#593: Integrating AI into enterprise marketing operations with Adam Brotman, Forum3

AI itself isn’t a goal. In the enterprise, marketers that effectively integrate artificial intelligence into their operations in meaningful ways will start to see the tangible returns that leaders in the space are already realizing.

Today we’re going to talk about the reality of AI adoption in the enterprise, and how marketers should be thinking about a workplace where humans and AI agents are working together.

To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Adam Brotman, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Forum3.

About Adam Brotman

Adam Brotman is co-founder and co-CEO of Forum3. Previously, he was president, chief experience officer, and co-CEO at J.Crew, where he launched the widely successful J.Crew Rewards program. At Starbucks, he was the inaugural chief digital officer and evp, global retail operations, developing the payment, ordering, and loyalty platform which amassed 60 million members. He has been recognized as one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People and CDO Club’s CDO of the Year. He serves on the boards of Ruby Tuesday and Cabi, and has held board positions at Neiman Marcus Group and Brooks Running. He is the co-author of AI First, in collaboration with Harvard Business Review, and received his bachelor’s degree from UCLA and JD from The University of Washington School of Law.

Resources

Forum3 website: https://www.forum3.com/

Spok website: https://www.spok.app/

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Transcript

Greg Kihlstrom:
AI itself isn’t a goal. In the enterprise, marketers that effectively integrate artificial intelligence into their operations in meaningful ways will start to see the tangible returns that leaders in the space are already realizing. Today, we’re going to talk about the reality of AI adoption in the enterprise and how marketers should be thinking about a workplace where humans and AI agents are working together. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Adam Brotman, co-founder and co-CEO at Forum3. Adam, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to talk to you. Yeah, looking forward to this. Yeah. And I you know, I caught you at MAICON this year in Cleveland. And you know, a lot of what you were saying resonated and you know, just wanted to get you get you on the show and share some of what you were talking about with with my audience as well. And, you know, to that end, why don’t we start with you giving a little background on yourself and what you’re currently doing?

Adam Brotman: Yeah. So my, my background is kind of varied. I mean, I, if you go all the way back, I, you know, I’ve, I’ve been an entrepreneur in digital or an operator and executive in digital my whole career. And I’d say, you know, the most pertinent elements of my background for this talk are, I was chief digital officer at Starbucks for about 10 years, where my team and I led the mobile app and loyalty program and mobile ordering and payment. and whatnot. And then I went off to J.Crew as president and chief experience officer there and worked on loyalty and technology and consumer experience and marketing. And so those are kind of some key elements of my background. I come, though, even before that, with a bunch of entrepreneurial things I’ve done, but always sort of in the consumer brand, either marketing or digital innovation arena and whether I’m an entrepreneur or an operator. And then I, I, a couple of years ago had the opportunity to go into business with a good friend of mine, Andy Sack. And we, he’s like the smartest guy I’ve ever met. Uh, other than maybe Bill Gates, who we interviewed for, which we’ll talk about in a minute, but he, so Andy and I have always wanted to go into business together. We’ve been friends for over friends for over 20 years. We decided to really take the combination of our careers, which has been all about helping consumer brands embrace and navigate the latest technology. And we thought, oh my God, we have to do that now, considering the kinds of technology that’s coming around the corner towards us, especially AI. So we found we really have focused our company, Forum3, on helping consumer brands with you know, how do they get the most out of AI and become an AI first enterprise, um, to help them with growth and innovation and productivity. And, and that’s, that’s what forum threes mission is all about. And we’re, you know, we’re writing a book and we’re doing a bunch of other things in that regard.

Greg Kihlstrom: Great, great. Well, yeah, we’re gonna, we’re gonna talk about a few things, but I do, I do want to start by talking about the book that you just mentioned your, your co-writing with Andy sack. I believe there’s a collaboration with Harvard Business Review in there as well. So why don’t you talk a little bit, you know, what’s the premise of the book and talk a little bit about it.

Adam Brotman: Yeah, the book, the book is being published by Harvard Business Review or Harvard Business Press. Andy and I are writing it and we actually just finished writing it. Oh, nice. Congrats. Yeah. Thank you. About a week ago. A couple of interesting things to note about the book. The book is called AI First. It was originally provisionally titled Our AI Journey. Harvard Business Review, when our editor approached us and when Harvard Business Review approached us about the book, we collaborated with Harvard on a couple of elements. We decided to make it not just your everyday book about AI, because if you did that, you could end up with a book that’s outdated by the time it even hits the bookstore shelves. So we decided to make it a project with the community, have it be a serialized book. I believe Harvard Business Review’s first ever book that they’re allowing us to release every chapter as it comes out, and in conjunction with a community of readers that are able to sort of have conversations with Andy and I about the book and the questions they have, and it’s helped inform the direction of the book. That being said, the book itself, like I mentioned, is about our learning journey around Gen AI. And I can give you more details, but essentially we were able to publish and research and publish and research this journey and talk to some of the best AI leaders in the world. Sam Altman, Mustafa Suleyman, Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates. There’s a lot of people we’ve talked to on the technology side. Then we also talked to in research for the book, dozens, if not almost a hundred different business leaders around what they’re experiencing from the business perspective. And the book sort of wrote itself in the sense that it became about us publishing what we were learning real time from the perspective of a business leader entrepreneur brand builder, which is how we sort of see ourselves. And that’s the audience, we think that’s the audience for the book. And we try to effectively come up with a playbook and a way to think and a framework for how business leaders and marketers should tackle this, you know, amazing, fast moving topic of AI.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And as you mentioned, you know, you’ve talked with some, definitely the some of the leaders, thought leaders in in AI and could say business in general for this book and had quite a few conversations. What was the biggest surprise that you encountered in that process?

Adam Brotman: You know, the biggest surprise was actually as we were talking to these AI leaders, you know, the nature of Gen AI is so different than any other software before it. Even any other AI as I had sort of understood it before it in the sense that the, you know, you, the, the leaders were building towards a vision of a very generalized, very powerful AI system. And they weren’t doing so with a particular outcome for business in mind. Uh, normally, you know, you think about software like Salesforce or Photoshop or office or word or, you know, you name it, you know, our social media platforms, any, any software we’ve ever used or developed in our life, it was always sort of built with a vision and a purpose in mind. In the case of AI, what was so surprising was that the research labs and the companies that are building it are building towards this very general purpose system And you, and it doesn’t come with a user manual either. So you, you, you have to sort of figure out yourself how you’re going to use this and how it can be used and what it’s good at, what it’s not good at. And that was the biggest surprise. I mean, the first couple of months, I remember just having to sort of process that Andy and I both had to sort of process that and then come up with, okay, given that you have to kind of make your own, your own user guide and your own playbook for how to incorporate it.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in that way, it all, it reminds me a little bit about, you know, early days of the internet. I mean, certainly there was a purpose for it, you know, uh, you know, scientific research purpose for it originally back in the day or whatever. there wasn’t a clear playbook in 1997 or something like that as to exactly how we were all gonna tackle the web. Do you see similarities there as well?

Adam Brotman: I do. In fact, I think that’s a really good example because it’s actually very analogous to the internet or even computing. So there’s a blend that’s happening now between software and computing and intelligence. And so you end up with this, it’s very similar to the computer revolution, I guess you could say of the 70s and 80s primarily, the PC revolution. And you think about Steve Jobs and he would talk about the bicycle, how computers or the personal computers can be thought of like a bicycle for the mind. You think about Bill Gates thinking about a PC on every desk. There was an element of, this is just a general purpose utility. And, and that’s how I think, I think AI is sort of emerging like another one of those mega, you know, capabilities.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like a, it’s the scaffolding to kind of build, build other things on, but not necessarily the, well, how far can I push this? Maybe, maybe not the blueprint for it.

Adam Brotman: Right. That’s right. You, you know, the scaffolding in the past in our, in our experience has always been either it’s always been something that’s been like literally infrastructure, like, you know, hard hardware or data pipes, like the internet, or protocols. In this case, now it’s software. And so that’s where it gets really wild, because, you know, software has always been kind of handcrafted or deterministic. And for software to have a form of intelligence and utility, that is general purpose, that’s where things get really accelerated.

Greg Kihlstrom: And so I want to in a second, I want to talk more about AI readiness in the in the enterprise. But one one thing I just want to get back to as far as the the medium that you chose to, you know, to write about this. And, you know, I’ve written a few books myself and certainly sometimes people wonder why we’re writing books when things are at least writing books about things that change so quickly, like AI and technology and stuff. You know, I’ve got my own reasons for it. But you know, just you mentioned a little bit about the serialized nature being a great way to kind of keep up with some of the rapid pace of change. But you know, just curious what drew you to writing a book about this, you know, given given what I just, you know, given given the fast paced nature of this.

