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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

I saw this tweet from fitness guy Dan Go the other day and it really fired me up. I am a very simple man with my wants, and as a recovering broke founder that can now actually afford to eat ramen from a restaurant rarther than ramen from the Chinese grocer, I need places to spend my money. And this is honestly the ultimate Christmas list for me.

Of these on the list I currently have: a sauna, standing desk, membership at the best gym. Looks like I have plenty of work to do still. Anyway, I finishing this piece up very late tonight, so won’t spill too much more ink in this little note. On with today’s piece.

BUSINESS STORY 🗞️

If You Ain't AI First, You're Last

AI isn't coming; it's here. And the gap between the laggard companies that treat it like a curiosity and those that have lened in to rebuild their entire org around it is widening by the week. This is our generations opportunity to be the haves of the technology world, peering down from their respetive high horses at those they left behind.

The battle is waging today, in real time. Companies mastering AI are operating with 2-3x the leverage of their peers. Revenue per employee ratios that seemed impossible three years ago are now table stakes. And the people who figure this out aren't just winning; they're rewriting what's possible in their categories.

Due to this, the piece I have for you today is a tactical, behind-the-scenes guide to transforming your organization from AI-curious to AI-first in 180 days. I'm writing this because we just did it at my startup, and I'm seeing too many smart founders fumbling the transition by either moving too slow or trying to boil the ocean on day one.

So here's the exact playbook we used. No theory. No fluff. Just the six steps that took us from a team of AI skeptics to an organization where agents handle work that used to require three full-time people.

Firstly, a quick tale from the real world

Two months ago, I spent a week hiking in New Zealand. During my stay, I got to know my hosts quite well. They were a lovely, middle-aged (50s) German-Kiwi couple with two teenage daughters; both were graphic designers and were a quarter-century into their careers. One night, while standing by the fire, the mother, let’s call her Helga, asked me what I did, to which I replied, “I work in tech, or tech-adjacent, and I write a newsletter about tech.” She rolled her eyes.

It was a moment where the world caught up to me all at once. “What’s with the eye roll?” I asked, “You don’t like tech?” To which Ina replied, “No, and particularly AI. Peter Thiel, Musk, Sam Altman, how much money do they need?” Before you think this is just another ‘eat the rich’ story, it’s not. After digging into this with Helga, I realized she had reason to despise tech. Firstly, all of her photographer friends, many of whom she’d collaborated with for decades, had seen their business slashed by up to 80%. “They can’t make a living anymore. No one is willing to pay for photography when you can just have AI do it.” And she knew, as a designer, that she was next.

As thirty-year professionals, the pressure from AI, along with the rise in the global cost of living since 2020, led Helga’s family to live in their family home for only two-thirds of the year. The other third live in a caravan and rent their house out, just to make ends meet. I tell this story for two reasons: Firstly, because it’s a story we in tech should hear. Real things are already happening that are affecting families all around the world. As I wrote recently in our piece about the revenue-per-employee war, technology drives the world forward, but we, as leaders in tech, should also have empathy for those affected by it.

The second reason I wanted to tell this story is that many of your team members likely feel like Helga. Copywriters, designers, developers. Every role is up for grabs with AI. It is our job as leaders to not only capitalize on the efficiency improvement from AI, but to also prepare our teams to feel comfortable about their future, while being skilled enough—’an AI won’t take your job, but a human who is great at AI will’—to thrive in the next stage of their career. Here is a step-by-step guide to becoming an AI-first organization.

1/ Communicate the strategy

First things first in your move towards organizational AI utopia, is to communicate to the team. What is happening, when is it happening, and how is it happening. Communication is one of the five core tenets of the CEO job description, and considering this is likely to be a large project, it needs to be communicated clearly from the top.

The communication should first start with getting buy-in from senior leaders. You need to map out why this will be beneficial to them and their orgs, and have them shape what the rollout will be from day zero. You need to explain the ‘why now’ element very clearly, and tie AI to survival + its obvious advantages. Be clear, this is a core change in how the company operates, not some curiosity around building a handful of AI agents.

At my startup, Athyna, we started by aligning with leadership at our bi-annual (the twice yearly, not once per two year type) goal setting session. One of our five organizational goals was to “Prepare our company and our people for the AI wave.”

_{*Note: For context, We set ‘goals’ at an organizational level, with loose key results if you will. They are not SMART goals, and we are ok with that. From the organizational level, we pass the goals—or themes as we often refer to them—to the departments that do rock-solid OKRs that need to tie into these goals/themes.}

After we discussed this, and once our leadership knew it was the direction we were heading, it was then my job, as CEO, to communicate this across Slack, emails, All-Hands, and anywhere else I could have my voice heard, so people knew this was a priority for us.

2/ Take the baseline

Next is understanding where the company sits today in terms of its AI literacy and adoption. This is important for understanding where the biggest opportunities are, but also as a low-water mark to build from and track over time. The way we did this was with a simple survey that asked our team a number of personal (which I’ll get to) and professional questions about their relationship with artificial intelligence.

Once we had that data, we were able to see where we sat in relation to adoption and literacy. I have created a friendly, understandable Game of Thrones-themed table below for you to reference.

With AI being such a nascent idea still, most companies today still sit squarely in the Fleabottom Pub Rat category, a stink-smelly stage where usage is low, and literacy is still somewhat Hodor-ish. This is ok, again, it’s the low water mark. The idea is that over time—let’s use 180 days as our guidepost here—you move your organization to at least the Knight’s Squire stage, and maybe even if you are lucky, the Maester in Training level.

_{*Note: I don’t love using AI images in my newsletter, but since we are talking about AI, we can thank ChatGPT for this one.}

Alongside the organizational level, which I would call the ‘professional’ side of the ledger, we asked our team several questions about how they feel about AI. How prepared do they feel for the future we are all embarking on together? The aim for us is to take whatever number we land on and also improve that over time. We want our people, as you should, to feel like they are the operators people are referring to when they say an AI won’t take your job, but a human who is great at AI will.

3/ Build the core team (lead + council)

The next stage is to make sure you have the cattle on the park (Aussie saying, apologies) to be able to execute on your AI strategy. You will need two things here. The first is a lead for the whole organizational push. This person should be someone who not only understands AI but lives and breathes it. They are the people who subscribe to The Neuron, Roko’s Basilisk, and Superhuman AI. They scour Twitter every day to see the new tool that drops and then rush out to get their hands dirty experimenting with it.

But not only that, they should have the capability to actually build with technical and non-technical AI tools + lead the company from the change management perspective. These people are somewhat unicorn-ish, but they exist. You are looking for an AI Workflow Design, AI Engineer, or some such role.

Concurrently, while you are out searching for your AI lead, you will want to build out an internal AI Council. Think of these as your wise mages of the digital world, who share your enthusiasm and zest for a cybernetic future but will fight tooth and nail to get their department’s needs on the table. They need to be AI-literate—although they do not need to be technical—with strong leadership skills.

_{*Note: For a bonus culture boost, make sure to choose people who are not necessarily leaders, managers, or heads of departments. It’s ok if they are, but if you can give this responsibility to the next ‘up and coming’ batch of leaders, it will make them feel great about their career, thanks to this small piece of added responsibility.}

💡 Note: If you are on the lookout for AI Workflow Designers, just reply to this email, as my team at Athyna can help.

4/ Launch AI week

Once your AI lead and council are in place, it’s time to launch the strategy in an all guns blazing week of AI content with the power of a thousand suns. We did this recently at Athyna. People were excited to be preparing for this new stage of growth for themselves and the company. For most companies, carving out a themed week is a big ask due to all the non-negotiable deliverables. To combat this, we announced the event a month in advance and carved out 20 hours from our calendars, while cancelling all non-critical meetings (one-to-ones, team meetings, stand-ups, etc.). This allowed all non-neg elements to fit in the remaining 20 hours.

Due to my borderline unhealthy obsession with Game of Thrones—and our entire organization being Westerosi-themed—we had an AI avatar of me introduce the event, standing in front of the gates of Winterfell. Why, you might ask? Well, as the drunken tattoo on my left foot would tell you, “Por qué no?” (Why not)

We had three core pillars of content throughout the week: presentations on different AI topics from members of our AI council, breakout sessions where we worked on idea regarding how we can infuse AI into our day to day via automations, workflows, and agents, and finally we had group watch parties, where we sat together and streamed an interesting YouTube tutorial around what’s possible with AI.

For the watch parties, to hold people’s attention, I informed the team that I was holding their attention hostage by asking three people questions after each session. For the sessions, I focused solely on videos from Greg Isenberg, as his videos are clearly the most interesting tutorial style, walkthrough videos on the internet today. Peter Yang is also great, as are many others, but Greg is now commonly referred to as ‘Uncle Greg’ inside of Athyna.

5/ Acquire the appropriate tooling

Next comes the conversation around tooling, and for the most part, if you have hired well, this is best quarterbacked by your AI lead. There are three steps to covering your tooling needs.

1/ The first is choosing which LLM platform you dedicate a team account for; the obvious choices here are ChatGPT and Claude. Even though Claude is much better for certain things—writing and coding for example—and has been since day one, most people are more comfortable with ChatGPT, and it still may be the better option. This is the first part of step one.

The second part is deciding where the AI council and regular non-AI-native team members can build their own automations, workflows, and maybe, if you are lucky, even some low-level AI agents.

2/ The second step is for you to decide on which high-level tooling you will choose for complex workflows, multi-step agents, and anything that requires deep technical oversight. This is likely the tool your AI lead will live in, and maybe some council members, but it will often require support from your engineering team. For our needs, and the needs of 200k other builders, that tool is n8n.

