Hello Reader !

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I wish you all an amazing year 2026! Today I want to talk about something I see constantly in the teams I coach. Leaders create AI goals that sound impressive but go nowhere. Why? They focus on training sessions while ignoring the bigger picture.

You’ve heard that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Well, AI eats culture for breakfast 😅 faster.

So what will you learn today?

• Why most AI goals fail.
• The framework I created (House of Goals) for holistic GenAI planning.
• Six practical steps to design GenAI goals using AI itself.

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Get comfortable for your 5 minutes of sparks to hack.

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Before we begin, how can I help you?

• Before we begin, how can I assist you?
  • Coach you to build your team GenAI system: skills, mindset and AI/human organization here​​
  • Coach you and your team to design and pressure test your new strategy or product here​
  • Audit and improve your innovation, customer centricity, and ability to adapt to a complex and ever-evolving environment here​

Get comfortable for your 5 minutes of sparks to hack.

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✨ Spark

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✏ What gets most people wrong about it

At the end of last year, I had many chats with the leaders I coached in pharma, sharing the same frustration:

They run sporadic AI training sessions. No follow-up rituals. No clear metrics. No infrastructure support. Leaders don’t model the behavior they want to see; they delegate more to tech team members or to IT/digital.

Six months later, they’re confused about why nothing has changed or are waiting for the IT pilots to deliver value. The training materials sit in a shared drive gathering digital dust. A few enthusiasts keep using AI. Everyone else went back to their old habits. There is no sharing.

The problem isn’t the training. The problem is treating AI adoption as a one-time event rather than a system that requires change.

Because AI not only needs your system to adapt, but if you do nothing, it will break it. AI acts as a "serum of truth", an amplifier of your current team and organization structure and culture (not only tech!!). AI is making the bottom of the iceberg not only visible but also more fragile.

• Today, limited trust and sharing: AI amplifies these behaviors
• Today, no clear data storage or information flow: AI will create more data, amplifying the mess
• Today archaique ways of working on paper and emails: AI will not be able to help

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✏ The right mindset: improve your system - a holistic approach

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SO, your goal is not to train your team but to improve your system so that you can use and benefit from GenAI easily.

You need to adapt the system where the technology will land. You need to work on 3 pillars:

• Capabilities. This is how people actually use AI. Their skills, their confidence, and their daily habits with the tools. Here, you will build a new common language around AI
• Change & Culture. Leadership commitment matters here. So do team rituals, psychological safety to experiment, and make mistakes. This is where role redesign will happen, like your AI champion to start with.
• Process & Structure. You need data infrastructure. You need workflows that make sense. You need digital spaces where AI actually lives and works. If your team in 100% paper or 100% on emails for communication, you have a problem.

This is how you can change your system, and our focus in our coaching and training program (if you're curious here.)

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You need measurable objectives for all three pillars. Not just capabilities. All three.

Here is how to draft it.

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✏ The framework: House of goals

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I already shared this framework here; this is my version of the OKR aligned with the mid and long-term strategy. With my clients, we design an objective for each pillar mentioned above (capabilities, change and culture, structure), craft key results not too many, and measure them quarterly.

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Transparency and measurable goals align your team. Holistic goals get everyone moving in the same direction.

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✨ Hack

So how do you actually design these holistic AI goals? Here’s the twist: use AI itself. I’m going to walk you through six steps, in chronological order.

✏ Step 1: Dictate

Don’t type your initial goals. Speak them.

Use voice-to-text in your AI tool. You’ll be more creative when you speak instead of write. Talk like you’re explaining to a colleague: “We need people to feel confident trying AI without fear of making mistakes…”

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✏ Step 2: Brainstorming

Ask AI to expand your ideas. Think of it as your sparring partner.

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✏ Step 3: Alignment

Leverage from your company goals and cascade down. This prevents you from building AI goals in a vacuum.

Feed your company’s strategic objectives into AI. Then ask: “How do my draft AI goals support our company strategy?”

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✏ Step 4: Strategic Intent

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Ask AI: “Do these goals reflect our higher-level intent, or are they too short-term?” Are we measuring activity or outcomes?

The trap is measuring “number of training sessions completed” or “percentage of team with ChatGPT accounts.” Those are activities. Measure outcomes instead.

✏ Step 5: Measures and Metrics

It is not always easy to find what to measure, but they must be something you feel aligned with.

Here’s your prompt: “For each goal, suggest 2-3 measurable key results using the OKR framework.”

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✏ Step 6: Roast Your Plan

This is my favorite step. It’s uncomfortable. Do it anyway.

The prompt is simple: “Roast my AI plan. Why will it fail? What’s missing?”

AI becomes your toughest critic. The more it knows your organisation, your projects, the better will be the outcomes

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That’s it for today.

See you in two weeks (will try to be more consistent 😅). Keep the spark alive, and be intentional :)

What's up with me?

I was in Marseille, France, at a beautiful hotel by the sea, with a leadership team from a top-5 pharma company. As you can see from my face, we had a great time: meaningful and honest conversations about what AI and what Artificial General Intelligence AGI means, the role of a leader in the era of GenAI, and defined their plan for 2026. Now they name themselves the AI queens. Love it!

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Reader, hit reply to let me know if you liked this edition or if you tried these tips. I respond to every person who writes to me!