Company Brain: Building a Single AI Brain for Your Organization

I'm going to bare my soul to you all tonight. We're going to talk about implementing AI in your organization. And we're going to talk about making one brain that's going to help you all move a lot faster. And I think maybe a good place for me to start first is more so on this slide first. So, just a quick show of hands, how many of you use chatgpd slash clod? Okay, now keep your hand up if you use, let's say you're using clod code. Okay, keep your hand up, hands are going up. Okay, how about codex, clod code? And then how about openclock, keep your hand up. Okay, and then Hermes agent. Okay, oh wow, my hand went up. Okay, fascinating, great. So, I'll start on this slide first. I, for my company at least, the way I think about it is, you know, everyone's talking about AI transformation, change management right now, all these corporate words, right? And people are saying there's a lot of resistance, it's really hard to get people to adapt. And I remember I was talking to my dad about this, because he was a programmer in the 90s, and I was using the internet when I was like eight years old or so. And it occurred to me that, I was like, this AI thing is no different than kind of the internet transformation when that was coming out. I was like, dad, how come you didn't use the internet really? Like, when did you, how long did it take your companies to adopt email? He said, oh, a long time. I'm like, how long is a long time? Oh, a very long time, five years, right? Which is crazy to me, because now that you have the power of infinite intelligence in your hands, you can't afford to wait five years if you're operating a business or you're inside of a business, right? Because if, let's say, this gentleman up here is compounding at 10x and he does it for 12 months, he's already way too far ahead, right? Versus if I don't adopt it at all. And so the rubric that we use at my company is really four levels. So you have unacceptable, which is obvious, you're not using any AI at all. Then you have capable, which is where maybe you're using AI, maybe you're using Cloud, you're using ChatGP, or maybe you're using it to search. Okay, maybe you believe it in a little bit. And then you have adoptive. It should say adoptive, but there's an A there. It should say adoptive, which is where you're using, you're building end-to-end workflows, right? Which we'll talk about in a second. And you have transformative, where you're building closed loops, which we'll also talk about in a second too. And, you know, people are talking about end-to-end workflows, they're talking about closed loops. We'll get there in a moment. But all this ties back into, like, how you do this change management thing, right? And so this combines with the whole concept of having a single brain. And, you know, as recently as last week, the founder of Shopify wrote a post just saying, oh, we have released this thing into Slack called River. And everyone's like, oh my God, this is amazing, right? River, anybody can talk to River. You know, we're doing all our, we're sending all our pull requests, we're upgrading our product, and then people are just talking to River, and everyone's learning in public, okay? That's one example. Maybe a month or two ago, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, now called X, he runs Block right now, and he's, you know, they cut 40% of staff, but he talked about this concept of this world brain, okay? So we just call ours single brain because I have single grain with a G, so I bought the domain single brain. So that's why I call it single brain, and we'll get into it. So let me back up a second here. I'm just going to call it a couple other things. So this slide shows that only 9% of enterprises are actually scaling with AI right now. The other 91% are not really touching this as much as they should, right? That sounds a little weird, but anyway, you get the point. So almost nobody's shipping right now, and this whole concept of having a single brain is going to help get you there, okay? And I'll show you some actual examples. I don't want that to just be all theory, and I'll maybe, time permitting, maybe I'll give you some practical tips on how you can do it because we've been doing it for ourselves for a couple months now. We've been doing it for our clients. The moment they drink this, it's like game over. They're just like, whoa. I think one of the, I'll share one of the quotes. One of the clients was like, when I don't have this or it's not working, it feels like I'm drinking soup with a fork, right? So that doesn't quite work out well, right? So execs see it, right? Execs see the benefit of this. Those of you that are running a company right now, you might be seeing the benefits of this, but maybe your team might not be seeing the benefit of this, right? So 72% of execs can see the benefits, but 10% do not. But the gap isn't necessarily the technology because clearly it's working for some people and for some it's not, but it's the implementation, right? And this will help bridge the gap here. So here's where we get into the actual bits of single brain right here. So you can see these little animals here, my great designer. We have a raccoon, we have a bear, we have a fox, a cat. Nobody's talking to each other here. You have Salesforce icon, you have a HubSpot icon, you have Google Analytics, you have Slack, you might have Shopify, you might have Google