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Key Takeaways
- Employees are finding ways to incorporate AI into their work faster than many organizations can create policies, norms or expectations around its use.
- The leadership question is no longer simply, “Should our people use AI?” It’s: “Are the ways people are using AI strengthening the culture we say we want or unintentionally working against it?”
In the past few years, the use of AI has accelerated. An employee asks AI a question they once would have discussed with a colleague. A presentation that used to take all day is ready before lunch. Is this a good change? Or not?
It’s hard to know since we’re adopting this new technology so quickly that establishing policies and strategies for its use often lag behind.
Your AI culture is forming before your AI policy
The use of AI to research, draft, analyze, summarize and solve problems is rapidly reshaping how people work together. As new habits take hold, expectations about speed, collaboration and good work shift. That’s how AI starts changing a company’s culture. Too often, those changes take hold before leaders have considered how AI use can reinforce the company’s core values.
Gallup’s 2026 research gives us a glimpse of how differently employees are experiencing these changes. At workplaces that had implemented AI, 24% said their culture had improved over the past year, while 25% said it had worsened. These two extremes show that AI alone doesn’t determine the outcome. The choices that leaders make about how AI is used are what really matter.
AI is rewriting the unwritten rules of work
As AI becomes part of the workday, leaders face three key tradeoffs. How leaders handle these clearly signals to employees what the organization values — and what it doesn’t
Speed vs. critical thinking
A report that once took five hours now takes one. That’s helpful, but someone still needs to question the findings and decide what they mean. If the response is “produce more reports,” there may be little time left for thinking, only doing — and the quality of output might suffer.
Access to information vs. collaboration
An employee can ask AI a product question instead of calling someone in R&D. That saves both people time, but they lose a conversation. The employee may never learn why a decision was made, and R&D may never hear what customers are asking. If that keeps happening, it becomes harder for the teams to solve problems together.
Efficiency vs. workload
What happens to the time AI saves? It could give someone room to tackle a harder problem, build a skill or work with another team. Or it could simply mean more work is expected, and the risk of burnout increases.
AI doesn’t make those choices. Leaders do — and over time, their choices become the unwritten rules of work.
Use AI to reinforce the culture you actually want
It’s easy to focus on whether employees are using AI correctly and miss how it’s changing the way they work with one another. Deloitte calls the problems that build up when organizations focus on how people use AI but overlook its effect on how they work together “cultural debt.” Leaders can start to prevent it by taking the values their organizations already talk about and making clear what those values look like when people use AI.
- Collaboration: Let AI handle straightforward questions. When a decision would benefit from a colleague’s experience, make time for that conversation.
- Critical thinking: An AI-generated answer is a place to start. Check the facts, ask what might be missing, and decide for yourself what the information means.
- Learning: Give people room to try AI tools and talk openly about what worked, what didn’t and what they discovered along the way.
- Trust: Make sure everyone knows when to say they’ve used AI, who checks the work and who is responsible for the final result.
- Strategic thinking: When AI saves time, leave room to tackle a harder question or think through a decision before adding more tasks.
This is how the values on the wall become part of the workday. Our executive coaches see a lot of scenarios where teams get it right and wrong. Here are a couple of examples that positively reinforced the company’s values.
A manager asked their team to use AI to prepare for a client meeting, then brought them together beforehand to test that preparation. What did the tool assume about the client? What questions were still unanswered? What did someone on the team know that isn’t in the summary? The team went into the meeting better prepared, and the process reinforced the habit of learning from one another — before relying on an AI-generated answer.
A team used AI to sketch out options for a new project, then gathered colleagues from other departments before choosing a final direction. Their colleagues spotted practical problems the team missed and had a chance to explain how a proposed change would affect their work. AI tools helped people get started, but the decision was better because they made it together.
AI is already changing the pace of work and the way people turn to one another for help. Leaders can shape those changes by making their values visible in everyday decisions: giving people time to think, encouraging them to seek a colleague’s perspective and recognizing care as well as speed. The question isn’t only how much work AI can take off people’s plates. It’s what you want people to do with the time and attention it gives back — and whether that brings your team closer to the culture you want.
Bringing AI into your organization deserves the same attention you’d give to a new hire or a new department. You need to think through how it fits and how it will affect the people already there. That care helps you build a culture by choice rather than by default.
Key Takeaways
- Employees are finding ways to incorporate AI into their work faster than many organizations can create policies, norms or expectations around its use.
- The leadership question is no longer simply, “Should our people use AI?” It’s: “Are the ways people are using AI strengthening the culture we say we want or unintentionally working against it?”
In the past few years, the use of AI has accelerated. An employee asks AI a question they once would have discussed with a colleague. A presentation that used to take all day is ready before lunch. Is this a good change? Or not?
It’s hard to know since we’re adopting this new technology so quickly that establishing policies and strategies for its use often lag behind.
Your AI culture is forming before your AI policy
The use of AI to research, draft, analyze, summarize and solve problems is rapidly reshaping how people work together. As new habits take hold, expectations about speed, collaboration and good work shift. That’s how AI starts changing a company’s culture. Too often, those changes take hold before leaders have considered how AI use can reinforce the company’s core values.