Adam Brotman: Well, it’s a great question because, you know, I’ve always been a person who likes to read books and, you know, hardcover books in particular around business topics and biographies. So I’m, I’m biased toward, and I still read books. I mean, on my, on my desk in front of me right now, I’ve got a book about, book written by Ethan Mollet called co-intelligence, a book, a hardcover. These are all hardcovers, a book by Saul Khan called brave new words about Khan Academy and Conmigo and AI. And then a book about Moderna. So that, that, those are the books I’ve read in the last, you know, couple of months. So I, I, I’ve always got kind of a book going. So I was sort of, Andy and I were sort of drawn towards this. I will say though, you’re right to point out that we live in a world now where it’s all about like the YouTube show and the podcast, to be honest. And then of course, quick, I almost call it entertainment, but quick information flow through TikTok and Instagram and Twitter and whatnot. And so it feels like the book is a weird medium to tackle. The thing I will say is that we were drawn also because we were asked to write this book We’re invited to write this book by Harvard. And we jumped at the chance because it’s still, even in 2024, almost 2025, writing a book still carries, I’ll call it, this patina of a quest for knowledge and truth and something more permanent. And so when you go and you’d say to Bill Gates or Sal Khan or Ethan Malik or Sam Altman, hey, we’re writing a book at Harvard Business Review about AI. it that that’s a great calling card still to have a conversation. So to us, it was great, because it opened the door to these conversations that we probably wouldn’t have had otherwise. And then, and did it in a way where we could just be authors and journalists of the sort and fact finders and let our own humility and intellectual curiosity sort of carry the day. And it’s with a book that’s a little bit easier to do as opposed to like, you know, interviewing these folks for other things they may not have said yes to.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, no, no, I agree. And I do think, again, I could talk about this all day, but like, I do think there’s a there is a permanence to some of these, you know, as much as we want to say things are changing, so quickly there’s you know the the practice of marketing you know the fundamentals hasn’t fundamentally changed other than the channels we’re using and some details and stuff so you know there’s business you know same thing you know there’s there’s a lot of things that actually do change and i think maybe we get distracted sometimes by the the rapid pace sometimes

Adam Brotman: Yeah. And also the, also the side, you know, you’re right. Like it’s interesting, right? Cause yeah, we could talk about it all day. It’s, it’s not, it’s not exactly what you had me on for, but it’s, it tends to be interesting because the book is like, you know, a 50,000 word book about a topic. There’s something about it that kind of requires you to sort of have an arc and have something to say, you know, as opposed to a blog post or a essay or a podcast interview.

Greg Kihlstrom: yeah yeah totally well so and and maybe you know to that end there is a lot of talk about and you know a lot of people are are writing and podcasting and all that stuff about ai but you know want to talk about how ready the enterprise really is for AI and using it effectively. So, you know, there’s certainly a difference between all the talking and doing when it comes to any new technology. I mean, you know, we talked about a few sort of the eras of technology here already. How would you describe the state of enterprise orgs as a whole when it comes to actual AI adoption?

Adam Brotman: I would say it’s still very early days and generally speaking, the enterprise is not ready. Now, that can rapidly change over the next two years, but I’d say that probably out of a hundred companies right now, there’s maybe five that are just on it and doing what they should be doing and are taking the steps they should be taking. The other 95% are, not, and that doesn’t mean they’re not doing anything, but they’re, they’re just being what we have found is that there’s not really a sense of AI literacy at the executive team level. And that really is a problem because if you don’t have executive sponsorship and a vision for what the, what it means to be an AI first company, then it’s gonna be really hard for the enterprise to be ready and do what it needs to do because you really have to invest right now as a company in getting your team, broadly speaking, maybe everybody, all your knowledge workers or your team, literate and proficient, and then clear on how they should be thinking by AI and really being able to sort of have the freedom to experiment and innovate around the AI to basically bring them all the benefits, which are productivity gains and a qualitative improvement in their business and innovation. And most companies right now, because the executive teams aren’t where they need to be, I think, you have this sort of negative trickle down effect on the rest of the organization. And that includes things like you know, what it leads to is a lot of organizations where there’s a very unevenly distributed usage of AI and attitude towards AI. And frankly, probably a lot of use of AI that’s happening undercover, where a lot of workers are just sort of bringing their personal AIs through, you know, a personal chat to BT use to the table, but they’re not talking about the fact they’re doing it, they might not be as careful as they should be about confidentiality and privacy. And mostly they’re not really able to truly innovate on behalf of the organization because there’s, you know, probably a lot of, you know, secretive use of the AI happening right now because of that.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, I, I read some stat that this was months ago at this point, you know, there’s some large percentage of employees as, as you were alluding to that are kind of use it, using it in secret. I mean, there, there’s always, it seems like there’s one scenario or the other in that I call it like the friend or foe scenario is like either the leaders are they’re very in favor of AI because they think it’s gonna they can lay off a bunch of people and still get the same amount of work done or there’s the employees that are very in favor of AI because they think they can get away with doing a lot less work and keep their jobs and stuff like that. I think that aside, being a little facetious, but that aside, it sounds to me like what you’re describing with that 95%, there’s a lot of fragmentation, right? And AI works well when it has access to not only lots of data, a breadth of data, right? Is that, do you think fragmentation is maybe the biggest blind spot for enterprises? Or are there other things, other common themes that you’re seeing as well?