Search Console. The problem is when none of your tools talk to each other, when none of your data nodes talk to each other, you can't compound and we all love compound interest, right? It's the eighth wonder of the world. And so if your tools don't talk, your knowledge stalls, change management, there's that word again, change management, right? And then what ends up happening is pilots don't ship and everyone gets frustrated. And then what ends up happening is you start having this AI theater in your company. We've certainly been affected by that in the past where it's like, if Eric wants this, we're going to do this, right? Which is stupid because it doesn't end up benefiting anybody. It doesn't benefit your customers, it doesn't benefit you. And it ends up being this AI-like theater that makes it look like you're doing something because of motion, but you're not really doing anything. So the way we think about it is one brain, okay? So you can connect your GitHub, your Slack, everything ties into this one brain, okay? You can call it the world brain, unified intelligence, single brain, whatever you want to call it. That's the concept here, all right? And the org chart then starts to shift. When you start to connect your tools into Slack or Microsoft Teams, here's the thing. You don't need to worry about change management because your team is already working inside of Teams and they're working inside of Slack. So if that's happening already, they're used to talking to humans. These agents that you have that are living inside your Slack that are connected to all your tools, guess what's happening now? You don't need change management because they're already starting to eat this stuff up, right? So the way this org chart works, and don't worry, we'll share the slides with everyone afterwards as you're taking pictures as well. Single brain is at the top. That's the main brain that you have. Around it, you have like, because my company does marketing, right? So we have SEO lead, you have sales, you have paid media, you have ops. These are people asking questions to single brain up top. And then right below it, okay, so single brain is an agent, right? It's an ambient agent that lives inside of your chat tools. And then you have a fleet commander, like an agent commander that basically will manage all of your other agents below. And then you have sub-agents below that. So we named ours after like DC characters, Oracle, Flash, Arrow, Cyborg. My designer just decided to make them in like these mammals, I guess. But it works. So the way it works is you have a human up top, you got the main brain, you have a fleet commander and an agent fleet, and then you might have sub-agents. That is how this works. And I think this might be interesting right now. I think in the next 12 months or so, almost everybody's going to be doing it. So you might as well start doing this right now. Because I don't think it's that particular. I think it's very simple to implement. Is it a pain in the ass? Yes, but it's still simple and it's worth it. And I'll share some numbers with you later as well. So for us at least, we have six agents. And you want to think about it this way. You want to have, when you're designing your company around AI, you are designing for specialist agents. So you might have agents that are good at SEO, you might have some that are really good at conversion rate optimization, some that are really good at email marketing. You want them to focus in these areas, right? And when you set these up, you want to make sure that they're set up in isolated instances so they don't bleed over to each other. And I'm not going to get too technical in this talk because I have limited time. But for this one, just for example's sake, Alfred is kind of the chief of staff. Hermes, or in our case, we have an Hermes logo in our Slack, so we would call it Hermes. That one is more so like the brain that would check Alfred because you need these agents to check each other. Sometimes they become unreliable. So there's a lot of work to do around security, stability, and reliability. We like to call that SSR, okay? So a lot of work to be done there. And then we have like an analytics agent called Oracle. We have Flash that handles social content. And just an example of Flash, it writes a lot of my Twitter posts now. And some of these Twitter posts are getting like 300,000 views, 500,000 views or so. And we're getting amazing, we're driving amazing pipeline from it, and we're having amazing conversations with people that I never would have imagined that I'd be talking to. And that's all being driven by just the work I'm doing with these agents and me going to the agents and saying, hey, what's some cool stuff that we did this week that would be a good ex long-form article? You can do that for LinkedIn as well. You can do that for whatever social channels. There's tons of people doing this for TikTok right now. You want to talk about TikTok shops, all these things, trying to apply this to e-commerce too. The sky is the limit. Once you start working like this, everything changes. It's not just you love ChatGPT anymore. It's totally different now, right? I think some of you that raised your hand with OpenClaw and Hermes, you already know what I'm talking about. But you as an individual using this is not enough because you're actually depriving your teammates of being able to grow with you as well. And you want to bring everyone along ideally. That's