Home/Module M2 · First Functions
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M1 · The Economic Case ▶
P01 · The ROI Playbook ▶
  • 01 7 modules. 21 playbooks. 1 system.
  • 02 11 workshops. Run Monday.
  • 03 The ROI Playbook
  • 04 Same companies, same tools, opposite outcomes.
  • 05 Half saw zero. Half saw 171%. They measured different things.
  • 06 The split is measurement, not capability.
  • 07 The 5-step ROI Playbook.
  • 08 Outcome metrics vs activity metrics.
  • 09 BCG 10-20-70: 10% tech, 20% process, 70% people.
  • 10 Four named failure modes.
  • 11 20 agents, 1.2 humans, $2.4M closed.
  • 12 Five things to do Monday.
P02 · The Procurement Playbook ▶
  • 01 The Procurement Playbook
  • 02 Your procurement team is signing eight overlapping AI contracts.
  • 03 Buy the platform. Build the integration. Demand the clauses.
  • 04 Demand these in every AI vendor contract.
  • 05 Four root causes of contract sprawl.
  • 06 Five steps to consolidate.
  • 07 Outcome pricing sets the trap vendors won't walk into.
  • 08 Concentration risk is your fiduciary problem.
  • 09 If you can't count them, you don't own them.
  • 10 Five things to do Monday.
P03 · The Model-Swap Playbook ▶
  • 01 The Model-Swap Playbook
  • 02 Silent model updates are now your product risk.
  • 03 If you don't own model-swap rights, you don't own your product.
  • 04 Six terms every CEO needs.
  • 05 What changes silently when the model swaps.
  • 06 From press release to P&L.
  • 07 Four steps to own your model risk.
  • 08 Where to lock the model. Where to let it move.
  • 09 Single-vendor dependency is concentration risk, not strategy.
  • 10 Five things to do Monday.
M2 · First Functions ▶
P04 · The Sales Growth Playbook ▶
  • 01 The Sales Growth Playbook
  • 02 One SaaS founder ran an entire go-to-market on this math.
  • 03 Hybrid beats autonomous above $25K ACV.
  • 04 Twenty agents feed one human. One human closes the deal.
  • 05 One model collapsed. The other closed $2.4M.
  • 06 Where you sit on this 2×2 decides whether AI replaces or extends your reps.
  • 07 Five steps to build one cell, then replicate.
  • 08 Two customers, same lesson: data quality before agent count.
  • 09 Four reframes that change the AI sales business case.
  • 10 Five moves before next quarter.
P05 · The Procurement Playbook ▶
  • 01 The Procurement Playbook
  • 02 Mid-market AI procurement is already out of control.
  • 03 Buy the platform. Build the integration. Demand the clauses.
  • 04 Five clauses every CEO must require before signing.
  • 05 Why eight overlapping contracts arrive without approval.
  • 06 Cut the stack in five moves — inventory first, renewals last.
  • 07 Refuse seat pricing. Make vendors price the work.
  • 08 The four archetypes and which platform wins in each.
  • 09 What a vendor that cannot hold these terms is telling you.
  • 10 Five moves before the next renewal.
P06 · The Agent Migration Playbook ▶
  • 01 The Agent Migration Playbook
  • 02 95% of agent pilots stall. The 5% that ship are onboarded like employees.
  • 03 An agent is a new hire, not a feature. Onboard it on a workflow that already works.
  • 04 Five steps from workflow to agent — the same arc you use to onboard a human.
  • 05 Agents do not go rogue. They inherit — your permissions, your paths, your stale facts.
  • 06 Humans are the middleware. That seam is the workflow.
  • 07 Write the job spec before the prompt. Six fields. No exceptions.
  • 08 You do not replace Susan. You fold the 10% spreadsheet task across 8 people into one agent.
  • 09 Three phases. Ninety days. One agent in production.
  • 10 Five moves to ship your first agent in 90 days.
CB · Function Before Industry ▶
  • 01 The Function-Before-Industry Playbook
  • 02 Functions move first. Industries follow.
