Anthony Franco

Who should own AI in your company

AI usually lands with IT because it looks like technology, but the questions that decide whether it pays off are about operations: where the friction sits, how much it costs, and who answers when a machine gets something wrong. In one field-services company we worked with, every vendor pitched an AI scheduler, and the friction that mattered was billing clerks re-keying handwritten job tickets. So I'd put AI in the hands of the executive who answers for that number, often the COO, with the CTO advising on data, security, and architecture.

Bio

Short

Anthony Franco is Chief AI Officer at First Strategy, an AI strategy, training, and implementation practice for operating companies of 50 to 500 people. In 2005 he co-founded Effective Inc, a user-experience firm that WPP later acquired, and he brings the habit he built there to AI: start with how people actually do the work, then decide what the technology should do. He co-authored the WISER Method Master Playbook with Robb Wilson, whose work the method is built on, and is a contributor to AI First Principles, an open framework.

Longer

Anthony Franco is Chief AI Officer at First Strategy, an AI strategy, training, and implementation practice for operating companies of 50 to 500 people. He has co-founded eight companies and had six exits. Effective Inc, the user-experience firm he co-founded in Denver in 2005, served 40 percent of the Fortune 100 and earned $50 million in cumulative revenue across its first six years. WPP acquired it, and he stayed on as President through the integration. At Effective, his teams worked for Boeing, FedEx, American Express, Microsoft, Pepsi, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and that work taught him to start with how people actually do their jobs before deciding what the technology should do. He works the same way on AI: at one field-services company, First Strategy found the costly friction where technicians' paper tickets reached billing, not in the scheduling software vendors were selling, and fixing it recovered close to $3 million a year. He co-authored the WISER Method Master Playbook with Robb Wilson, co-founder and CEO of OneReach.ai, and the method is built on Wilson's work on organizational AGI: a system that understands what's happening across a whole organization at any moment. He is also a contributor to AI First Principles, an open framework.