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Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
Hereâs what nobody tells you about being CEO:
The job isnât hard because you donât know what to do. Itâs hard because you canât be everywhere at once. Your strategy is clear. Your priorities are obvious. But the business moves faster than you can clarify, and by the time youâve explained the âwhyâ to one team, three others have already drifted.
Legacy CEOs manage through hope.
Agentic CEOs manage through architecture.
We wrote The Agentic CEO to show you exactly how Category Designers are using AI to multiply the three areas that create the most leverage: Strategy, People, and Numbers. Not as a âproductivity hack.â As a fundamental redesign of what the CEO role actually does.
If you havenât read it, stop here. Read it first:
If you have read it, this post is your tactical guide.
Weâre breaking down the five steps to turn your one-sentence strategy into executable logic that runs without you, and how to create your own User Manual. With the exact prompts. With real examples from CEOs whoâve done it. With the tactical moves that turn âI wish my team would get thisâ into âmy agents enforce this automatically.â
Hereâs whatâs wild: The CEOs making this shift arenât just moving faster.
Theyâre stepping back while the business accelerates.
Letâs show you how.
An AI agent is not a chatbot.
Or a fancy dashboard. Or a productivity tool bolted onto old workflows.
An AI agent is a persistent, goal-oriented, outcome-driven digital worker that can monitor signals continuously. Reason over context and constraints. Take or recommend action. Learn from feedback. Coordinate with other agents.
Think less of an assistant.
Think more about a co-founder executive who never sleeps, never forgets, and never gets political.
Agents donât just answer questions. They do stuff. Produce actions and outcomes by themselves. They run loops. And CEOs who understand loops beat CEOs who stare at reports.
Agentic CEOs use AI to multiply the parts of the job that create the most leverage:
Strategy
People
Numbers
This isnât about automating tasks. Itâs about amplifying judgment, insight, clarity, and alignment at a scale that was nearly impossible before.
Letâs break down each role and how AI becomes your multiplier.
Role 1: The Strategy Simplifier
Remember: Strategy is what you remove.
The fastest way to accelerate execution is to eliminate the decisions, projects, and conversations that slow everything down. Simplify until only the essential path remains. When strategy becomes obvious, motion becomes easy.
AI helps you simplify faster. Here are a few ways to start:
Use AI to distill competing Languaging and POV into a one-sentence strategy.
Run transcripts of leadership meetings through AI to spot themes, risks, and decisions.
Offload repetitive explanations into an AI agent (like Delphi) that reinforces priorities across the company.
Use AI tools to identify patterns and places where the strategy is drifting or where teams are working on things that donât matter.
This is how strategy becomes a system. AI helps you clarify it, compress it, and repeat it until the organization runs on it.
It forces prioritizationâyou piss off 9 to serve 1 Superconsumer.
It creates autonomyâdecisions happen without permission because the logic is encoded.
It collapses ambiguityâwhat you do and donât do becomes binary.
It lets you move at speed under uncertainty because the strategy doesnât require a meeting to execute.
It aligns humans instantly because theyâre not guessing what mattersâthe system already told them.
Pre-AI, this was already a superpower.
Post-AI?
It becomes executable logic. AI agents donât need motivation. They need clarity.
The One-Sentence Strategy was never about memory. It was about autonomy.
And clarity is exactly what a One-Sentence Strategy provides.
Hereâs an example Nike should have followed.
Nikeâs one-sentence strategy: âWe serve athletes.â
Product Agent: Does this make an athlete measurably better?
Pricing Agent: Does this price exclude serious athletes for casual hype?
Marketing Agent: Does this storytelling prioritize lifestyle over performance?
Partnership Agent: Does this partner increase athlete credibilityâor dilute it?
This is why Nike lost runners to Hoka.
They didnât lose talent. They violated the sentence. Agents would have flagged it instantly.
Role 2: The People Multiplier
If people get wealthy with you, theyâll follow you anywhere.
Clint leads with clarity, not charisma. His User Manual removes interpersonal friction. His incentives reward outcomes. His standards create missionaries instead of employees.
Missionaries protect momentum because theyâre committed to the mission.
AI builds alignment without micromanagement by helping you:
Use leadership-mirror tools to spot blind spots you may not see in yourself.
Use sentiment tracking to catch cultural drift before it becomes dysfunctional.
Analyze communication patterns to see where trust is slipping or where tension is forming.
Generate the first version of your User Manual by feeding AI your decisions, messages, pet peeves, expectations, and leadership patterns.
Owning the people becomes an engineering problem instead of an emotional guessing game.
You can use the AI prompt guide below to create your own User Manual.
Role 3: The Value Creator
CEOs who canât explain the business canât scale it.
A companyâs market value grows when you understand what creates value, what destroys it, and what must be true for momentum to continue. Cash flow, unit economics, margin, and demand signals are navigation tools. You have to treat numbers as the businessâs language.
When the math is simple and visible, decisions become obvious.
AI turns the numbers into a real-time guidance system.
Create scenario models to see how pricing, hiring, or demand changes will impact cash flow
Build cash flow agents that warn you when margins tighten or when customer behavior shifts
Model financial futures using Monte Carlo simulations and understand your best-case, worst-case, and most-likely outcomes long before they materialize
Owning the numbers gives you confidence, and AI gives you confidence with far more precision.
The question is: how do you actually build this?
How do you turn your strategy into a system that runs without you?
How do you encode your judgment so agents can enforce tradeoffs in real-time?
How do you collapse months of alignment work into automated intelligence?
Below, weâre breaking down the exact five steps to build your Strategy Simplifier Agentâwith the prompts, the logic, and the tactics that turn âI wish my team would get thisâ into âmy agents enforce this automatically.â
Weâll give you the framework to build your Strategy Simplifer Agent and People Multiplier User Manual system.
If youâre a Founding Member, keep reading.
If youâre not, upgrade here to get access to the full tactical breakdown, the Pirate Eddie Bot to pressure-test your strategy and ask your category design questions, access to all 6 of our big books, and the weekly insights that help you build a legendary category.
How To Build Your Strategy Simplifier Agent: The 5-Step System
Here are five steps get started and build your Strategy Simplifier Agent: