Getting the most out of new technology has never been about the technology. You can develop the best technology in the world, but introduce it in the wrong way and you’ll create more problems than you solve.

We’ve known this for decades. Back in the late eighties, Jonathan Grudin (1988), then at Microsoft, carried out a seminal study of how organisations adopt technology. He uncovered a range of factors that can break a technology transformation: ignoring the social context, misaligned incentives, inadequate support for change, and benefits felt unequally across an organisation. 

None of these reasons for failure are technical. They are all cultural. 

The same is true with artificial intelligence. Clear evidence has emerged in recent months that AI can bring many benefits to an organisation – increased productivity, new ways of working, even new business models – but that this doesn’t happen automatically. In fact, whilst individual workers are becoming more productive with AI, this may not be translating into organisation-wide uplift. For example, a recent survey of 6000 executives showed that 80% are not experiencing organisational productivity uplift from AI (Yotzov et al. 2026).

Culture will make or break how well you get on with AI. An organisation with an AI-ready culture will soar with AI. One without it will sink.

In our engagements over the last few years, we’ve noticed three kinds of organisation, with three distinct cultures.

• AI-first culture.

  These organisations go ‘all in’ on AI. Led by an enthusiastic board member or CEO, everyone is expected to use and experiment with AI. Leaders have AI KPIs. Trainers run workshops on how to use the tools and how to identify AI use cases. There is a well thought out AI strategy.

• AI-sometimes culture.

  These organisations use AI but in limited ways. Leaders provide some training, but staff are mostly left to themselves. There are some pilot projects applying AI but not a wide-ranging AI strategy. The board and executives may champion one or two individual AI projects but haven’t thought how to replicate this across the organisation.

• AI-last culture.

  AI is seen as something that isn’t relevant. Leaders only make one or two AI tools available and discourage their use for anything remotely innovative. They may even ban AI altogether. 

The point of this article is not to make everyone AI-first. Not everyone needs to be. All three categories have their challenges. For example, an AI-first organisation might disenfranchise staff if AI is seen as a solution to everything and ignores human expertise. On the other hand, an AI-last organisation might lose talented staff who feel they don’t have enough room to experiment with the latest technology.

Getting your culture AI-ready

If your organisation wants to move from one category to another (from AI-last to AI-sometimes, or AI-sometimes to AI-first), you’ll need an AI-ready culture to make it happen.

An AI-Ready culture has a mixture of ingredients that can be thought of as ‘core enabling conditions’ (non-negotiables) and ‘supporting capabilities’ (which build on the non-negotiables). There are 5 non-negotiables:

1. Leadership behaviours – this includes leaders that model curiosity, admit they are learning, experiment visibly and invite challenge;
2. Psychological safety – including asking naïve questions, testing tools, admitting uncertainty and sharing failures;
3. Trust – this involves having a strong positive emotional foundation where AI is seen as an opportunity and not a threat;
4. Learning culture – AI is evolving rapidly and a learning culture rewards skill development, encourages peer sharing, normalises iteration and funds upskilling;
5. Ethical clarity – AI amplifies poor governance and bias and ethical clarity helps to define acceptable use of AI, sets guardrails, encourages responsible challenge and protects reputation. 

Some of the supporting capabilities to an AI-ready culture include factors such as strategic alignment, cross-functional collaboration, data literacy, and change agility, however the non-negotiables are where we suggest you start as your key foundation for success.

How to get started

As a first step in realising an AI-ready culture, we recommend developing an AI culture roadmap to help understand where you are now and where you want to go. Unlike traditional culture roadmap work, this needs to be carried out in a short timeframe – months not years. AI is the fastest moving technology we’ve seen. And so thinking about and evolving your organisation’s culture needs to move fast as well.

In short, if you are currently adopting AI but facing challenges of slowness, resistance, confusion or complexity, it’s likely your culture that isn’t quite fit for purpose. Instead of focusing only on the technology, take a holistic approach: combine culture work with strategic thinking and experimentation to unlock the benefits of AI in your organisation.

Steople and Goldilocks AI are partnering to provide AI-ready culture services. If you are interested in hearing more, please get in touch at info@steople.com.au