The Operating Week: One Read. One Book. One Pod. One Follow.
The one article, one book, one podcast, and one person you need this week to build better.
84% of people have never used AI. 0.3% pay for it.
The gap between what the technology can do and what people actually do with it is the biggest business opportunity of our professional lives.
That is what we work on inside Operating.
Paid subscribers ($7.99/month) get the full resource library, every framework, and the complete archive of essays, case studies, and toolkits.
Founders ($500/year) get everything above plus two 1:1 strategic sessions with me. Your business. Your growth problem. We work and solve together.
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The Fed meets this week. Rates stay at 3.5% to 3.75%. Inflation above target. Unemployment at 4.3%. Oil spiking. The honest summary for operators: plan for ambiguity, because that is the weather forecast not matter which way you look.
Cool. Here’s the useful part.
In a foggy economy, the operators who pull ahead are not those with better predictions, they’re the individuals who get more done per person, per hour, per dollar.
Fewer handoffs.
Fewer meetings where nothing happens.
Fewer people waiting on other people.
That is the leverage question.
It is the only strategic question that matters right now.
Not “should we use AI?”
How do we redesign our work so every hour produces 10X more than it did six months ago, and produce 100X more one year from now.
The Timing: 5% of enterprise apps had AI agents in 2025. Gartner expects 40% by year-end. That’s an eightfold jump in 12 months. The bottleneck is not technology. The bottleneck is human capacity for change. The bottleneck is our own competitiveness and design to win. It is workflow design. The “boring stuff” ia how you win in today’s markets. I’d argue that’s always been true, but now it looks a little sexier to say.
If you run a small team, you can rewrite how work gets done without a task force. Your lack of organizational hierarchy is your moat.
A distinction of this particular economic revolution is that the competitive opportunities a biasing to small orgs, not large. Big ships moves slowly.
Take your shot, Operators.
- j -
Note: Be sure to check out the research appendix at the end of the article for more depth and perspective.
One Article to Read
“OpenAI Launches Frontier, a Platform to Build and Manage AI Agents” — TechCrunch
This readse like an IT memo.
It is not.
OpenAI built a platform to deploy and manage fleets of AI agents across business systems. They are calling them “AI coworkers.”
Onboarding. Permissions. Performance reviews.
Not a chatbot. An entire operating department (not just a layer)
Their CRO said it plainly: “What is missing is a way to deploy agents inside the business without rebuilding everything underneath. The technology works. The plumbing does not.”
For Operators: The moat is about process design. Frontier exists because enterprises cannot get agents past the pilot stage. The demo works. Then it breaks the moment it touches a real workflow because nobody redesigned the workflow. Model intelligence is not the constraint. Human, organizational intelligence the limiting variable. Uber and State Farm need six months and a compliance review to change anything. You need a laptop and forty-five minutes. Competitive advantage is going to accrue to smaller firms for the time being. You need to be ready to grab it.
Do this now. Pick one recurring workflow. Three columns: human judgment, repeatable manual steps, automatable steps. Hand one item from column three to an AI tool this week. The point is not to save twenty minutes. It is to prove the workflow can be rewritten.
One Book to Listen To
“High Output Management” by Andy Grove
Thirty years old.
More useful than anything published this quarter about AI and productivity.
Grove ran Intel. Engineer who thought like an economist. One question drives the whole book: What is the output of a manager? Not effort. Not hours. Output. Then he redesigns meetings, decision rights, and information flow around that answer.
Software changes every eighteen months. How you design handoffs, allocate attention, and structure decisions so the right person makes them at the right time, will compound over decades, across infinite software updates.
Grove figured it out in the 1980s. The vocabulary changed somewhat.
The value only grew. You need to know this book backwards and forward.
(If you’re interested, here’s a full playbook I wrote months ago)
One Podcast to Watch
“Bill Gurley: 6 Out of 10 People Are Making This Mistake” —
My First Million, Ep. 803
Sam Parr and Bill Gurley (Uber, Zillow, GrubHub). The whole conversation circles one idea: most people are working extremely hard on the wrong thing.
Catch the moment early. Six out of ten people dislike their work, and Gurley reframes it as an allocation issue, not a motivational conundrum. People optimize for intensity when they should optimize for fit. They confuse effort with leverage.
When was the last time you audited how your time, resources and activity were being allocated?
Not how fast you are moving, but whether the direction makes sense.
Try it today!
One New Person to Follow
Pieter Levels (@levelsio) — Follow on X
Runs Nomad List, Remote OK, and Photo AI. Revenue: $3M+/year. Employees: zero. Tech stack: PHP, jQuery, SQLite. Funding: zero. Infrastructure: under $200/month. That last number is probably less than your Slack bill.
He does not talk about leverage.
He just operates with it.
Ships fast, automates what works, kills what does not, posts his numbers publicly.
Follow the operators. Not the commentator.
The Through-Line
The article shows agent infrastructure arriving now, bottlenecked by human limits, not the technological (it also makes the clear supposition that you shouldn’t sleep on what OpenAI is continuing to produce, even as Claude outperforms for the moment).
