There’s a ghost haunting your AI project.
You won’t find it in the code reviews or the technical specifications. It’s not hiding in your data lakes or your neural networks.
It’s sitting in plain sight – in your Monday morning meetings, in the whispered conversations by the coffee machine, in the unanswered Slack messages.
The silent killer of AI projects isn’t technical – it’s cultural.
Here’s what the consultants won’t tell you: You can have the most sophisticated AI system in the world, but if your people are rowing in different directions, you’re going nowhere fast.
Remember when email came to the workplace? The resistance wasn’t about whether it worked – it was about whether we wanted it to work. AI is email multiplied by a thousand, with a dash of existential crisis thrown in for good measure.
Your engineers are building bridges to tomorrow while your middle managers are quietly stockpiling dynamite. Not because they’re saboteurs, but because nobody likes to be the character in the story who gets automated away.
But here’s the thing – the best AI implementations don’t replace people, they amplify them. Netflix didn’t fire their content creators when they built their recommendation engine. They turned their creators into superstars by connecting them with the right audiences.
The real question isn’t whether AI works. The real question is: Are you building an organization that’s ready to work differently?
Because culture isn’t just what you say in your town halls. Culture is what happens when no one’s watching. It’s the small decisions your team makes when they think you’re not paying attention.
Want to know if your AI project will succeed? Don’t check your GitHub repository. Check your lunch tables. Are your data scientists sitting with your operations teams? Are your AI experts learning from your front-line workers, or are they just teaching?
The good news? Culture can change. But it changes through stories, through examples, through small wins that build trust.
Start there. Start small. Start human.
Because the future of AI isn’t about replacing human intelligence – it’s about augmenting human wisdom.
And wisdom? That’s always been cultural.