How we build an AI Powered company

Everyone wants an AI-first company right now. The question is what you picture when you say AI-first.

In my world, an AI-first company means agents do most of the work and people check their output.

Ask yourself who will still enjoy that work two years from now. On top of that, colleagues who fear for their jobs will not carry AI adoption with you.

That kind of company makes no sense to me.

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A year of everyone on their own

We used AI every day. Each of us alone, and every time from scratch. Whoever found a good approach kept it in their head.

We were not alone in this. Our AI Map showed that 56% of people have never automated a single task they do repeatedly. The main reason? No time for it.

For a year I believed it was enough to show people how it is done and they would join in. It was not. One person cannot carry AI adoption. They can kick it off, not carry it. Three things changed that:

1️⃣ I started showing people their own work.

When you tell someone "give AI a try", they do nothing. The problem is too big. So I started either showing people a concrete solution for their own process, or we built it together on the spot.

2️⃣ We started sharing our successes and failures.

We set up a 30-minute AI Morning once a month where people shared what worked and what did not. I add feedback to it, because plenty of things can be done differently and better a month later.

The more people used AI, the more their sense of what it could do expanded. Everyone ended up with a list of things to improve or automate. Suddenly the main brake was neither ignorance nor lack of time.

The brake was using AI in a chat window.

3️⃣ We set aside time to leave the chat window.

A short brief, three hours with Claude Code and the terminal, the whole team together. Design, marketing, project management, invoicing and admin. Within a month everyone was working in the terminal, regardless of role or prior experience.

On its own that step would not have worked. People came in with their own list of things they wanted to do and change, held back by the technology (chat). That is the only reason it landed.

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Two different goals

An AI-first company is built so that AI agents do the work. You cut costs. You cut people. Who joins in enthusiastically only to be gone in six months? AI-first demotivates.

We are not chasing savings on people. We are making sure they get far more done than before. Everyone here builds agents, automations and internal apps, including people who have never written a line of code. The whole team shares skills and rules on GitHub. In our maturity model this is stage 4. We call it an AI-powered company.

Everyone now gets through work they previously had no capacity for.

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Webinar on 15 September

On Tuesday 15 September I will walk through how we use AI at House of Řezáč and our road to an AI powered company in detail. I will show one project that is running right now. From research through decisions and planning to a finished campaign and product. You will also see the places where we got stuck.

"I learn by going where I have to go."
– Theodore Roethke

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Weekend reading

Of Termites & Tokens

When a landing page is cheap, it stops being a project and becomes market research.