EP45 - If You're Not Already Playing With AI You're Far Behind with Adam Brotman and Andy Sack

Corby Fine: 0:44

So I have to admit, I personally have been playing a lot lately with generative ai writing blog posts, don't tell my boss, but checklists from work PowerPoint presentations for, for conferences. Really by now, I would assume that most of us brands and individuals know that we can pretty much create almost anything we want. I'm living proof of that myself. The technology, it's becoming standard as a creative tool, and so the question to me becomes, who can a company turn to in order to get the best creative ideation and execution using this new AI technology? always say, you know, we should build our apps so that nobody has to ever teach us how to use it. There's no instruction manual. Anytime you download an app, this thing's a little different. Even myself, I find I'm watching YouTube videos on how to actually prompt a chat GPT, because it's, somewhat intuitive. I know I'm missing something and I'm often looking for help in doing that. And so as a brand or an Individual, when you're uncertain of, who and where to turn for that right opportunity, that's what we're gonna talk about. today. It's a problem that. Forum three is actually hoping to solve. And today I'm honored and lucky to have, the two co-founders of Forum three, Adam Broman. Who is the former, Chief Digital Officer at Starbucks, and rumor has it the creator of the, uh, Starbucks Rewards mobile app, where I spend way too much money, by the way along with Andy Sack. Who himself a former innovation consultant for Microsoft, CEO. Satchin Adela. I'd love to just be in the room with Satchin Adela, but you know, we can talk about that as well. Forum's, new online platform. Hive three.ai was launched last summer in 2023, and from what I can gather was built to essentially. Gamify the process of connecting brands with experienced AI creatives. But I'm gonna let Adam and Andy give us a little bit more detail about their business, the model, the successes to date. And I think really what we're all trying to figure out is what's the journey and future that they, and we all should be envisioning for ai, um, which I do believe includes a book, and we'll talk about that as well. Maybe the book was written by a large language model. We'll find that out. But Adam and Andy, welcome to the podcast.

Adam Brotman: 2:58

Glad to be

Andy Sack: 2:58

so much. Glad to be here.

Corby Fine: 3:00

so why don't you just, first give a little background on, on yourself. Uh, maybe we'll start with Adam.

Adam Brotman: 3:06

Sure. I am, a Seattle native, uh, through and through i, my, you know, my career, I started out as an attorney, but then quickly got into business and, uh, had a couple of entrepreneurial stints, but always in the digital arena. So digital music, digital images, I. And ended up, at Starbucks and was the chief digital officer there, there for about 10 years. And yes, you know, had the honor and the privilege of leading the team that launched the Starbucks mobile app and rewards and mobile ordering and, and was one of the first chief digital officers, in the country. And then went from there to J. Crew as, uh, president and Co CEO for a stint. And ended up back, uh, back being entrepreneurial, uh, connected with my longtime friend Andy Sack here. And we decided to, pursue a, a multi-decade dream of ours, which is to work together and, you know, kind, kind of combine powers around, uh, helping brands. With their digital transformation, plans and ideas and, and that led us to forum three, which now I'm Co, CEO and Co-founder with Andy of Forum three.

Corby Fine: 4:18

Awesome.

Adam Brotman: 4:19

Andy.

Andy Sack: 4:21

I am Andy Sack and, I've been in the technology space. started my first internet company in 1995. The first decade, I had four internet companies, managed to sell a couple of them, Firefly, to Microsoft, which became important Later, I Then became a venture capitalist in Seattle. I have a seed stage fund called Founders Co-op. Most relevant to this conversation, I did in fact spend. Time working directly for Satya Nadella, at Microsoft just prior to him becoming CEO. And then for the, you know, six years after he, became appointed as CEO and I worked with the small product team there on digital INF innovation and digital transformation of Microsoft itself, really working through the processes necessary to effectively incubate new products. Fast forward to form three with Adam.

Corby Fine: 5:17

Awesome. So obviously we're talking to very seasoned executives. You guys know what you're talking about and I think that's really important. For the first question when we talk about ai, I. The average marketer, the average employee, the average small business owner, there's a lot of different connotations on what that means. We hear job loss, we hear fear, we hear opportunity, we hear legal rights, copyright, How have you simplified the way to explain to others what is it when, from your perspective, you're talking about AI as a, a creative tool and something that can help businesses. How do you simplify the, the definition of that? why don't we start with Adam. I.

Adam Broman: 6:00

it's really hard to simplify the definition, which is interesting because I don't think we've ever seen anything like this. It's, it's different than web one and web two in the sense of, you know, if you, if you know when I say web one, web two, web two, you know, in 1995, we all have that sort of aha moment when we saw. A browser and thought about like, what would the internet mean for publishing and commerce and connection. And then there was this sort of social mobile cloud era around 2000, you know, seven to, to, you know, almost now where it, where it, it was also kind of amazing. But those were, those were sort of linear, like this is more exponential in the sense that. It's actually ai, whether you're talking about generative AI from a large language model, like a chat, GPT and the like, or you're talking about, other generative AI tools like Mid Journey and Dolly and Stable Diffusion. What they all have in common is that they're, essentially, intelligence or creativity. As a service. And that's something that we've never seen before. Like we've always seen like point solutions and software that, like you program it to work a certain way and you create a great interface for it. And, and I would say that this is unlike anything we've ever seen. And so it, it's super multipurpose. It's multimodal, it's very capable and it's more akin to. Its name, it's more akin to AI as like a person on your team that you can collaborate with. And so for us, we would say, Andy and I would say once we realize that, and I'll be honest, Andy, Andy was sort of thinking about ai. A little bit before I was, but we were both, thinking about blockchain and Metaverse and a little bit of AI when we started playing with chat GBT about a year ago. And when we did, we were like, no, this is, this is more powerful. Like this is something we need to focus on. And so that would be the simplified message I would say to any marketer or leader is that you gotta be thinking about this, you gotta shift your paradigm to think this is a, this is knowledge, intelligence, capability as a service. And if you're not tapping into it and collaborating with it and incorporating it into everything you do, you're just gonna fall behind. And that's, that's kind of how we are thinking about it. And we're trying to build platforms and services that are scalable, that help brands do just that.

Corby Fine: 8:34

So Andy, something that that was just said by Adam was this. Knowledge or creativity as a service. That's a really powerful line to me. I really heard you say that. Um, boldly, looking at that though, from, we'll say maybe the average marketer's perspective where there's a little bit of. Ownership, maybe even preciousness in terms of creative output ideation, everything from the big concept to the actual asset that gets generated by a marketing team or an agency. How do you see that fitting in? Do you see this creative world? Pushing back or really adopting and sort of diving right into this because in some regard, it's sort of supplanting the skill and the expertise that the average marketer believes that that's why they exist.

Andy Sack: 9:25

I, I mean your, I mean your, your question is about the societal implications, of this technology. I, I, think Adam said it and it's, you said it, and you, you, back to your last question about how do you, what, how do you simplify this? I think of this as a digital brain and in, I think Adam He said, he said it, and I'll just highlight it, which is intelligence as a service is the way to think about this. This is most people, like, there's a range of people who have read the headlines and you know, it was the fastest product to a hundred million users by like an order of magnitude. Um, meaning Chet, GBT was. And so the rate of that adoption and now the rate of the technology advancement in less than a year. I think is the issue. I think it's the speed of the adoption and the advancement that has literally when we had the, um, unique pleasure of meeting with Sam Altman and we told Sam a brief bit about Forum three, is the parent company in Hive three AI product. And he, he liked the idea. but he said in that meeting. the reason that he liked the idea was because it's people. It's basically creators who go deep with the technology, given their background. nobody knows what these models are capable of, and that is a, including Sam Altman. And that is a scary, I mean, that we came out of the meeting. And, and we, we went for a walk and tried to just like we talked about the implications to our business, we talked about the implications to the world, um, for Sam Altman to say that to us. And I think that, that, that has resonated. Like, you know, the, the people that created these models are still trying to figure out exactly how they work Now they'll figure that out. and They're they're deconstructing it how it. arrives. And there's already been advancement in that. Now to your question about the marketing people and the, adoption of that, I think that like there are gonna be people that embrace the techno. The technology is outta the back. It's happening. Like there's no putting that back in the, that genie back of the bottle. So there's. gonna be people that adopt it and embrace it and find that it is an amazing. Tool, having a digital brain that, that, that, that you collaborate with to create, to get jobs done, to advance in the world, they're gonna be, those people are gonna be incredibly productive and they're gonna produce things that are mind blowing. And then there's gonna be, the problem of the speed of the adoption and the advancement. is gonna cause. Upset in our society, and, uh, we're gonna have to deal with that. And hopefully the technology, the, the positives outweigh the negative. And I think that's really where Adam and I are standing. And that's where forum three is, is that doing, it, working with AI responsibly with brands and creatives, recognizing the human implications. you have to just, you know, you have to be thoughtful or as thoughtful. as you can, and know that there's There's just, there's forces here with this tool. This is a, I think this is having been around at the beginning of, uh, at 1995, uh, at the start of the internet. I think this is as big, if not bigger than the internet. I mean, I remember Mosaic, I think it's bigger.