3/ The third step is to create a place for all prompts to live. A ‘prompt library’ as it were. This will be the home for all useful prompts. We use a Notion database with separate views, split into a general view and one for each department. For the sake of cleanliness, AI council members ensure that all prompts are entered to a high standard. Everyone is going to have their own projects, prompts, artifacts, and custom GPTs spread across a number of platforms, but think of the prompt library as the high-level, super valuable, and nicely polished resources.

In this next section, I plan to spend a couple of minutes explaining the difference between automations, workflows, and agents. Here is a quick explainer.

Side note: Automations v Workflows v Agents

For months, I nodded along when people used these terms interchangeably. Let me save you the embarrassment: they're different, and the difference matters. Automations are simple if-this-then-that operations. New lead fills form → add to CRM. Meeting booked → Slack notification. No decisions, just mechanical movement.

Example: When someone completes a form, Zapier grabs the data and dumps it into your database. Takes 30 seconds to build, saves 10-15 minutes per submission. Do this 50 times a month, that's 10+ hours back.

Workflows on the other hand, are multi-step processes with conditional logic. The output of one step feeds the next. Workflows can include AI, but they follow a predetermined path you've mapped.

Agents are where everything changes. Agents are AI systems that perceive, decide, act, and iterate—without you programming every step. You give them a goal and tools, they figure out how to achieve it. The key difference is that workflows follow your map, whereas agents draw their own.

Example: A sales outreach agent gets a goal to book five qualified demos this week and access to LinkedIn, email, your CRM, and web search. You don't tell it exactly who to contact or what to say. It searches for prospects matching your ICP, researches each company, crafts personalized emails, sends them, analyzes response rates, and adjusts its approach. If cold emails aren't working, it might pivot to LinkedIn messages. If enterprise leads respond better than SMBs, it shifts focus. Same goal, but the path changes based on what's actually working. To illustrate nice and clearly.

Start with automations, graduate to workflows, experiment cautiously with agents. The biggest mistake is building agents before automating basics. A simple Zapier automation beats a half-baked agent every time.

6/ Review at 30/90/180 days

Now that we are all on the same page as to what the heck agents really do, we need to talk about the final steps in the process we have gone through today. At the different points in the process you will want to assess different elements of your AI strategy. Here are the things you should check at each milestone:

30 Days: Adoption & Early Wins

Re-run your baseline survey. You want movement from Fleabottom Pub Rat toward Knight's Squire. You ahould be tracking towards 40-50% weekly AI usage, 10+ automations deployed, AI conversations in Slack without prompting. The AI Council met twice. Prompt library has 10-15 entries. Serious forward momentum.

90 Days: Workflow Integration & ROI

The key question here is, ‘Is AI embedded in core workflows or still a side activity?’ Track time saved. If 50 people save 30 minutes daily, that's three FTEs of capacity. If this sounds like you, well done. Give yourself a big pat on the back. You should also 5-10 workflows in production with clear ROI. Hopefully a few power users are emerging who build for others; if not, you may need to look at your buy-in or incentives.

180 Days: Maturity & Competitive Edge

By this point in time, AI should begin to feel normal, not novel. Hopefully around 50%+ of your team have arrived at Knight's Squire, with 10-20% at Maester in Training. Every department should have its one signature workflow. Revenue per employee should also be up, customer satisfaction steady, and AI-enabled employee satisfaction positive.

Although you may come to the end of 180 days and assume the AI world has been conquered, the space is evolving so rapidly that the goal posts will be forever moving. Even so, if you have oversight across these three checkpoints you'll have a good understanding of where you sit, and if there are any areas you need to continue to improve upon.

Future

Most companies reading this will still be at Fleabottom Pub Rat level in six months. They'll bookmark this piece, maybe have a meeting about AI strategy, then get busy with whatever feels more urgent. Meanwhile, a small percentage will actually do this. And in 18 months, the gap between those two groups will be so wide it'll look like different industries. The uncomfortable truth: AI adoption isn't optional.

Companies that don't figure this out in 2025 will be competing with one hand tied behind their back by 2027. You can read this, nod along, and go back to business as usual. Or you can block out two hours this week, gather your leadership team, and start. Six months from now, you'll either be glad you did or you’ll damn sure wish you had.

Extra reading / learning

• OpenAI's NEW AI Agent Builder Replaces n8n & Zapier - October, 2025

• 99% Of People STILL Don't Know The Basics Of Prompting - June, 2025

• What is Vibe Marketing? The Complete Guide - October 2025

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

HIRING ZONE 👀 

Today we are highlighting AI talent available through, Athyna. If you are looking for the best bespoke tech talent, these stars are ready to work with you—today! Reach out here if we can make an introduction to these talents and get $1,000 discount on behalf of us.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Framer*—the site builder trusted by startups to Fortune 500.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

P.S. Want to work together?

1. Hiring global talent: If you’re hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it 80% less, check out my startup, Athyna. 🌏

2. See my tech stack: Find our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna here. 🧰 

3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investors and leaders in tech. 👀