Adam Brotman: I would say that the thing that we’re seeing is that, and we write about this in the book, and it’s really what, even our company right now is really focused on this, which is really helping companies, brands, these leaders, sort of get a system in place, get a mindset in place, and get a process in place that they can run that allows them to do, you know, a lot of experimentation and effectively sort of build their own lab, an AI lab internally. Because you’re talking about the ability to create, if you will, and certainly customize software using natural language. So you have never seen a situation where non-technical people can actually really be innovative using software on their own. And that’s really important for companies to be able to facilitate right now because functional leaders, marketers and sales leads and all sorts of different functional leaders, they know their business better than anybody. So there’s this opportunity to get your functional leaders in your company to get AI proficient and then start figuring out the ways that you can use these frontier AI systems to become really productive and even more so really innovative, both. And the problem is that if a company it could be about fragmentation, but it’s actually more just the opportunity cost of not experimenting and not, not figuring, not having these functional leaders that are very smart about their business and understand like what’s going to move the needle. Having those leaders in the trenches pushing on what, what the company could be doing to take advantage of AI and In other words, if you end up in a situation where those leaders aren’t doing that, or their teams aren’t doing that, and their teams are using AI under under the desk, so to speak, if they’re doing that, it’s fine. They’re getting some productivity out of that, better than nothing in some respects, possibly. Like, whether, you know, AI is helping to make better decisions and helping to write things, but you’re missing out on the real opportunity, which is the strategic lift, either through decision-making or the real opportunity to automate some process for productivity or to elevate some customer experience through being able to leverage AI. So those kinds of things I mentioned, those strategic automation, experiential uplift, those opportunities come from having a real system in place where the functional leaders can say, okay, I get AI, I get what it can do. Let’s make sure we’re having this process. And that’s what’s missing if you don’t, if you’re an organization that’s not set up right, that’s not happening. And if that’s not happening, you’re kind of lost.

Greg Kihlstrom: Do you see this as another point in time where there, you know, the gap between leaders and laggards is going to really put some companies ahead and, and, you know, by that token, um, really leave some in the dust? Yeah, hugely.

Adam Brotman: I think so because we haven’t even, and this reason why I said experimentation is so important from the leaders in the organization and in every function, because, we’re about to see a whole new set of models come out in the next, maybe in the next couple of weeks, if not in the next couple of months, then you’re going to see, you’re going to start to see agentic capabilities or agents where, where, where AI systems or AI agents are going to be able to start functioning like people and are going to start to be able to interact with one another and interact with humans. And that combination of agentic capabilities and even more, more capable models. If you’re a company that’s already experimenting and already thinking about it and pushing your organization, your level of capability, your competitive advantage is going to go, is going to be, you know, double, triple digit over your competitors. Meaning you’re all of a sudden, if you’re not doing that stuff, you might just find yourself wondering like, what just happened? Why, why are my, why are my competitors able to, out innovate me, you know, they they don’t need as many resources, they’re just going to start running circles around the companies that aren’t doing that stuff. And it’s going to be kind of shocking, I think, or potentially, I don’t want to be over hyperbolic about it. But I do think that we could be in a situation where with another turn of the crank or two from these systems, that the companies that are taking advantage of are going to start to run circles around the ones that aren’t. And the ones that aren’t, they’re going to be six months behind because they didn’t do the proficiency, they didn’t get the AI counsel, they didn’t do the training, they didn’t start the experimentation on their own processes. And if you’re not doing that now, six months is going to be a lifetime, potentially, when your competitors are able to run circles around you.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. And you, you mentioned AI agents. I think, you know, last topic I really wanted to talk about with you was that I recently interviewed somebody from the Microsoft co-pilot team as well, talking about this, this stuff. And I know you’ve started a platform called Spock as well. And, you know, certainly there’s, there’s some other like co-pilot like things popping up here and there are agents, the future of, of AI and humans working together.

Adam Brotman: I think so. So when we interviewed Reid Hoffman for the book, he was telling us, we asked him, what’s the world going to look like even in just like two years or three years from now? Forget about AGI necessarily. And he said, Oh, you gotta be, got it. Everyone’s going to be interacting with agents all day. And I remember not fully internalizing what he said at the time, because, you know, I understood it intellectually, but I just, I couldn’t see it. But then now that I’ve seen some examples of like what it could look like to have an, a, an agent spun up and interacting with other agents, interacting with other humans and just realizing like, oh yeah, that’s like, it really is going to be like, a human, and then we as managers and leaders and workers are going to have to really start to think of ourselves as managers of AI systems as much as we are as just functional leaders. And so I do, I do think that that’s going to be the future in a lot of ways, uh, in terms of like this idea that you’re going to spin up agents that are going to do things, or maybe multiple agents are going to do things, or maybe you’re going to spin up agents that are going to spin up agents. And, and when that can start to happen, you know, and all of a sudden, you know, you’re in, if that agent is coming back to you and emailing you or messaging you and you, you start to see a world where things could accelerate really quickly. And I do think that that is going to be the future of work is just like being able to manage these systems. In fact, uh, Jensen Wong from NVIDIA was on this, the BG two podcast. And he was talking just the other day and he was talking about how every manager is going to have to sort of be like a CEO and prompt engineer their people and their agents. And so there’s going to be this blend of agents and people. And it’s all going to happen through natural language prompting. And that’s, that’s not how we think about doing our jobs today. We think about, you know, you talk to humans and you use software and you try and get results. And it might just become that we need to sort of think of ourselves more as like designers of systems and managers of people and agents. And that, I think that is going to be the future. It’s still kind of dystopian science fiction, kind of weird to even say out loud, but I’ve seen some early examples as I’m sure you have of these multi-agent systems running where they’re just talking to one another, right? And then they come back to you and you’re just like, oh yeah, that’s right. These AI agents can really emulate humans in some ways. I haven’t even gotten used to it, so I’m sure most people haven’t either.

Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely, you know, and I’ve seen some of it, you know, as well. But to your point, it’s, I mean, we certainly have a tendency to anthropomorphize as humans, I think. So, you know, some things about it may be a little easier than others. But I guess, you know, with that, you know, Adam, thanks so much for joining today. I guess, you know, kind of ending on that note, What does a leader do now, given, you know, what you’re talking about, we’re going to have this multi-agent scenario, there’s already a lot of laggards in, you know, in the space that’s, that’s fast moving, you know, what, what would your advice be to, to a leader right now? You know, that that’s feeling like they’re already behind, you know, what, what can they do to kind of try to get ahead?

Adam Brotman: You know, honestly, my advice would be to try to get as AI literate and proficient as you can right now. Not because it’s going to be a silver bullet, but because it really doesn’t take that long. I mean, Ethan Mollick the Wharton professor, who’s sort of a guru in this space, has suggested that it takes about 10 hours of using AI systems to get really good at prompting and understanding the sort of jagged frontier of what these systems can do and not do. And then I would suggest, you know, as a leader, you know, find a podcast like Paul racers podcast, um, the artificial intelligence podcast or something like that. Find a podcast, you know, find a blog. Uh, Ethan Mollick’s got a good blog with his one useful thing and, and start using the systems, get proficient. Because if you do that, you’re going to put yourself in a position that takes about a month of getting up to speed and then stay up to speed. And, and then depending on your company as a leader, you know, either create a council or join an AI council and start, you know, understand what your use policies are at your company or establish those and then just start experimenting. Because I mentioned the competitive advantage you can give yourself and your company by doing that, you’re not too late to start now. You might be in a year from now or in six months from now, but you’re not too late now. I think the big explosion is going to happen over the next, know, 12 to 24 months. And so there’s going to come a point where it’s like, Oh shoot, I’m a little late, but not, not yet. Right now I just encourage everyone to like, you know, do those things and, um, and start playing. And, you know, by the way, you know, one, one good example of something somebody can do just to put a plugin is you could go to Spock.app and we, you know, we’ve got, is that you can do a one-week free trial. Spock doesn’t cost that much money if you’re a marketer. Spock will really be a great way for you to learn what’s possible with AI as a marketer because we’ve already taken some of the guesswork out of how to prompt and put that under the hood of Spock. And so if you try Spock as a marketer, you’ll see, wow, I can, I can brainstorm ideas. I can create content plans. I can, I can really understand what my, my customer segmentation is, what they’re searching for. And I, and you can really see how the AI works. So, you know, I would also encourage people to check out Spock.

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