What does Adam Roozen do?

Adam Roozen builds technology systems and trades his own capital. He is CEO of Isotropic Solutions, which builds governed agent workforces for businesses, enterprises and national institutions. He also runs business automation experiments testing how much can operate without people, and takes a small number of advisory engagements each year.

What is Adam Roozen's background in trading?

Adam has traded his own capital for ten years, and it is his primary income. He started in forex around 2016, added crypto in 2018, and crypto became the main focus from 2021, with equities and index futures alongside it. He trades theses rather than tickers, and has built software around his own research process. He trades only his own capital. He does not manage outside money, is not a financial adviser or fund manager, and publishes no performance figures.

What is Adam Roozen's background in digital technology?

Adam has worked through every consumer technology wave since the mid-nineties. He built transactional websites in high school, before payment processors existed, and had to write his own card encryption. He joined Walmart as a programmer analyst during the early dot-com build-out, ran e-commerce marketing at Sam's Club through the mobile wave, scaled a global commerce agency through the social and cloud waves, worked in tokenized and blockchain systems, and now builds autonomous agent systems.

What is Isotropic Solutions?

Isotropic Solutions was founded by Seran Devaraj, and Adam Roozen joined afterward as CEO. The company builds governed agent workforces: agents do operational work, a person signs off, and every decision keeps its evidence. Autonomy is earned a rung at a time, from drafting, to recommending, to acting under review, to running inside written limits. The second half of the work is preparing businesses to be read and transacted with by other companies' AI systems.

How is Adam different from a traditional technology consultant?

Adam runs the systems he would otherwise be advising about. Two of his companies operate with no employees, his trading runs on software he wrote, and Isotropic Solutions ships agent systems into banks and commodity traders. He has also spent nearly 30 years operating: building early e-commerce at Walmart, running e-commerce marketing for a $700M to $1B channel at Sam's Club, and co-founding a 200-person agency.

What is Adam Roozen's background in e-commerce?

Adam led e-commerce marketing and operations at Sam's Club (Walmart) while the channel grew from $700M to $1B in annual revenue. He then co-founded Echidna and scaled it to more than 200 people, serving blue-chip retailers including Kohl's, Michael Kors, Toys 'r Us, Lowe's, Cracker Barrel, Aveda, Jelly Belly, Wolters Kluwer, Dubai Duty Free, Liverpool in Mexico and Mr. Price in South Africa.

Who does Adam work with?

The work spans four sizes. One person, in the zero-employee companies he runs himself. Owner-operated businesses between $5M and $50M, through W3 Strategic Management Services. Enterprises, such as ETG, a global agricultural commodity trader turning over $8B across 250 business units. And national institutions, including the Central Bank of Oman and Vietnam International Bank.

How do I start working with Adam?

Adam takes a small number of advisory engagements each year, and works directly with whoever is accountable rather than through a team of associates. When an owner-operator needs the cash more than he needs the invoice, he will take revenue share instead of a fee. The best first step is a short note through the contact page describing what you are up against.

Defensive math

60% of companies are getting almost nothing back from AI. The more interesting question is which math they ran.

Here's a strange pair of numbers. BCG found that 60% of companies are seeing little to nothing back from AI, even after significant investment. Fewer than a third say they're seeing significant ROI across the organization. These probably aren't companies that skipped this. It looks like they bought in - tools, contracts, maybe a task force or two. And most of them, by their own reporting, got very little back.

Let's look at how that happens, and then at what it looks like away from budgets.

Two kinds of math

A company can run two kinds of math on AI. Here's the first one, in my own words:

"defensive math" - justifying an investment by what it removes, instead of what it makes possible.

The second kind doesn't have a tidy name, but we could call it something like expansion math - justifying an investment by the capabilities it builds, even when nobody can price them yet. We'll get there.

The customer service line

The cleanest case of defensive math working is high-volume, routine work. Customer service interactions are the standard specimen. Abstractions are hard to walk through, so here's someone doing it.

Dana handles returns at a mid-size retailer. Let's walk one of her contacts:

(a) a customer emails about a return

(b) Dana opens the ticket, checks the order, confirms it's eligible, and issues the refund

Run that contact through Dana and it costs $3 to $6. Run the same contact through an AI agent - it reads the email, checks the order, issues the refund, or something close to it for routine cases - and it costs $0.25 to $0.50 per contact. In those specific workflows, the reported result is an 85 to 92% cost reduction. Honestly, that math is real. I'm not disputing it.

But notice what had to be true before any of that math could run. What makes a cost removable? It was counted first. Dana's contact shows up as a $3 to $6 expense because somebody, at some point, decided to track what a contact costs. Defensive math can only run on numbers a company is already keeping. A capability that doesn't exist yet has no line item, so it never enters the comparison - not because it failed the math, but because the math never saw it.

A floor under subtraction

Here's where I think the 60% comes from. Maybe subtraction has a floor. You can cut a cost once, optimize it twice, and then the line item is gone - and so is the gain. The other kind of math asks different questions: what could this team do that it couldn't do before? What could the company ask that it could never afford to ask? The trouble is those answers don't exist yet as numbers anyone is counting, which makes them hard to defend in a budget meeting. $0.25 to $0.50 per contact walks into that meeting with receipts. That asymmetry probably explains most of the gap between specific workflows posting an 85 to 92% cost reduction and fewer than a third of companies saying the investment paid off across the organization. The first kind has a number to put in the cell; the second doesn't, so it keeps getting deferred.

Where else it shows up

Alright. Let's climb out of it. This isn't really a corporate pattern. It looks like a human pattern wearing a corporate costume. Take personal health. Cutting calories is defensive math - countable, immediate, a number that moves every morning. Building a capacity you didn't have - strength, endurance, being able to say yes to the hike you would've dreaded - is the other kind. Most of us run the first kind and underinvest in the second, because the first kind reports back. (Though I don't always do it right.)

A household budget works the same way. Canceling subscriptions is defensive math. Learning to cook - so that restaurants shift from necessity to choice - is expansion. The first shows up on this month's statement. tbh, the second is harder to stick with because no statement ever confirms it.

It turns out the more you look for something, the more you find it. This shows up in careers - taking the raise versus learning the unpriced skill - and maybe in city budgets, in friendships, in how a person spends a Saturday. The cut has a number and the build doesn't, so the comparison isn't even happening on the same terms.

The part I haven't resolved

The part I have no answer for is how you budget for something whose value can't be counted until after it exists. I don't have a clean answer. The question I keep circling, in budgets and elsewhere, is whether the math I'm running asks what something removes or what it makes possible. I catch myself running defensive math in places that probably deserve the other kind. I don't always get that one right either.