Corby Fine: 12:51

So Andy, just to go then one step further. So you've gone even beyond the marketer, you've said, I'm gonna build a business around this. So why don't you explain what exactly Hive three.ai is and, and how you're trying to take advantage of this, you know, massive speed adoption, the way, you know, you're talking about it, of, of AI as a tool.

Andy Sack: 13:12

the, uh, I mean it's interesting. It's worth noting that our origins of Forum three, we were the team behind. We started as a Web3 company, we were Advisors to Starbucks through Adam's relationships, on the Starbucks Odyssey. Project which is going very well. We continue to be involved with Starbucks. We, we run their community. and advise them and it was really Starbucks Odyssey launched within one week of chat GBT, and it was as it was launching. It also launched, I think two weeks after the FTX debacle. As it launched by January, Adam and I were having conversations about the implications of chat DBT on Starbucks Odyssey and on forum three, and we started to see very quickly in January and February, organic behavior by consumers of customer co-creation, meaning. Customers were taking, were taking mid journey, uh, and using generative AI to create things and post them to the Starbucks Odyssey, um, in the Starbucks Auto Odyssey Discord. And we were like, wow. And that was the most, those posts got the most. Engagement and, and chatter in the Community. And we were like, wow, this is. bought, like this is bottoms up community. This is the future of brand building. And from there, it's basically been a journey. Our AI journey, which we'll get to our, that is the name of our book, um, our AI Journey, and it's been a journey of generative ai, customer co-creation and helping consumer brands, to. realize the efficiency and effectiveness of AI in their creativity as well as in their business, and that's what Forum three is all about. How'd I, how'd I do, Adam?

Adam Broman: 15:05

That was good. I mean, I, I, I, I love that. And I'd only specifically add, so our first step of what we did when we said we need to focus on ai, this is too interesting and too powerful. The first step was I. Was realizing that there were already a burgeoning community of AI creators out there. And we thought, and they were pretty amazing. And they were like the tip of the spear of like, they were using Mid Journey and Stable diffusion and Dolly, and they were really good at prompting, get these image and video creation models and tools to create amazing things. And, and so we thought, well, why don't we. Why don't we set up a platform that runs a weekly competition amongst this community and showcase to brands what's out there. Because we also realize that brands, and you mentioned this earlier and I'll touch on it, there are a lot of. Scary things about ai. There's like uber scary things like alignment issues and you know, what happens if it gets super intelligence or capabilities and, and those are very real issues. And there's also, you know, issues of, call it, it gets into the wrong hand, what about implicit bias within it? There's, there's all, there's all these big important issues. And then there's also issues related to like. How are these things trained and created? You know, was there authorized training? What about copyright issues? That's particularly, I think, salient, um, in this, in this space. And if you're a brand, like you're, like your lawyers are telling you, I. Don't touch it. And in the meantime, everybody at these companies are using it, whether they're authorized to or not, because Andy said it's like there's a study that just came out that like over half the people in companies are using it and not telling their bosses they're using it. So there's this combination of like, yeah, genie out of the bottle, lawyers are lawyers and other people are going to have the, are rightfully asking tough questions about, Copyright issues, IP issues, ownership issues, ethics issues. and so we, we were like, well, let's, we had the ability to say, well, let's put a platform together where we take this community of AI creators and we just start, we. Briefing them every week. Okay. Create a, create an ad campaign for a clothing line, A fake one. We made up one called like urban Lux, like create one, like create a video for a movie trailer, that doesn't exist yet. So we, we just started playing with it and putting real prize money up and just to see what would happen. And it's pretty amazing. You know, we have a several thousand person community now. We have weekly competitions. we've actually brought some brands and we brought crumble Cookies has come in and sponsored a competition. and the, and the goal was to show. Both show brands what was possible in this space around co-creation and taking advantage of community and ai, but also for us to learn.'cause we're on a learning journey. The reason our book is called our AI Journey is we have a lot of humility about this. Like we're, we're actually not that, you know, it's nice of you to say that we're really smart and we know a lot of stuff. The truth is like, we're learning this stuff like, you know, yeah. We're old. We are, we

