Welcome to the Forward Obsessed Founder, my newsletter with insights, awesome tools, and real-world advice to grow your business and career.
GO FORWARD THOUGHT OF THE WEEK ➡️
Thinking you need a bigger team to make a bigger impact is a myth. With AI, that mindset is broken and expensive.
Most companies are still operating with a 2015 playbook: hire more people, add more tools, and stack more processes on top of process.
But the companies winning right now aren’t scaling people, they’re scaling output. And they’re doing it by pairing their existing talent with a growing number of always-on, never-sick, fully capable digital teammates.
That’s not some futuristic vision pumped by tech bros. It’s already happening inside businesses I work with every day.
We’re in the era of agentic workflows.
That means instead of asking your content strategist to write, research, and design the whole thing from scratch… they kick off a workflow and an AI agent does the heavy lifting.
From UX and copy to market research and messaging frameworks, AI agents are taking care of the first 90%. Then your people step in and make the final 10% shine.
I call this the 10/80/10 approach I wrote about it more here pre-LLMS here
That’s leverage. And it’s not theoretical. It’s operational.
Last month alone, I helped three companies double their marketing output without hiring a single new employee. We didn’t get approval for a new budget. We increased their output by layering AI agents into their workflows.
The results? Faster output, sharper insights, and happier teams doing the work they were actually hired to do.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t about replacing people. It’s about unlocking their best work with AI agents that remove the busywork, eliminate lag time, and quickly turn strategy into deliverables.
Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, nailed it when he said,
“Your IT department will become HR for your digital workforce.”
That’s exactly where we’re headed. And if you’re still thinking of AI as a toy or a trend, you’re going to get left behind.
The playbook is shifting fast. Here's what the new model looks like:
Start with a brief.
A real one. Clear, strategic, and outcome-focused.
Let your agents run.
Research gets pulled.
Ideas get riffed on.
Copy gets drafted.
PRDs get written
Prototypes get designed (and built)
And now you come in to shape the final outcome.
UX gets mocked. Copy gets drafted. Ideas get mapped.
Your human talent steps in at the end.
You apply taste, nuance, and direction. The stuff AI can’t fake.
We’re already seeing this inside companies who get it. They’re not racing to hire more people. They’re upgrading their workflows. They’re making every team member more dangerous by giving them a sidekick who never sleeps.
Last newsletter we talked about how to fill your teams with tastemakers, yappers, and vibe coders—and it’s the AI agents that give these people the time and space to do what they do best—be human.
But this shift raises a bigger question I’ve been thinking about a lot: what if I could build the ChatGPT for marketers? Or the Cursor for content creators?
Not another wrapper. But an actual agentic marketplace that connects the best model for the job—whether it’s OpenAI, Claude, Mistral, or whatever’s next—with a clean UX, prebuilt prompts, and modular flows that marketers can plug into without ever touching a line of code.
Kind of like how Uber Eats connects you to great food—you don’t care what kitchen it comes from. You just want the thing to arrive hot and done right.
That’s my vision. An AI system where it’s not just about spinning up prompts or outputs—it’s about delivering completed work. Strategic, high-quality, done-for-you work, customized to your org, and built to scale.
If your team is still slogging through briefs, rewriting copy from scratch, or waiting days for that “one-pager” to come back from a freelancer, you’re not just behind.
Do you need this for your business? Reply to this email with VULCAN and I’ll add you to the closed waitlist to be the first to take it for a spin :)
You’re vulnerable.
So what should you do about this?
Start small. Look at where your team is wasting time. That’s where your first agent belongs. From there, layer in automation, prebuilt flows, and a little imagination.
And if you don’t know where to begin?
That’s where I come in. I run AI readiness audits and help companies design agent-first workflows that actually drive revenue. If you want to stop throwing people at problems—and start building a real agentic stack—hit reply and let’s talk.
The businesses that adopt agentic workflows now are going to dominate the next five years. They're moving faster. They’re doing more with fewer people. They’re making their current teams dramatically more productive without burnout or bloat.
You don’t need more humans.
You need to increase speed and capacity.
Book a 15 minute call with me and I bet I can point out 2-3 opportunities in your business by the end of our call.
Talk to you soon,
Pete
P.S. Here's what one of my clients had to say about our time working together...
“Pete’s the first person I recommend when a founder tells me their business feels bloated or stuck. Pete doesn’t just talk about AI, he shows you exactly how to use it to improve workflows, free up more time, and focus on what humans do best. There’s nobody else who blends creativity, strategy, and systems like he does.”
—Matt R.
Three ways I can help make your CFO and board love you right now:
- Help you discover new revenue streams for your business hiding in plain sight.
- Host an AI Growth Workshop for you and your team to reduce fat and wasted manual work by up to 30% weekly.
- Install an IDEA Machine in your business that listens to your customers and market and automatically suggests areas for improvement powered by the latest generative AI tools.
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