Episode 661: Nicolas Darveau-Garneau
June 18th, 2026
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Navigating AI: The Power of Our Wishes with Nicolas Darveau-Garneau
Nicolas Darveau-Garneau is the founder of Garneau Digital Advisors, is the former chief evangelist of Google, and is the author of the book Be a Sequoia, Not a Bonsai: The Seven Growth Secrets of the World’s Most Successful Companies.
Greg and Nicolas discuss how AI systems are akin to powerful “genies,” but the real power and risk come from the “wishes” humans give them. With everyone having similar access to similar “genies,” the true differentiation will come from the strategy behind their use.
Nicolas emphasizes the need to think carefully about how we measure success in marketing and other areas of business. Often we focus on metrics that are easier to capture as opposed to the ones that really matter for achieving our goals. He also claims that companies that fail to articulate their goals in marketing are most likely to fail in other areas.
*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*
Episode Quotes:
The real power of AI is not the AI
55:47: The whole point of AI is that we’re building these amazing genies, but the power isn’t in the genie. The power is in the wish. We have to think very carefully about what we ask these genies to do for us. By the way, I actually think that is going to make us even more human, right? And we have to really do some deep ethical thinking, some deep value thinking, and really give these AIs the right wishes. And then I think we will thrive and be fully human. But if we give these AIs the wrong wishes, then AI can send us into a tailspin, not only as companies but as a society, pretty fast.
Most companies start with the wrong wish
02:42: So, as Google's [former] chief evangelist, I met over 1,000 companies in five years, and what I noticed was that, even in marketing, 90% of the time the teams were asking for the wrong wishes.
Stop designing for the average customer
16:33: So the trick is not to test or design your customer experiences for the average customer. It is to actually build customer experiences for your best customers. Very, very few companies do it this way, right? And so, once you can predict the customer lifetime value of a brand-new customer or an existing customer, the entire corporate strategy should revolve around it.