Corby Fine: 18:19

wisdom. It's wisdom. Yeah.

Adam Broman: 18:21

we're, we're old. But also just like everybody that's playing with this AI stuff and learning about it right now is kind of in the same spot. Like everybody has the same advantage and disadvantage and it's brand new. Put it this way, there's nobody, other than maybe the teams that like DeepMind or whatever, there's nobody really that's been like. Truly playing with this and learning what it's capable of at any sort of scale level for more than a year. So we're, we're just kind of in that boat and we, we just wanna take our, I'll tell you right now, we, we want to take our foundational. Mission and belief system around helping brands embrace these emerging technologies so that they can have a better relationship with their customers and they can unlock growth and build their brands. Like that's our, that's Andy and my life work. That's what we just do. It's what we've been doing. This is no different, it's just a different technology, but we're learning and it's happening so fast, faster than anything else, like Andy said earlier, that we've ever seen before. So we had to put ourselves in a position of learning, demonstrating And sort of building with our community on the fly. So the first thing you've got is Hive three.ai, where you've got this design competitions and creative community, and we're bringing brands into that to sort of tap into that, to sponsor a competition or do an activation. But we're also writing a book on the subject and we're releasing it with Harvard Business Review as a serial book and building a community around that. And then thirdly, behind the scenes, we're privately doing private betas right now with brands to help them with their Essentially their AI collaboration strategy and building products and software products that we hope will scale to help brands do that as well.

Corby Fine: 20:04

So just on the crowdsource piece, I know that model has been around for a while. In fact, I. I can even recall doing some personal stuff with, I don't know, 99 designs or whatever it was, and I was, wow, what an innovative idea to take advantage of this massive, ecosystem of people that are way more talented than I am in terms of design and logos and copy and whatever it might be that I needed at the time. So you've basically taken a, you know, I guess a proven but yet legacy kind of business model. And, and modernized it with, a combination of both the tools and the asks of what you're, what you're getting, you know, new creators to kind of think through. Is there anything fundamental to the actual model, that sort of crowdsource component that's distinct and unique? Or where do you see that part of it going? Because to your point, AI is just like massively changing the way in which the creation happens. What about on the business model side too? And, and if brands. You know, or anyone listening to this podcast were to say, Hey, like, I'd love to try that out the way crumble cookies are. Uh, how would they go about doing that and engaging with you?

Andy Sack: 21:08

Well, the, the last question is the simplest and easiest, which is they can email us at Andy at forum three, inanimate forum three. So forum three.com is our website. Go there and, and reach out to us. In terms of the crowdsourcing, uh, you actually make a really good point, which is, it is a Trident true, effective way of community sourcing, ideas, brainstorming. I think probably the, the, the interesting or com, um, innovative parts thus far.'cause I don't think it's, we're. We're just early. We're at the start. You, you, you talked about, uh, we launched this thing last year. We launched this thing three months ago. it's four, three and a half months old, which in ai, in AI times is close to six years.

Corby Fine: 21:59

Got it.

Andy Sack: 22:00

Um, The innovative parts, we're just launching the crumble activation. So what we do today is crowdsource. We have our own community of a coup of a couple thousand of what we call, of really top creators, what we call super prompters. We have those, they're on our site, they're in our discord. now we're working with crumble, we're, we're gonna provide them. Really generative AI consumer tools to their customer to actually create, because we have the belief, just going back to the Odyssey, to Starbucks Odyssey, we have the belief that customers actually have an experience. They a want to be engaged with their brands. They want to create and they have an experience and can often tell the story on behalf of brands better than brands and marketers can themselves. And so if there was an innovative part of the crowdsourcing piece. I would say that providing a tool set and allowing that to be open in an activation form remains to be seen, talked to us in, you know, another three or four, another Six years Um, yeah, six a years of ai. I think that's an innovative piece, I think on the business model side. I think there's work to be done there and, and I think, you know, it's a topic that Adam and I are, are talking about because the other part of the business, the strategy, this like intelligence as a service piece, I. Is a, it's basically we're looking to pull the intelligence as of a service and the, providing that as a member of your, call it your executive team. combined with the customer piece and all putting that into the digital brain of AI and And, through that, being able to unlock. Really insights and creativity and efficiencies and ideas that, no exec team would've come up with without it. that's our that's what we're up to. How to charge for that. I don't know.

