Editorial
The Gist
- AI transformation is a cultural challenge first. Technology accelerates change, but culture determines whether teams adapt, stall, or resist when uncertainty rises.
- VUCA demands new behavioral muscles. Learning, emotional steadiness, initiative, empathy, and trust become operational requirements when best practices don’t yet exist.
- Leaders shape outcomes through example. Policies and tools matter, but cultural signals—what’s rewarded, tolerated, and modeled—ultimately guide how AI gets used.
AI’s real transformation of marketing is still ahead, and during this shift marketing’s world will get more VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous). If you want your team adapt successfully, you’ll need more than new technology and processes. The real power is in your culture.
Today’s marketing AI use cases focus mainly on efficiency, such as producing research, plans and content faster. Tomorrow, AI will push businesses into novel territory.
An AI-infused world demands that people learn as the technology evolves. GTM models, processes and structures will need fresh ideas and bold reinvention. Employees must not only adapt but ultimately master these shifts.
Marketing success will rely on AI that’s technically reliable, ethically sound and capable of elevating customer experience. These capabilities will cut across departments and require diverse expertise. And as they advance, these innovations will spark new, unforeseen challenges that we can’t yet imagine from today’s starting line. Best practices are years away; leaders will have to take smart risks.
Historically, the road to transformation has been bumpy and an AI future guarantees even more VUCA. Reports suggest that only about 30–35% of change efforts achieve their intended goals. With a technology as significant as AI, you’ll want to do all you can to ensure your team will be in that fortunate third.
Table of Contents
- Why Is Organizational Culture so Important to Transforming With AI?
- What Cultural Attributes Are Useful to Ensure Success in a Changing Workplace?
Why Is Organizational Culture so Important to Transforming With AI?
It is operations improved by AI that will deliver desired outcomes. However, achieving operational progress depends on employees who are willing and able to change their behavior. For positive motivation, AI offers opportunities for greater productivity, more interesting work, deeper insights and more personalized customer journeys. Yet, employees’ behavior will also be influenced by worries about job displacement, privacy and security risks, malicious usage and the high cost and possible failure of new workflows.
A resilient organizational culture offers the best insurance for a reliable and scalable AI transformation. Culture exerts the strongest influence on people’s behavior. Leaders can steer their team’s behavior via formal artifacts including policies, instructions, training, protocols and metrics, but these lack the powerful impact of culture.
Culture is social. It works like a magnet, pulling people into its center. The most ideal operational practices will not compensate if there exists a culture that tugs individuals off course.
Culture consists of the ways things get done, saturated with the meaning that people ascribe to those actions. “Culture comprises the unwritten rules that guide people every day. Not the policy manuals or the organization charts that depict how things are supposed to get done in an imaginary world,” write the authors of The Future-Proof Workplace.
An example of these unwritten rules is expressed by this story from a senior leader from a famous Silicon Valley company who transferred to the California headquarters from the London office. Upon arrival, a human resources executive told him that the California office had no dress code policy and therefore the executive was free to dress as he liked. So, the man continued to wear the formal clothes he had enjoyed in the UK—a dress shirt, cufflinks and gray flannel pants. After repeated reminders about no dress code policy, he finally realized that there was indeed a dress code in Silicon Valley, it just wasn’t overtly expressed. To fit into the Valley culture, people were expected to dress informally.
Related Article: AI in Marketing in 2025: Smart Automation and Brave Brand Building
What Cultural Attributes Are Useful to Ensure Success in a Changing Workplace?
Although it can’t be worked on directly, culture is going to arise, so leaders may as well try to shape it. Practices, rituals and language consistent with the desired culture must be encouraged. Fledgling practices must be protected from the crush of the existing habits.
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If you want your team to thrive in an atmosphere of where change is inevitable, here are five cultural attributes that you should strengthen in your organization:
Five Cultural Attributes That Enable AI-Driven Change
AI transformation succeeds or fails long before models are deployed. These five cultural attributes shape how teams respond to uncertainty, develop new capabilities, and make decisions when best practices don’t yet exist.
| Why You Need This Cultural Attribute | Guidance on How to Increase This Attribute |
|---|---|
| Continuous learning When people feel that learning something new is valued and rewarded, they seek out opportunities and more readily incorporate new information and skills into their work. Experimentation, mistakes and failure must be appreciated as opportunities for learning, not treated as failures. | People are going to need specific AI skills. Don’t skimp on providing these or on giving people the time they need to learn. Cultivate a learning culture by strengthening your team’s ability to ask questions, listen, collect information, analyze and make decisions. Leaders must become role models for these behaviors. |
| Equanimity Uncertainty produces confusion, ambiguity and fear. The ability to manage one’s emotions is essential for working in unpredictable situations. Equanimity is a state in which people feel challenging emotions without getting tangled up in them. | Leaders can encourage equanimity by creating “sandboxes,” or safe environments where people can practice doing new and intimidating things. Sales teams frequently receive this kind of training, while marketers often do not. |
| Entrepreneurialism No matter how strong your plans and preparation are, you can’t anticipate every opportunity or obstacle. In fast-changing environments, top-down instructions arrive too slowly. Leaders need people who are willing to step outside their lanes and act when new problems emerge. | Leaders promote entrepreneurialism through power-sharing, reducing bureaucracy and honoring those who volunteer to tackle enterprise-level challenges. While thoughtless action isn’t the goal, momentum matters when conditions change quickly. |
| Empathy Major change almost always requires new working relationships. Successful AI in marketing depends on greater customer-centricity and collaboration across diverse groups. Empathy does not require agreement, only recognition that others are human beings worthy of respect. | Empathy practices include respectful listening and tuning in to others’ emotions. Leaders should model empathic behavior themselves, reflecting leadership’s literal meaning: being the one who goes first. |
| Trust Adapting quickly to change requires greater empowerment than traditional top-down models allow. Trust between leaders and teams is essential for that empowerment to work. A lack of trust becomes a tax on the enterprise, increasing oversight, friction, and cost. | Balancing empowerment with accountability helps build trust. When people can speak candidly about market realities, work quality and opportunities for improvement, organizations expand their capacity for innovation and problem-solving. |
For the foreseeable future, marketing organizations will experience on-going uncertainty and the need for continual adaptation. To get optimal outcomes from the AI transformation, the marketing leader’s playbook must include influencing culture.
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