Welcome to the world of possibility.
I'm Adam Hofmann, and I'm glad you're here.
The future has always pulled at me, and I've spent my life going out to explore it. Right now it's happening with AI, so that's where I spend my time: trying things before they're obvious, making sense of them, and helping people and organizations decide what's worth doing with all this new possibility.
I got into AI by accident.
In 2014 I was working on a new mobile startup connecting travelers with locals for advice. And we couldn't always get a local in real-time. I kept asking myself the same question: what if the app could respond like one?
Almost nobody was asking that yet, so I went looking. We ran an early experiment using Slack and the Domino's API to order a pizza from a chat message. (Zero AI in it. Don't tell anyone.) It still showed me something I couldn't unsee: one day we'd talk to machines the way we talk to coworkers.
That's been the pattern my whole life. I notice something interesting, I follow it further than is reasonable, and serendipity and a fair bit of luck do the rest. It's taken me into digital health before electronic records existed, into the mobile wave next to Uber and Airbnb, into deep tech at Singularity University, and into building AI with my co-founder Steve Steinberg that could reach everything a company knew and then act on it, years before anyone called it agentic. Elixirr bought that company in 2023.
I'm not the researcher inventing the models. I'm the one who keeps showing up early, rooting around, and coming back to tell people what it means for them. Today I do that as a Partner at Elixirr leading AI transformation, and in public through PSBL.
Everyone just got the same new superpowers. Few know what to do with them.
The leader: An AI budget and limited ROI.
You've got pilots everywhere and nothing that changes the shape of the business. You don't need another tool. You need to know what's worth betting the organization on.
The founder: You can build almost anything.
Which means the hard part is choosing what's worth building, and having the nerve to build it differently when everyone's product is starting to look the same.
Everyone else: What does this mean for me?
The kid wondering what school is for. The person laid off a few years from retirement. The manager whose work is changing under them. You have the least margin for getting this wrong, and you're who I most want to reach.
Two ways to follow my thinking.
PSBL · My personal newsletter
What I'm testing at the edge of AI, and what it means for the rest of us. Essays on what I'm researching and trying, written while it's still early, wrong calls included.
The monthly executive briefing · Elixirr
What leaders need to know about AI this month. One briefing a month on what's shifting inside organizations, and what I'd do about it in your seat.
See it. Bet on it. Make the shift.
I love to explore and try things, then use what I find to see patterns, place bets and get people fired up to go after them. It took me a long time to realize that's the work.
- See · Keynotes: A room that leaves seeing what's happening, where it's going, and what to do about it on Monday.
- Bet · Leadership sessions: Finding the big bets with a leadership team, and prototyping the future so people can see it instead of imagining it.
- Shift · Transformation: Making the reinvention happen faster, with large organizations through Elixirr.
- Founders: Advising founders building what's next, from someone who's built and sold one.
What I'm working on.
- PSBL: My newsletter on what I'm seeing at the frontier, what I'm experimenting with, and where I think we're heading.
- AI Transformation at Elixirr: Helping large organizations stop doing the old thing faster and start reorganizing around what's now possible.
You made it all the way down here.
Which probably means this is your kind of conversation. Here's where to go next.