Corby Fine: 23:52

Yeah, no, and, and listen, I'm just like the technology itself. Things evolve. The business model will evolve, the demand will evolve. And to that, I guess, you know, the, last question specific to that is, you know, Adam, when you think about, and you've worked in some amazing brands, the J Crew, Starbucks, et cetera. What kind of organization, what kind of leadership, what kind of CMO is gonna win in this game? What, what's it take in their demeanor, their character, their risk taking aptitude like, like who wins?

Adam Broman: 24:20

Well, it's funny, it, we write about this in our book, we're still writing. It's a serialized book, but we actually wrote about this in the introduction chapter. The, the answer to your exact question, which is if you look at the methodology in the past that I think you can apply to AI, is that you have to think about The trend line that's going on with the technology, and you need to start now to start experimenting with it. And you need to start thinking about how to incorporate in your workflow, how to introduce it to your customer relationship strategy, if not directly to your customers, and. You're gonna have to do that at a time when you're not sure what's gonna work and what's not gonna work, but you're sure that if you don't experiment with it, you're gonna get left behind. And that that was true of Web one. That was true of social mobile cloud. And I think it's especially true of AI because it's moving so fast that if you're, to your question, if you're a marketer or a C-suite leader. Or a school principal for that matter. Like if you're not right now saying, wait a minute, you mean I can have effectively a chief strategy officer and business intelligent team and creative studio at my fingertips, and I can start incorporating that into my workflow. If you're response to that is, I'm scared, uh, or I don't know how to start, that's natural. But you gotta get over that a little bit and you gotta start experimenting. And that's, that's what I would say is when I look at the examples, not just Starbucks, but when I look at the examples of some of the greatest digital transformation stories of the last 20 years, and Andy and I talked about this in our book, like they do just that they were, they were willing to sort of understand that they were early, that they didn't have all the questions, but they were gonna get on it and they were gonna learn and they were gonna learn with their But their company with their team, and a lot of brands don't have the courage to do that. Um, it's not, it's not for the faint of heart, but I think it's important, and I think it's more important with this technology, this emerging technology with AI than it even was before. Because the pace of change of this AI technology, like when you think about where this is going and how fast it's gonna get, there you, you're already behind if you're not playing with it right now.

Corby Fine: 26:45

I think that's kind of the title of this podcast. If you're already not playing with it, you're too far behind. Andy, anything last to kind of add to that?

Andy Sack: 26:54

I mean, I think that I would just echo that. I think that to answer your question about who do I think, I think you need to be courageous. You need to be curious, and you need to be courageous because the, particularly as the organization size scales, the. Really the brand police, the copyright police, the lawyers. There's lot more than any other technology previously. security and, um, the, the technology people, they're all, there's lots of reasons not to start experimenting with AI out of fear and. If you're not already experimenting with it, you're behind. So the people that experiment with it and get their teams to experiment with it and treat it collaboratively will, I think, will unlock some amazing, amazing growth for their businesses.

Corby Fine: 27:44

Very well said. And so, Adam Broadman, Andy Sack, thank you for having the courage yourselves to, to really start this transformation journey as co-founders and co-CEOs of Forum three, launching and operating Hive three.ai. I. Authors of the upcoming book, our AI journey, being published with Harvard Business Review. Um, thank you so much for your insights, for your wisdom. And uh, just so everybody knows, this podcast was actually recorded in AI time over the course of a year. So, uh, you know, just to put it in scale. But I really appreciate your time today. Thank you both.

Andy Sack: 28:19

Corby, thank you so much for having us.

Adam Broman: 28:21

Yeah, great talking to you.

Corby Fine: 28:22

you.