what I learned in this. Every day it's like so cool, but I'm like, but I feel like if my gap is getting, if I'm growing like this and my team's growing like this, that gap is going to get wider and I can't let that happen, right? And you shouldn't let that happen to yourself and also to your teams. So that's what I'd say. That's what kind of this agent fleet looks like. And then what happens afterwards is as you start to learn this, like I just mentioned, you start to give every person on your team a fleet. So this paid me to lead. They might have Arrow, which is good for social media, Flash. They might have the Oracle one, which is good for analytics. And they will start to customize it for themselves. And I mean, look at your desk at work. Look at your home, look at your car. Don't you like to customize and decorate it? Everybody likes customizing their own, right? I think some of you who are old enough, I certainly remember this, Tamagotchis, right? Pretty cool, right? Yeah, right? So once you start to give everyone the ability to customize it, people feel more bought in. Every single person that we've given an individual agent to, where we've been testing this, they're like, wow, I feel like I'm reliant on this now. I feel like I can't live without this, right? And so again, this is something that everybody can build on their own, right? The reason why, again, I called out OpenClaw and Hermes, these types of agents, is these types of agents allow you to do this type of stuff and unlock the ability for you to have this unified brain, this world brain that a lot of people are talking about. And it seems scary when they're talking about it, but once you start to implement it, it's really not that bad, okay? So again, you have an ambient brain for your company, then you have a fleet for yourself, and then you make one for your company, and then you start to scale a lot faster. So in terms of, maybe there's three levels right now to all this, right? You have do-it-yourself, okay? You have done-for-you, and then done-with-you, okay? So on the very left side here, you probably can't see it as well, do-it-yourself, maybe you're using ChatGPT, maybe you're using Clawd, maybe you're using Clawd CoWork, and you're just going back and forth with it, right? Done-for-you is when you're working with these specialist agents, okay? Where you have these end-to-end workflows, and let me explain what that means. So an end-to-end workflow is when you have a human input, that's the first step, I'll go over here, human input first, then the AI does thinking in the middle, and then the human reviews the output, right? And you think about a lot of the workflows that we're doing at work, like these things are all just workflows, right? So then what happens is you build a bunch of these workflows together, and then what happens is you start to create these specialist agents that can do a bunch of things around SEO, or conversion rate optimization, paid media, ad creative, which we have one that spins up a ton of ad creatives, and I'll show you an example in a second. But once you're able to do that, then you start to create loops, okay? So the way I look at the org chart of the future is you have specialist agents, and then you have loops. And a loop is basically a bunch of different tasks that you might insert agents into, and then you just have people, a human at the top, managing these loops. So the future is really agents, loops, right, and workflows. And if you have an org chart that compounds that way, you're just going to grow a lot faster. And the thing is, anybody on my team that is using this stuff right now, work, when I ask them, and I'm just like, hey, don't BS me. Are you having fun right now? I'm like, more fun than I've ever had. How hard are you working right now? Harder than I've ever worked, okay? The only thing I'm concerned about right now with these AI-pilled people on my team is actually burnout. That's the only thing I'm concerned about right now. Now, on the flip side of that, the people who aren't AI-pilled right now, it's like, oh my God, it's like trying to drag someone over. And you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make him drink, right? So that's the challenge that I have as a business owner right now. I want to bring everyone along, but not necessarily everyone's going to want to come along, and you're going to have some tough decisions that you might have to make, right? And as noble as it might be that you want to bring everyone along, you just can't. But I will say the ones that are super AI-pilled right now, it's such a pleasure. It's such a joy to work with these people. I look forward to coming into work every day. I don't dread it anymore. And you can apply this to e-commerce. You can apply this to any form of marketing. You can apply this to services. The list goes on. So the way we see it is one human plus five agents is a 10x team member. Okay, maybe even 50x, maybe even 100x or so. But we're just looking at leverage ultimately, because when you have the ability to call on this ambient brain whenever you want, you're actually compressing time. So next slide, I'm going to show you what I mean by that. But just think about it. If you're with an e-commerce company right now, you have to, maybe a year ago, two years ago, if you wanted to get a data pool from your data scientist or your data analyst, what is that? Three days? Four days? A week? A week's pretty effing crazy to me, right? Because a week is 2% of the year, right? Oh, two weeks? 4% a year? Are you kidding me, right? So like, and they don't want to do the data pool for you. Like, you don't want to ask for the data pool. Like, it's a pain in the butt, right? So you might as well just ask the thing. Instead of waiting for a week, you get it in seconds. And you compound it on all the things that you need from a context standpoint, you're just able to move a lot faster, right? So I'll show you an example here on the screen. So this is inside of Slack. This is me asking for data, okay, to Oracle. And maybe you can't read the text, but you can get the slides afterwards. And here's like, oh, here's how Meta's performing right now. Okay, cool. Here are the top spending campaigns, right? And then Christy comes in. Hey, I want to refresh this Meta ad creative over here. What should we do? Okay, Picasso comes in. That's another agent that we have that does ad creatives. And then it does more data over here. And then after that, it's okay, it's starting to strategize with my team. It's starting to say, okay, here's what's happening right now. But the most interesting part is when you're able to combine the agents. So boom, Picasso spun up a bunch of different variations based on what was already performing well, right? So you can just say, hey, look at my Meta ad account. I want you to double down on creatives that are working. I want you to spin up 100, 200 different variations. I want you to kill the campaigns that aren't working right now. And then let's move on to the next thing, right? And the crazy thing is now, those of you that raised your hand with OpenClaw and Hermes, you know this already, but you can literally, now you have the slash goal command that can help you do a lot of stuff overnight, right? It can help you finish tasks, and you can go a lot further in terms of just getting things done, and you can plug this in. So there's so many, any of you that have played video games growing up, there's so many different upgrades you can add every single day. And that's what it feels like. At least for me, it feels like I'm playing a video game, right? And I hope it feels that way for you, too, once you start to do this. All right, some examples here. You can simply ask, oh, what's our ROAS this week? Okay, and you can see the performance over here. Then you can go deeper. Okay, what's our ROAS? Which creatives, again, which creatives should we double down on? What are our competitors doing right now? Okay, what does their ad library look like? What are the longest-standing ads that they had running for a long time? Approximately what are they spending right now? What are some other ads that are working in maybe adjacent industries right now that we should consider? Okay, let's put up 500 variations, right? That is all possible now. It wasn't possible before, but again, when you're able to compress, let's say, 22 weeks of work into 22 seconds, the sky's the limit, right? So that's why earlier with David backstage, we were just talking about, I was showing him these AI stocks. I'm not going to tell you. I don't want to give you financial advice. But man, some of these are just parabolic, right? I looked at one that's like up 5,000% or something in the last year or so, and these are all part of the AI stack. But if we're all trying to buy this infinite intelligence that we've never had before, I think the build-out is going to go even crazier, right? And so anyway, all that to say, if you can do this for your business right now, what's going to happen in a year? Scale it to 200 variants, scale 500 variants, whatever it is exactly. And here's just an example of if you put a prompt in, campaign out, hey, I want more landing pages over here. I want nurture email spun up. And so with one of these single brain agents, it literally, it will put together your cold email infrastructure, okay? Or it can put together your nurture sequence. So what it did for us was it literally bought 100 email domains. It came up with a naming vernacular as well. It also put together the sequences and it recursively self-improves, meaning that it constantly is testing itself over time, right? And so that is a closed loop, right? We want to think about once you start to use this, you want to think about how many closed loops can you build? Because a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, us humans were working in open loops. Oh, Bob, I know your name's not Bob, but Bob, how's that status report going right now? Mike, how are the paid ads going over there? Anna, creatives, how's that going right now? How annoying is that? Nobody wants to do that, right? Nobody wants to check in with each other. By the way, I'm in the client services business. I even talk to my clients too, when I show them this stuff, I'm like, let's be honest. You don't want to talk to me. I don't want to talk to you. Like, if we just do good work, who cares, right? And they're like, exactly. And like, right? Literally, I did that since I'm like, I don't usually get on the client calls, but I've been hopping on them recently and they're all like, yeah. And like, you also have to help your team understand this too, right? Like, because they're so like, they tend to overwhelm themselves. But if you start to get them to see the light in terms of how to work this way, my God, work's going to be way more fun. ... [continues with more on loops, examples, and closing advice] ...