ISSUE #58

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 ➡️

Taste + Tech: Why Humans + AI Create Unstoppable Teams

If 2024 proved anything, it's this: AI isn't just the future—it’s the now. As someone who's been immersed in AI for years, I see not just what's happening today but what's next—and I want to share that edge with you.

You’ve seen the headlines: ChatGPT went mainstream, Apple is putting it in iPhones, and (almost) every public company earnings call had a bit about how they were going to integrate AI into their workflows.

The growth of the industry (and technology) has been cool to watch, but not for the reasons you think. AI is a big part of my work and the businesses I choose to work with. I’ve been deep in this stuff for years, so I feel like I’m “in the future” with AI still.

This crystallized for me when I read this anecdote from OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, where he said that next-generation AI models are going to “be agentic in a real way.”

​In a separate interview, Sam Altman, the other OpenAI cofounder, called agents a “super-competent colleague that knows absolutely everything about my whole life, every email, every conversation I’ve ever had, but doesn’t feel like an extension.”

These quotes reminded me just how far ahead we are with AI. While many are just discovering the potential of prompts, I’ve been leveraging agentic AI for over two years to achieve incredible results.

Prompts are the commands you give to AI, but agents take it a step further—they’re autonomous systems that execute tasks on their own, delivering outcomes with minimal input from you. The logical process is that prompts become agents which lead to outcomes. Let me explain…

Prompts are where the fun starts—they’re the commands we give to AI to perform specific tasks. But as AI evolves, those prompts grow into agents: autonomous systems capable of managing entire workflows on their own.

Agents, in turn, deliver outcomes, handling everything from data analysis to project management with minimal human input. This transformation means we’re not just telling AI what to do anymore—we’re collaborating with it to achieve results faster, smarter, and more effectively.

To put it simply: AI agents do repetitive, time-consuming tasks without getting tired or distracted. That means they don’t make mistakes from boredom or losing focus.

For example, they can ensure brand guidelines are applied consistently across all marketing materials or help prepare polished proposals for new clients with minimal effort. This frees us up to focus on the more human parts of work, like figuring out how a brand connects with its audience.

Here’s another example that I’ve personally been working on this year. Founders need content to get distribution, which leads to more deals, customers, and eyeballs on your company.

Call-to-Content fills up your content calendar with material sourced from your calls. In the past this would take 3-4 team members or 1 absolute rock star to generate for you. Now Call-to-Content does it with zero added time.

​Click here to try Call-to-Content (or learn more below).

Before you get too worried that AI is going to replace your work, there's a huge opportunity here for people and businesses who are ready to seize the opportunity. AI still has a big issue with integration and understanding the human perspective from all this information.

For example, while AI agents can analyze market trends or prepare client proposals with precision, it takes a human to:

• Interpret those insights
• Adapt them to real-world context
• Apply internal "tribal" knowledge to the output
• Communicate strategies that connect with audiences

Here’s the truth that people need to wake up to: taste is the best thing you can add to your toolbox. In an age of abundance, tastemakers run the world.

AI’s already shaking up jobs like analysts and researchers—handling in minutes what used to take hours (and cost a fortune). People and businesses who leverage AI as a tool while maintaining their unique human perspective will find themselves at a significant advantage.
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The other day I saw a post about someone eliminating a role that they were paying over $300,000 a year on (for competitive research). They replaced it with AI automations that costs pennies on the dollar.

Think of this opportunity like a chef in the kitchen. AI provides "ingredients"—consistency, speed, and precision—but it’s the chef who decides how to combine them into a dish that’s fresh, exciting, and unexpected. Without the chef’s creativity and vision, those ingredients would just sit there, unused.

This collaboration between human ingenuity and AI capabilities is rocket fuel for innovation. The key is not to compete with AI, but to enhance your natural abilities with it, creating outcomes that neither humans nor AI could achieve alone.

The next billion dollar businesses have yet to be built. We’re still in the early stages of AI, for as far as we’ve come the last couple years!

Founders who are able to peek around the corner and have a willingness to test new ideas and workflows will see the opportunities long before anyone else. AI’s future is bright, but navigating it requires a partner who’s been there. Let’s not just stay ahead—let’s define what’s next.

- Pete Sena​

Tool of the Week 🧰

CALL TO CONTENT. Turn your mouth 👄 into money 💰💰💰

If you're like me, you probably spend more time than you’d like to admit on conference calls.

​You can’t summarize business success, but you can turn most of your outputs into value if you're smart.

My tool of the week is Call-to-content. I dreamed this up for one of my startup founders. After seeing it help them turn their sales meetings into SOPs, social media content, and an auto-populated content calendar, I thought it would be stupid if I didn’t offer this to everyone else.

So, I struck up a partnership with my favorite AI notetaker, Fathom, and got to building.

Mention my newsletter before Dec 31st and get $100 bucks off Call-to-Content.​
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This is a no-brainer if you want to monetize your meetings and time.

Thanks so much for reading this edition of The Forward Obsessed Founder — you can also check out this issue on the web [Link].
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