Hands-on coaching for the people making the decisions, run personally by Philippe Marcotte. In person, at your workstation, working on the things actually on your desk this week.
Four to six weeks. Roughly four hours of contact time per executive. You leave with a personal playbook, real deliverables, and the judgment to lead what comes next.
Some buyers want to hear the founder before they read the case. The video makes the argument in voice. The page below makes it in detail.
30 minutes · No commitment · Run by Philippe.
Most AI initiatives are run by leaders who have read about the tools, watched a demo, maybe tested them for an afternoon. That is not the same as having used them to do real work — and the gap shows up everywhere downstream. In the vendor selection. In the policy debates. In the conversations with the board. In the rollout that doesn't land.
AI Fluency closes that gap first. Before the rollout, before the strategy, before any of the bigger pieces — the people leading the change become fluent themselves. Everything else gets easier from there.
This isn't a coding course. We're not turning non-technical executives into engineers, and we're not asking you to become one.
The cleanest analogy is the most familiar one. Most executives don't know how a computer is built — chip architecture, kernel design, network protocols. They use computers fluently anyway. Email. Calendar. Spreadsheets. Slide decks. They make smart decisions about IT investment, security policy, and software vendors. None of that requires building the machine.
AI is the same kind of shift. You don't need to understand how a model works to draft a board memo with one — or to know when not to. You don't need to be able to fine-tune anything to govern its use in your company.
What we develop is fluency as a user — the firsthand calibration that lets you make smart decisions about deployment, governance, investment, and rollout. The mechanics under the hood are for your engineering team. The judgment is for you.
There are good arguments for starting AI adoption at any level of the organization. Each has trade-offs. None of them avoid this constraint: the decisions that govern the entire program are made by executives, and those decisions are only as good as the firsthand judgment underneath them.
Executive time is the scarcest resource in any organization, and any engagement that ignores that fact is dead on arrival. The format is built around the constraint: surgical, one-on-one, in your environment, on the work that's already on your calendar this week. No webinar series. No e-learning portal. No "AI 101" deck. The first session produces a real deliverable, not a slide on what's possible — maximum impact, minimum drag on the calendar.
Run personally by Philippe Marcotte, Sterling North's Managing Director. No junior coaches, no rotating staff, no co-pilot in the corner. Same person, every session, start to finish — and reachable directly between them.
Most executive AI training programs produce a feeling of having attended something. AI Fluency produces actual artifacts you can point to and use. There is no completion email. There is the work itself.
AI Fluency stands on its own — a leadership team can do it, take what they need, and stop there. Most don't. The conversations that follow it tend to be more grounded, more specific, and faster, which is why most clients use this as the doorway into the rest of the work. Below is how it sits next to the other three offerings.
Fluency does not have to come first. There are situations — a clear, urgent Solver mandate; a transformation already underway with a strong internal lead — where it doesn't make sense to slow down. We'll tell you that on the strategy call. But for most organizations approaching this for the first time, the four-to-six weeks invested at the top pay back across every subsequent engagement.
AI Fluency is a particular shape of engagement, and that shape doesn't fit every situation. Better to be honest about that up front than to disappoint either party halfway through.
I led AI and analytics transformation engagements at McKinsey as an Engagement Manager a decade ago, then built and operated a venture-backed network of tech-enabled medical clinics where I had to implement it myself rather than recommend it. Since late 2022, I've been using AI tools in my own day-to-day work — writing the prompts, breaking the agents, fixing the deployments, and seeing what executive fluency does — and what its absence does — across more than a dozen organizations. I run these sessions personally. They're not delegated to a coach who learned this last quarter.
A 30-minute conversation, no obligation, where we figure out whether AI Fluency is actually the right starting point for your team — or whether something else (a Solver, a strategy mandate, a transformation diagnostic) makes more sense given where you are.
If Fluency is the fit, we'll walk through how the engagement would work for your specific leadership team — who, in what order, on what timeline, and at what investment.
The call is still the right starting point — we use it to confirm scope, identify the right participants, and align on timing before producing a Statement of Work.
Book a Strategy Call →Philippe runs every engagement personally, so capacity is the real constraint — typically a handful of Fluency engagements running in parallel at any time. If your window matters — a board meeting, a fundraise, a leadership offsite — flag it on the strategy call. We'll find the way in if we can, and we'll be honest if we can't.
Free · No commitment · 30 minutes
No noise. No product updates. Just Philippe's read on where work is heading and what it means for how organizations need to operate.
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