  • 03 Six functions. One pattern. Every industry.
  • 04 Vendors sell by industry. Agents deploy by function.
  • 05 When a CEO asks "does this apply to my industry?" — the three-move answer.
  • 06 Three moves before next quarter.
M3 · Company Brain ▶
P07 · The Company Brain Playbook ▶
  • 01 The Company Brain Playbook
  • 02 The data is the moat — and almost no one is ready to defend it.
  • 03 Dashboards show outcomes. The brain shows decisions.
  • 04 Your dashboard sits on top. The brain underneath is what makes it true.
  • 05 Five moves that turn a dashboard company into a brain company.
  • 06 How the brain actually routes. One server. Three stores. One answer.
  • 07 Six inputs every company already generates — and almost none captures.
  • 08 Everyone has dashboards. Almost no one has a queryable decision history.
  • 09 Three companies that built the brain before anyone called it that.
  • 10 Four ways your brain is leaking — to vendors who will index it before you do.
  • 11 Five moves to start building the brain this week.
P08 · The Discoverability & Governance Playbook ▶
  • 01 The Discoverability & Governance Playbook
  • 02 You are already losing the governance race.
  • 03 Every prompt is a document. Every agent is an identity. Both are now legal evidence.
  • 04 It is not theoretical. Two courts already ruled.
  • 05 The six-step Governance Playbook.
  • 06 The 96/12 gap is a fiduciary problem, not a technical one.
  • 07 What "discovery" now includes — beyond email.
  • 08 31 unauthorized agents. 6 weeks. One mid-sized agency.
  • 09 Per-vertical secrets. Machine identity per agent. Separate accounts per role.
  • 10 Five moves. Two are this week.
P09 · The Model-Swap Playbook ▶
  • 01 The Model-Swap Playbook
  • 02 Your vendor already changed the model. You just did not see it.
  • 03 If you do not own model-swap rights, you do not own your product.
  • 04 A "silent model swap" in plain English.
  • 05 Three things that break the moment the model changes.
  • 06 Vendors announce capability gains. Customers absorb the P&L impact.
  • 07 The 4-step Model-Swap Playbook.
  • 08 Which of your AI workloads is highest-risk for a silent swap?
  • 09 The model-swap notification clause — draft language.
  • 10 Four moves before the next vendor renewal.
M4 · Prototype to Production ▶
P10 · The Prototyping Loop Playbook ▶
  • 01 The Prototyping Loop Playbook
  • 02 Most AI pilots stall. A five-day loop tells you why before you spend.
  • 03 Test the thesis. Then scope the project. Not the other way around.
  • 04 Five steps from thesis to kill-or-scale — one working week.
  • 05 Four failure modes that turn a six-week pilot into a six-month sinkhole.
  • 06 Thesis-first prototyping drops the cost of being wrong by 100×.
  • 07 One week, four checkpoints.
  • 08 Pick the tool by what it has to do — not by what it is.
  • 09 Two windows. One architects. One builds. Copy-paste when they disagree.
  • 10 Five moves to ship a prototype this week.
P11 · The Hidden Cleanup Playbook ▶
  • 01 The Hidden Cleanup Playbook
  • 02 Your agents are already running. The cleanup bill is already growing.
  • 03 Every agent has a tail. Pay it on schedule, or pay it in incidents.
  • 04 Six line items every agent project owes — whether you budgeted them or not.
  • 05 MCP made integration linear. Openness by default made the wrapper mandatory.
  • 06 The compute bill is falling. The cleanup bill just took its place.
  • 07 82% are running. Most are not reliable. The cleanup bill compounds quietly.
  • 08 Five moves to name the cleanup before it becomes an incident.
  • 09 Inference is a commodity. Your contract probably does not reflect it.
  • 10 Five moves to name the bill before it names itself.
P12 · The Anthropic Agent Environment Playbook ▶
  • 01 The Anthropic Agent Environment
  • 02 The infrastructure barrier to running real agents just dropped.
  • 03 Prototype in Perplexity. Run in the Agent Environment.
  • 04 Six things you get here that you cannot get in a chat session.
  • 05 What moves from prototype to production — named, mapped, decoupled.
  • 06 Six terms. Use Anthropic’s vocabulary internally — then map your vendor.
  • 07 What it costs — and when to migrate vs stay in Perplexity.
  • 08 Eight items before your first production deployment.
  • 09 Two launch partners. One pattern.
  • 10 Four moves to run your first production agent in 30 days.
M5 · Organization Rewrite ▶
P13 · The Workforce Tiering Playbook ▶
  • 01 The Workforce Tiering Playbook
  • 02 Three numbers explain why most AI rollouts stall.
  • 03 Three tiers. Three plays. Or your saboteurs pick for you.
  • 04 Name the tiers. Then act differently for each.
  • 05 Same tools, same budget. A 6× gap. The variable is fluency.
  • 06 The CIA wrote your refusers’ playbook in 1944.
  • 07 Build the network before the strategy. The order matters.
  • 08 Stop buying tools. Start buying fluency.
  • 09 Four rules for the bottom tier. Use all four.
  • 10 Five moves before next quarter.
P14 · The Org Change Playbook ▶
  • 01 The Org Change Playbook
  • 02 Three numbers explain why most AI rollouts fail.
  • 03 Manage the change, or the change manages you.
  • 04 Where AI value actually lives — and where you are spending.
  • 05 Hire the operator, not the architect.
  • 06 Five moves. In this order. Skip one and the rollout stalls.
  • 07 Same playbook. Different narratives. Different results.
  • 08 What CFOs ask vs what CHROs ask. Skip a column, kill the transformation.
  • 09 Four phases. Ninety days. Then measure people, not throughput.
  • 10 Five moves to manage the change before it manages you.
P15 · The Campfire Protocol Playbook ▶
  • 01 The Campfire Protocol Playbook
  • 02 When the keeper walks out, the loss is measurable.
  • 03 The fire is going out. Capture the stories. Encode the judgment.
  • 04 The 7-phase Campfire Protocol.
  • 05 Boeing 737 MAX: the cross-engineering judgment about MCAS edge cases.
  • 06 Hundreds of millions per year, every year, from the same pattern.
  • 07 Ask your top 10 leaders: “Who would cause the most damage if they left tomorrow?”
  • 08 From story to system — the four encoding layers.
  • 09 Prioritize by risk × replaceability.
  • 10 Five moves to start the campfire this week.
WORKSHOPS · Workshops ▶
WS·01 · The Secrets Workshop ▶
  • 01 The Secrets Workshop
  • 02 The breach is already priced in.
  • 03 Seed. Vault. Agent. Audit.
  • 04 Five words that aren't interchangeable.
  • 05 Method matters. The choice you make is the policy you live with.
  • 06 How CEOs actually lose secrets — three traps.
  • 07 The pattern: seed, vault, agent.
  • 08 Isolation is the architecture. Discipline is the harness.
  • 09 Two tools. Different jobs. Use both.
  • 10 Seven rules that survive Friday at 5pm.
  • 11 Five questions to ask your CISO on Monday.
WS·02 · Enterprise AI Memory Architecture ▶
  • 01 Enterprise AI Memory Architecture
  • 02 A 100-person firm loses ~$1M/year to AI that doesn't remember.
  • 03 One fact, one home.
  • 04 Enterprise knowledge is three things — and one layer can't serve all three.
  • 05 Three layers, one rule, one source of truth per knowledge type.
  • 06 Temporal knowledge graph. The conversation memory of the enterprise.
  • 07 Portable memory store. Atomic facts. Scoped IDs. Vendor-independent.
  • 08 Vector document store. Verbatim retrieval. Citation-grade.
  • 09 The one-sentence rule that keeps Layer 3 clean.
  • 10 Three layers, queried in parallel. The user asks one question.
