Goal Assistant: AI-Powered Goal Creation and Management

Description

Goal Assistant is an embedded, AI-powered tool within the Goals module that enables employees and managers to create, manage, and update goals through conversational prompts and interactive assistance. Available on the My Goals page, it converts a user's stated intent into clear, measurable SMART goals — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound — and supports day-to-day goal management beyond initial creation.

The assistant draws on contextual data such as the user's designation, skills, and last performance review feedback to generate and suggest relevant goals. It offers guided introductory messaging and predefined prompts for common themes like creating goals based on a role, modifying an existing goal, or rewriting a generated goal, while also supporting free-text questions. Generation is iterative: users can save goals as drafts, regenerate them, or refine specific parts such as the title, description, task, or targets.

Business Need

Employees often struggle to know where to begin when drafting goals or how to make them measurable. A SaaS engineer drafting quarterly goals, for example, may be unsure how to align with company and manager objectives or translate intent into concrete, trackable targets. This friction leads to vague, low-quality goals and inconsistent goal management across teams.

Goal Assistant addresses this by turning intent into structured SMART goals quickly and guiding quality progress updates. It helps employees create meaningful, aligned goals while leveraging Gen-AI, and it gives managers a faster way to define clear goals for their teams and keep them aligned with shared business objectives.

Key Features

• Create and refine measurable SMART goals using conversational prompts and interactive AI-powered assistance.
• Generate goals from natural-language intent, with the option to align them to company and manager goals.
• Choose from predefined prompts for common themes or ask free-text questions for more flexible exploration.
• Perform bulk updates to goal progress and view overall status at a glance.
• Save generated goals as drafts and regenerate or refine titles, descriptions, tasks, or targets until they are right.
• Enable managers to create and assign team goals that stay aligned with shared business objectives and take action on team goals in one place.
• Ensure all actions performed through the assistant adhere to the user's configured permissions and goal preferences.

Deployment & Considerations

Goal Assistant is an upcoming feature in the July 26th release, available to single architecture customers using Cornerstone Performance. All enhancements apply only to redesigned Goals. The new Enable AI Goal Assistant preference is off by default.

Activation requires several admin actions. First, customers must raise a work order to enable the Goal Assistant feature for the portal. Once enabled, admins can self-activate: go to Core Preferences, AI Activation Preferences, and ensure the Gen AI support for Goals toggle is enabled; then navigate to the relevant OU, open Goal Preferences, and under the new AI Preferences section check Enable AI Assistant. The existing AI preferences for goal description and goal comment assistance have been moved under this new AI Preferences section. There is no direct impact for admins beyond configuration. All assistant actions respect configured permissions — for example, a user who lacks permission to modify a particular goal cannot do so via the assistant — and the tool provides goal guidance for unsupported or out-of-scope questions rather than unreliable responses.