The book gives you the framework for redesigning work around output.
The podcast asks whether you are optimizing effort when you should be optimizing your various resource allocations.
The person is doing all of it, solo, profitably, in public.
Leverage > Systems > Proof > Signal.
See you next Monday. Hope this helped.
— John
Forward this to one person building something on their own.
That is how Operating grows.
Most people are cosplaying with technology they have opened twice.
84% of humans have never used AI. 0.3% pay for it. Actual adoption is a fraction of what the tools can do. And yet the feed is full of “AI-native founders” who could not build an automated workflow if their revenue depended on it.
The gap between what the technology can do and what people actually do with it is the biggest business opportunity of the next decade.
That is exactly what we work on inside Operating.
Paid subscribers ($7.99/month) get the full resource library, the Operating Working Group, every framework I build, and the complete archive of essays, case studies, and operating toolkits. That is less than two dollars a week to have an economist who actually ran a company decoding the economics of what is happening and translating it into tools you can build with.
Founders ($500/year) get everything above plus two 1:1 (60-minute) strategic sessions with me. Your business model. Your positioning. Your growth problem. We work on it together. This is a second set of eyes from someone who has scaled a company, exited it, and now advises founders building in this economy every day.
At Operating, we’re not posting about AI. We’re building our futures with it. Join us!
John Brewton documents the history and future of operating companies at Operating by John Brewton. He is a graduate of Harvard University and began his career as a Phd. student in economics at the University of Chicago. After selling his family’s B2B industrial distribution company in 2021, he has been helping business owners, founders and investors optimize their operations ever since. He is the founder of 6A East Partners, a research and advisory firm asking the question: What is the future of companies? He still cringes at his early LinkedIn posts and loves making content each and everyday, despite the protestations of his beloved wife, Fabiola, at times.
Appendix: Research, Sources, and Links
Macro and Fed
The Dual Mandate in Conflict: Balancing Current Tensions between Inflation and Employment — St. Louis Fed, March 2026. Unemployment at 4.3%, PCE inflation at 2.9% in 2025, Fed holding at 3.5%-3.75%.
FOMC Statement, January 28, 2026 — Federal Reserve. 10-2 vote to hold rates.
FOMC Minutes, January 27-28, 2026 — Federal Reserve. Market expectations of one to two cuts in 2026.
Fed Leaves Rates Unchanged to Start 2026 — J.P. Morgan Wealth Management.
Fed Rate Cut Bets Rise After Weak Jobs Data — Reuters, March 6, 2026.
Markets’ Hopes for Fed Interest Rate Cuts Are Rapidly Fading Away — CNBC, March 12, 2026. Iran conflict, oil prices, and shifting expectations.
Looming Fed Meeting Shifts Bets for 2026 Interest-Rate Cuts — TheStreet, March 15, 2026.
AI Agents and Enterprise Adoption
OpenAI Launches a Way for Enterprises to Build and Manage AI Agents — TechCrunch, February 5, 2026. Primary article recommendation.
Introducing OpenAI Frontier — OpenAI blog. Full product announcement.
OpenAI Frontier: Enterprise Platform — OpenAI. Product page with technical details.
OpenAI Launches Platform to Manage AI Agents — Axios, February 5, 2026. Includes early customer data (90% more time back for client-facing teams, 1,500 hours/month saved in product development).
OpenAI Launches New Enterprise Platform — CNBC, February 5, 2026. Enterprise customers account for ~40% of OpenAI’s business.
OpenAI Expands Enterprise Push With Frontier — Reworked, February 2026.
OpenAI Launches Frontier: Platform to Build, Deploy, and Manage AI Agents — InfoQ, February 20, 2026.
OpenAI Frontier: Close the Enterprise AI Opportunity Gap, or Widen It? — Futurum Research, February 9, 2026.
Gartner Forecasts
Gartner Predicts 40% of Enterprise Apps Will Feature Task-Specific AI Agents by 2026 — Gartner, August 2025. 5% to 40% adoption, $450B+ in enterprise AI revenue by 2035.
Gartner Predicts Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Canceled by End of 2027 — Gartner, June 2025. Counterpoint: escalating costs and unclear ROI remain risks.
40% of Enterprise Apps Will Embed AI Agents by End of 2026 — Yahoo Finance / Motley Fool.
Featured Media
My First Million, Episode 803: Bill Gurley — Apple Podcasts. Also on Spotify.
High Output Management by Andy Grove — Audible. Also on Amazon.
Pieter Levels (@levelsio) — X/Twitter. Products: Nomad List, Remote OK, Photo AI.
Solo Operator and Leverage Context
The One-Person Unicorn: How Solo Founders Use AI to Build Billion-Dollar Companies in 2026 — NxCode, February 2026. Solo-founded startups now 36.3% of all new ventures.
The Rise of the Solopreneur Tech Stack in 2026 — PrometAI, January 2026.
The 30 Highest-Valued Solo Startups of 2026 — WeAreFounders, January 2026.
How Pieter Levels Built a $3M/Year Business with Zero Employees — FastSaaS.