  • 11 ~$700/mo at small scale. ~$7K–16K/mo at enterprise. Pays for itself in weeks.
  • 12 Twenty weeks. One layer at a time. Discipline before scale.
  • 13 Five things to do Monday.
WS·03 · Clean Zone Architecture ▶
  • 01 Clean Zone Architecture
  • 02 Modern AI lives in the cloud. Most of your most valuable data legally cannot.
  • 03 The cost of getting this wrong is no longer theoretical.
  • 04 Contain the sensitive data. Transform it there. Let only the transformed output leave.
  • 05 Six words that decide your compliance posture.
  • 06 One pattern. Five modules. A boundary enforced at five layers.
  • 07 Five modules, one job each. Composition matters more than tools.
  • 08 Four properties make a system defensible. Missing one is a vulnerability.
  • 09 Same architecture. Different attestation.
  • 10 Redaction loses meaning. Synthesis preserves it. Choose synthesis for AI.
  • 11 Every defensible clean zone produces an explicit chain of attestations.
  • 12 First 100 documents are special. They calibrate the system.
  • 13 Six threats. Five assets. Eight controls. The shape of every defense.
  • 14 Five failure modes account for the majority of breaches. Design around all five.
  • 15 One physician practice. 2,400 transcripts. The clean zone fits on a single dedicated office machine.
  • 16 Five things to do Monday.
WS·04 · GitHub for CEOs ▶
  • 01 GitHub for CEOs
  • 02 Your best prompt is gone. Or worse — you have nine versions of it.
  • 03 Your prompts and skills become a library that compounds — not a folder that decays.
  • 04 Eight GitHub words in plain English.
  • 05 A repository is your library — files, history, and access boundary in one container.
  • 06 Commits: every saved version, with a note and a who-and-when.
  • 07 Branches and pull requests: experiment safely, publish deliberately.
  • 08 Actions: automation works on prose too — not just code.
  • 09 Your AI agents can read and write to your library too.
  • 10 Governance: encode who can change what, and under what conditions.
  • 11 Five questions to ask your team.
  • 12 Five moves for Monday morning.
WS·05 · The AI Grifter Test ▶
  • 01 The AI Grifter Test
  • 02 The grift works because the failure rate gives it cover.
  • 03 You don't need to evaluate the technology. You need to evaluate the proposal.
  • 04 You're not buying technology. You're buying organizational change that happens to use technology.
  • 05 Red flags 1 and 2: speed and shape of what they're proposing.
  • 06 Red flags 3 and 4: exit and economics.
  • 07 Red flag 5, and the synthesis: any two and you walk.
  • 08 The buyer's scorecard: five questions, one page, go or no-go.
  • 09 Even clean deals oversell. Even careful buyers get burned.
  • 10 Procurement upgrade: build a framework, not a roster.
  • 11 Five questions to ask before your next signature.
  • 12 Three moves for Monday morning.
MODULE M2 OF 7 · BuildClub Academy
4 Playbooks
·
36 Slides
·
~0.6h

First Functions

Where AI deploys first inside a company — and why it follows function, not industry.

P04 · 10 slides
The Sales Growth Playbook
Twenty agents. 1.2 humans. $2.4M closed. Hybrid beats autonomous above $25K ACV.
Open playbook →
P05 · 10 slides
The Procurement Playbook
Eight vendors. One customer. Five clauses.
Open playbook →
P06 · 10 slides
1 2 3 4 5
The Agent Migration Playbook
Onboarding the digital employee. Treat agents like new hires, not features.
Open playbook →
CB · 6 slides
Function Before Industry
Same functions move first. Every time. The CEO industry question — answered in 5 minutes.
Open playbook →

The functions that move first are the same in every company. Stop waiting for your industry. Start with the function.

Work with BuildClub →
The CEO AI Playbook™ by Stephen Forte · Module M2 © 2026 BuildClub LLC · Stephen Forte · stephen@buildclub.com Podcast: Apple · Spotify · YouTube
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