Campbell Brown says the days of AI for AI’s sake are over. Here’s how CEOs should be thinking about deploying the technology.
Campbell Brown, co-founder and chief executive officer of Forum AI. Photo: Getty Images
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Business leaders across industries are all making the same big mistake when it comes to deploying AI.
That’s according to Campbell Brown, co-founder and CEO of the AI evaluation company Forum AI. Falling prey to the siren song of AI, business leaders are adopting a hot new tool or the latest AI model, but Brown says that’s the exact wrong way to approach AI.
“I keep seeing a lot of companies that think they need a big AI strategy,” Brown told attendees at the 2026 Inc. 5000 Conference in Dallas, Texas last week. “Stop and figure out one use case.”
Brown left a career as an Emmy award-winning journalist at outlets including NBC and CNN to oversee global news and media partnerships at Meta. She spent more than seven years there before departing to launch Forum AI together with Robbie Goldfarb, another Meta veteran and former product leader of AI Trust & Safety.
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“When ChatGPT was released publicly for the first time,” she said, “my first thought was, ‘Oh my God, this is where my kids are going to get all their information. We have to quit our jobs and start a company focused on AI and misinformation. Social media is over.’”
That’s exactly what she did. Forum AI evaluates AI models, agents, tools, using what the company calls “judges” that it trains on the expertise of a few, rather than the consensus of many. It’s a distinction that Brown says differentiates the startup from competitors with overlapping offerings, like Mercor, Scale AI, or Surge AI. It also gives her unique insight on what is or is not working for enterprises. Brown says she’s noticed a broader shift in the past six months from, “oh my God we’ve got to deploy AI” to, “wait a minute, we’ve got to make sure the AI actually works,” she said.
Here are her three best tips for entrepreneurs hoping to make the most of AI tools: