We recently completed an org-wide planning and goal-tracking project at the Doris Duke Foundation, and wanted to share the pattern in case it’s useful to others tackling similar challenges.
The problem we were solving
Like many mission driven organizations, we don’t measure success with revenue or sales targets. Instead, we organize around long-term strategic goals (“North Stars”). And, I know the companies I’ve worked for need to track Objectives and Key Results in addition to revenue.
The challenge was that our strategy lived across PDFs, decks, and docs: making planning slow, fragmented, and hard to translate into action.
What we built
Using Airtable’s app-building capabilities, we built Horizon: an org-wide planning and goal-tracking system that serves as a single source of truth for:
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Long-term strategic direction (North Stars)
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Annual enterprise objectives
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Team goals
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Projects, ownership, and timelines
Everyone accesses the same structure, sees how their work connects, and plans in one shared system.
Where AI helped (the repeatable part)
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Creating durable structure
We used AI to turn raw conversations and planning notes into a clean, hierarchical data model designed to last multiple planning cycles—not just a single year. -
Getting existing work into the system (fast)
Teams uploaded their existing strategy documents. Airtable AI read the full content, and an automation translated that content directly into Horizon’s shared structure.-
No copy-paste
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No rework
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Just a clean starting point teams could refine
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Turning structure into outputs
Once strategy lived in structured data, we could generate:-
Board-ready summaries
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Internal planning views
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Public-facing language
Same source of truth, different outputs, very low friction.
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What changed
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Teams now plan and track goals in one place
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Strategy is visible, connected, and actionable
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Less time translating between formats, more time doing the work
Template + help
We’ve made a clonable Airtable template of Horizon, including:
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The core data tables
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A fully built app/interface layer
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Definitions and guidance on how to use it
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Lightweight automations for review and governance
If you’re trying to solve:
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“Our strategy lives in too many docs”
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“We want clearer alignment from goals → projects”
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“We want AI to help structure planning, not just write text”
…I’m happy to share the template and talk through how we approached it. The Horizon Admin README walks through the structure, setup, and intended usage in detail
Horizon README - Instructions &…
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Feel free to reply here or DM if you want:
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The template link
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A walkthrough of the data model
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Notes on what we’d do differently next time
Happy to help others avoid reinventing this from scratch.
