By now, it’s beyond a cliché to say that AI will transform how we live and work. But if you were to walk into most companies today, you’d largely observe businesses running as usual.
However, at a more select crop of companies, you’d see transformation in the present tense — AI agents handling customer service and nurturing sales leads, engineers shipping features 10x faster, marketers building their own apps, entire workflows reimagined across the business.
This dichotomy is stark, but not surprising. You've likely already heard science fiction writer William Gibson's quote, but it's one of our favorites, so it's worth reciting: "The future is already here — it's just not evenly distributed."
Our mission
As we see it, most companies right now are navigating the “memos and demos” phase.
Ambitious plans and mandates to start using AI, ASAP are boldly declared in an ever-growing collection of CEO memos. Board decks trumpet "AI‑first" roadmaps. Flashy features are center stage in the demoware that’s rocketing around social media. There are endless ChatGPT prompts floating around, the same theoretical debates rehashed at AI dinners across San Francisco, and hand-wavy directives like "Use Cursor!"
But there are few in-the-weeds discussions. Concrete details on scalable implementations and real, present-tense results remain hard to come by. Ask about specifics — team structures, evals, actual productivity metrics — and the conversation typically shifts to higher ground.
This new publication aims to close this gap. And we think we’re well suited to take on the challenge. For more than 12 years now, First Round has published tactical playbooks from the builders — not the VCs — over on The Review. We’ve penned millions of words that have earned many millions of readers, all to serve up tactics that you can use today to change your company and your career.
Our obsession has always been with ground truth over grand theory, on the mechanics of company building over market maps. Applied Intelligence extends that mission into the AI era.
We’ve set out to tell the stories that showcase the actual work of building with AI — not just talking about it. To that end, we’ve spent the past few months interviewing the sharpest minds from both the established scale-ups racing to reinvent themselves and the startups born in the post-ChatGPT era that are doing things differently from Day 1.
Each installment will feature candid, behind-the-scenes conversations with standout senior folks spanning eng, product, and revenue. We’ll deliberately sidestep the hazy distant future vision talk, and instead focus on what's already working in production today.
More specifically, we’ll “delve” into:
- How companies are building customer-facing AI products
- The internal AI tools and workflows delivering the biggest productivity gains
- How team structures and cultures are evolving to meet the moment
- What others can learn from how AI-native startups are rethinking every aspect of company building
We’re interested in the infrastructure decisions nobody ever tweets about. The numbers from actual dashboards, not press releases. The still-clunky internal tools that will never be showcased in a slick marketing video but are driving real business value. In short, all of the tactical details that might make a difference as you look to move your own team’s AI efforts from memo to measurable impact.
Our inaugural piece is with none other than the Shopify team.
Think of our interview with VP & Head of Engineering Farhan Thawar (which you can read in full here) as the sequel to the now-famous memo, chronicling the tactical steps of how Shopify created a culture to embrace and implement AI, along with some of their most impactful use cases thus far.
And we’ve got many more already lined up in the weeks ahead, including stories from Carta, Block, Linktree and many more (so make sure you get each one in your inbox by signing up).
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An unfair AI advantage in your inbox
After dozens of conversations, we spotted the same pattern: The companies and builders showing early signs of success here aren't the ones with special access or secret knowledge. They're simply the ones who got started. Who committed to paying the learning tax early.
Thankfully, they’re generously sharing the lessons they’ve picked up so far. Not because they have to, but because they understand what Gibson meant: the challenge isn't in creation, but in circulation.
Have a story about shipping AI in production that you think other builders could learn from? Help us distribute the future a little faster by getting in touch at ai@firstround.com.