282: Build Your AI Operating System with Andrew Amann

Andrew Amann, CEO and Co-founder of NineTwoThree Studio, is driven by a passion for building great products and embracing the entrepreneurial journey alongside his team and clients.

We learn about Andrew’s journey as a founder and his philosophy of finding joy in the process. He introduces The AI Operating System, a practical framework that helps companies adopt AI with clarity and speed. The system begins by building an internal knowledge base, then moves into deploying simple AI agents to automate repetitive tasks, and culminates in managing these agents through a Super-Agent that orchestrates workflows and interacts with external systems using natural language.

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Build Your AI Operating System with Andrew Amann

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Andrew Amann, the CEO and co-founder of NineTwoThree Studio, an AI consulting agency, building products for funded startups and established brands such as Consumer Reports, NPR, and Experian. Andrew, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Steve. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Great to have you. And I will start with my favorite question as always, what is your personal “Why,” Andrew, and how are you manifesting it in your business?

Sure, so we’ve been at this for 12 years, and I believe that many entrepreneurs would answer that question depending on the year that they’re in. As you grow, my personal”Why” originally was to build the biggest company to be on the tallest building in Boston and to have the logo basically replace Fenway Park. And that dream has has sailed. I don’t think I’m interested in that anymore. It seems aspirational and I think necessary when you’re starting a company to have those levels of aspirations and dreams because you have to run through things that most people wouldn’t and you have to achieve things that most people would give up on.

So the journey of entrepreneurship, I’ve discovered that my “Why” is to be part of the journey. I’ve read a lot of books recently, basically around the philosophy of the process of like Siddhartha is a great example, or The Alchemist, or even Life of Pi. That’s been my last year of inner research about what I want to be when I grow up. And what I discovered in all three of those books is the journey is what matters, the story is what matters, and the process of success, the process part is what matters. And many entrepreneurial friends, they sell their business and they lose that aspect of their lives because they forget that the process was what was fun.

The ability to learn, the ability to grow, and the ability to be part of the team is what I truly admire. So when I was asked this question in a CEO group, they said, Andrew, what do you want to do next? I said, I kind of want to do the same thing I’m doing now. And they said, well, who do you wanna work with? And I said, the teammates that I currently have. And they said, well, what type of clients do you want? And I said, the clients we currently have. And so I think my “Why” is just kind of living in the moment, being part of the process, being successful, but also supporting the teammates that we have so that they can be prosperous, that they can find their purpose. They can be great problem solvers, but they can also be great providers for their family. And so my “Why” is to support that journey and that process that we’re going through right now.

Wow. Okay. Well, you look very young for having such a wise “Why,” but it’s good. You shortcut the process. I do agree that the journey is the destination, perhaps. It definitely is very important. And as an investment banker, I can testify that sometimes you saw businesses for people and then they fall into depression because they lost their identity. They didn’t know how to recreate the success that they were having along the way. And so that’s pretty awesome. So having said that, you are in a very highly evolving area, which is AI. You’ve worked very actively in AI. I mean, you do other stuff as well. But we talked about AI on our pre-call and I was very intrigued by the framework that you’ve developed around what you call the AI Operating System. So what is an AI Operating System and how do you get one in your company?

Sure. So I come from a supply chain background. I built nuclear submarines for the first five years of my life. And when you build for the government, you have to learn processes, but you also have to learn throughput. One of my favorite books of all time is The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. And it’s just a phenomenal book that teaches you about throughout and bottlenecks and relieving those bottlenecks to get to the next step so that you can ultimately achieve the profit. So with AI, we’ve been at this for eight years now. We’ve been developing a process and a strategy of how to implement AI into businesses.

What we’ve discovered is that CEOs are very scared of deploying something new, something that they don’t know and something that their friends or CEO friends are not doing the same way that they are. It was very easy to say, let’s move to the cloud because it had such a promising effect on the company that they could work from anywhere. The cloud would store all the data, they wouldn’t have to worry about servers going down. And all of their friends are moving to the clouds, all the other CEOs are moving to the cloud. So it was a transition that I think a lot of organizations took upon, whether it was Microsoft or Amazon, it didn’t matter. The movement to the cloud mattered. From our standpoint, AI is not so simple. AI becomes a very individualistic goal. It is something that your IP or your company has this fingerprint around, and you’re trying to AI that, which means it’s something different from your friends. It’s different from other companies. It’s a different organization.

And because everybody’s fingerprint is different, everybody’s adoption of AI is going to be different. But we’ve created a process of a workflow that you go through, we call it, you start with exploration, which is free, where you come through us and you try to figure out exactly what you’re trying to solve for. We then go through what we call product strategy and engineering discovery. And what that specifically does is diagnose what the problem is inside of the company and what the return on investment would be if we solve that problem. Now, I’ve been kind of making fun of Deloitte and Accenture for the last year because those two companies have this strategy session as well. It costs a million dollars, and they have great success with it. I’m not touting them for their success because a lot of companies see the value in hiring those types of consultants. What I am kind of knocking on is that to find value with AI should not take more than one or two months. The return on investments that we’re seeing are in the seven figures or even eight figures with a $200,000 investment. And AI changes the game for that initial discovery phase for what I call the strategy sessions. Because within a month, we should not only be able to determine what the ROI is, we should be very accurate with that. Because when AI is deployed properly, it either decreases costs or increased revenues. And we’ve seen that two dozen times in a row at this point. And we have the track record to prove that.

But the process should point out that once you solve for the KPIs, or once you’re trying to determine what the ROI is of this investment, it is now a system that you put in place to develop or implement that solution. It is no longer a what if, let’s test these three avenues. AI allows you to prototype, experiment, and deploy much quicker to get those results. So we like to say that every project we’ve worked on in the last, I would say, six to seven months has been less than four months of effort to get to a production release. We don’t build MVPs anymore, we don’t build prototypes, we build first production releases that get people into the system, working with it, testing it, and most importantly, seeing what the return on investment truly is based on the estimate. And if we achieve that return on investment, well, there’s more money to be had to keep building AI solutions. So everybody wins.

Okay, so let’s unpack this. So what does it mean to find the ROI? Give me an example of a project that you had kind of a hypothesis or an initial idea, and then you tested it and it showed an ROI and then you scaled it up. What does it look like?

Sure. So we had a consulting firm that worked for legal, it was a legal consulting firm. They help lawyers and paralegals determine what documentation and what information went into whether it’s prison reports or people that were sentenced to prison. We were able to double the revenues of that company and reduce the costs by about 90%. Now, when that happens, you’re basically allowing individuals to work the same way they did before. Nobody was fired. Everybody’s still supporting the initial goal, but they’re creating more revenue with the efforts they’re putting in. They’re also doubling down on what they’re good at, and they’re removing their waste. So, when an AI solution comes in, it allows all the consultants on the team, or a lot of the people that are doing the research to start getting this energy around what a new process looks like when built upon AI. And so this specific company, I mean, they have