How crucial is the company culture for AI adoption?

What is company culture and why is it a driver of AI adoption?

Company culture is the aggregation of the behaviors of all employees in the organization, skewed heavily towards behaviors at the executive level. It’s deeply ingrained in the organization and is driving how the organization operates. These are the unwritten rules of how decisions are made in the company.

Without being explicitly documented anywhere, company culture also determines how new ideas, new processes, and new technologies are embraced within the organization.

Almost all AI solutions require that employees change how they operate. Implementing AI necessitates changes – sometimes small, sometimes big – to workflows, decision-making processes, or tools that employees use. AI also requires experimentation to test different approaches to sometimes still unproven AI solutions. And, any new technology or process, including AI, is not 100% perfect. Some initial failures are to be expected, which provide opportunities to learn.

To quickly check if your company culture is supportive of AI, answer for yourself these three questions:

1. Does your company culture embrace doing things differently than has been done in the past?

2. Does it allow for experimentation?

3. Does it support employees taking calculated risks to learn from them?

If you answered “no” to even one of these questions, your AI adoption is most likely at risk due to your company culture.

Peter Drucker, the famous management guru, said: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Any strategy developed in the company, any planned investments, and any significant changes to existing processes will fail if they don’t align with the culture of the company. This applies also to your data strategy and to your success with AI. Your company culture will determine if AI will be accepted in your organization … or not.

Company culture is the mother of AI adoption.

How to change the company culture?

Successful transformations are initiated and driven top down. Executives have the highest influence on shifting the culture to a more desired state.

The fish stinks from the head. But the opposite is true as well. Changes need to start with the executive team. And it’s more than just sponsorship. Executives need to be role models and show, for example, how they use AI in their work. They need to be frequently involved in the change process, not only during quarterly updates.

In large and distributed organizations, this change needs to include executives and leaders at all levels. After all, employees have more exposure to their direct managers, who need to be integrated into this change management program.

I now have used the sometimes dreadful “change management”. Dreadful because many change management programs are too general or too academic to successfully help with AI adoption.

That’s why I never liked the term “change management”. I have often experienced change management programs as something imposed by Human Resources. These programs were run by external coaches without deep understanding of the company culture. They were poorly defined without clear objectives. And the worst part: there was no executive-level involvement.

Can you show examples of successful change management?

I have seen both.

When I joined a global pharma company to build analytics capabilities, the resistance to use data and AI was clear from the first meeting I attended:

“What is this new guy doing here? We don’t need any changes. We have been doing our jobs very well without any fancy analytics.”

Fortunately, at the time I joined this company, a worldwide digital transformation program was being rolled out (and I was brought in to lead the data and analytics part). This program was based on a long-term strategic vision and leadership commitment. There was a clear plan defined, including several stages with milestones, timelines, and budgets. The entire leadership team was involved. It was well executed … for a while.

A few years later the tide has turned.

Although the need to use data and AI has increased and the ChatGPT hype required even more continuous efforts to adapt the company culture, the executive involvement faded away. New executives had a different understanding of what is required for success with AI. They focused more on technology and having employees figure out how to use it. And they believed that somebody in Human Resources should run a training program.

There will always be resistance to change, any change. And AI necessitates change. Almost all AI solutions require employees to change how they operate. If that change doesn’t come naturally in your organization, your company culture may be limiting your AI adoption. Since changing company culture takes time, you may want to start the culture transformation right away.