Anthony Franco

Anthony Franco is an entrepreneur, author, and AI systems designer who coordinates the AI First Principles framework. He is the Managing Partner at First Strategy, an AI implementation consultancy, and the creator of the WISER Method, a practical framework for structuring human-AI collaboration in agentic AI systems.

Franco has founded seven companies with six successful exits. The most notable was Effective, a digital agency he led to $50 million in annual revenue before its acquisition by WPP, one of the largest marketing communications holding groups in the world. He has also founded a consumer packaged goods company that achieved 84% gross margins in an industry where 55% is considered strong, and pitched another of his ventures, M.C. Squares, on the television program Shark Tank.

Across his career, Franco has consulted for organizations representing roughly 40 percent of the Fortune 100, working on technology, design, and operational strategy at scale. That practitioner exposure to enterprise complexity informs his current focus: First Strategy provides premium AI implementation consulting grounded in the WISER Method, helping organizations move from AI theory to operational AI rather than from one demo to the next.

The WISER Method itself reflects his operational view. Most failures of AI adoption are not failures of model capability. They are failures of accountability, context engineering, and workflow design. The method gives teams a repeatable structure for treating AI as a collaborator with defined responsibilities rather than a tool that produces outputs.

Franco coordinates the open-source AI First Principles framework as a public project. His position is that durable principles for AI in business should be freely available, because the people most affected by AI deployment will not benefit from a body of insight that lives behind paywalls or proprietary frameworks. Across his work at First Strategy, the WISER Method, and the AI First Principles, he holds the same operational frame: AI is a workforce question first and a technology question second, and the organizations that succeed with it will be the ones that get the design and accountability layers right before they scale.

Anthony Franco's contribution to the AI First Principles is that of an architect who has built the kind of systems the principles govern. Where most frameworks are designed at the level of policy or research, Franco's involvement brings the view from the build side: the specific, concrete failure modes that appear when AI agents are given too much authority, when feedback loops are missing, and when organizational ownership of objectives is unclear.

His WISER Method operationalizes several of the principles in practice, particularly People Own Objectives and AI Fails Silently. His participation in the movement is a signal that the principles are not prescriptions from observers but from practitioners who have encountered these problems in production and built frameworks to address them.