AI First: The Playbook for a Future-Proof Business and Brand
Adam Botman and Andy Sack
Harvard Business Review Press (June 2025)

How can almost any organization and any brand survive the AI “tidal wave”? 

That is one of the questions that Adam Botman and Andy Sack hoped to have answered when they began to interview several “top AI thinkers”  that include Sam Altman (See Pages 1-3), Matt Britton (107-111), Brice Challamel (136-139, 142-145, and 162-163), Bill Gates ((37-43), Reid Hoffman (19-21 and 22-25), Sal Khan (115-128), Adrian Masson (136-137 and 149-150), and Ethan Mollick (96-97, and 169-173).

Here are three brief excerpts from Botman and Sack’s discussion of Hoffman:

o “As one of Open AI’as founders, Hoffman had access to GBT-4 prior to its public release, in March 2023. In fact, he had access to GBT-3.5, in November 2002, the release that sent shockwaves through the world and kicked off the modern generative AI era and craze.” (20)

o  “Hoffman suggested that the concept of how much leverage you can get with human + machine is to think of what the steam engine did for the Industrial Revolution. He said, ‘AI is like the steam engine for the mind.’ By the early 1800s, steam-powered machines allowed entire factories and industries to be much more productive, and freed up humans to focus on more-creative aspects of company and industry building. You still needed humans to direct the endeavor, but the new paradigm of human + steam-powered machine became the norm for any industrious company looking to truly grow and compete in that new era.

“Enterprise AI copilots are this era’s version of the steam engine.” (25)

o Moreover, Hoffman said,  “Start experimenting and playing with this AI as copilot now, as in RIGHT NOW. Maybe even start using some agents in your workflow if you can find someone to develop them for you…Start thinking about your ‘offense game’ and ‘defense game’ using  these tools. Your offense game is figuring out where might the incorporation of generative AI to your workflow allow you to do something that would give you market share, margin, differentiation by using this.”

“On the defense side, think about what your competition might be doing with these tools. And this also  helps inform the offense thinking. And so on.” (29)

All of their conversations with “top AI thinkers” are thoughtful and thought-provoking.  No brief commentary such as mine could possibly do full justice to the value of the ideas, insights, and counsel that Adam Botman and Andy Sack provide in abundance. However, I hope I have at least indicated why I hold them and their work in such high regard.

These are among their concluding thoughts: “If we are living our mission from this book project this point forward, and if you are living the principles we are espousing here, then we will see each other on the trail as we compare notes and get ready for the next chapter together. After this book gets published in hardcover form, we plan on opening up our book reader community to a broader AI first community around future content that we create in this arena. It turns out our AI journey is just getting started.”

I am among those who, after reading this book, feel as Orville and Wilber Wright might have felt after the Wright Flyer II  achieved what is believed to be the first successful, sustained, powered, heavier-than-air human flight on December 17, 1903, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. 

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Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to to read two others: J. Craig Wheeler’s The Path to Singularity: How Technology Will Challenge the Future of Humanity and Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI.

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Here are two suggestions while you are reading AI First: Highlight key passages. Also, perhaps in a notebook kept near-at-hand (e.g. Apica Premium C.D. Notebook A5), record your comments, questions, and action steps (preferably with deadlines).

Pay special attention to the exceptionally informative Introduction, a series of equally informative Tables (e.g. TABLE 1-1: “A leveled, matrixed approach toward classifying systems on the path to AGI based on depth performance [generally] of capabilities,” Page 12, and TABLE 5-1: “Stages of AI first mindset in practice,” Page 99,) as well as various best practices cited throughout the narrative to help guide and inform your initiatives.

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will expedite frequent reviews of key material later.