Making AI a Goal, Not an Option: How One Leader Drives Adoption

One operator is driving AI adoption by making it a named individual goal and warning that treating it as optional leaves people behind.

This brief draws on a single advisor's account and should be read as one operator's practice, not a broad pattern. A pharmaceutical executive described a deliberate approach to AI adoption on her team. Rather than encouraging use, she wrote AI into each person's individual goals and set up recurring meetings focused only on how team members were applying it. The intent is to make adoption measurable and visible instead of assumed. She also voiced a concern about uneven uptake. In her view, some people, and women in particular, cannot treat AI as an extra task layered on top of an already full workload. They must prioritize it or risk falling behind as the technology becomes a differentiator. Finally, she framed her own role as leading by example, using AI early herself rather than waiting for it to settle. The signal for executives is simple. Adoption tends to happen where leaders make it a named expectation, protect time for it, and model it personally. Where it is left optional, it competes with existing work and loses. These are one person's observations, so confidence is modest. But the practices are concrete and cheap to test: put AI in individual goals, review usage in dedicated meetings, and give people time rather than more work.