MIT Sloan defines the cultural lens as the realm of the storyteller — the world of norms, values and artifacts that create meaning inside an organization. When it comes to AI, that story is already being written in your hallways, Slack channels and team meetings. The question is who’s telling it and whether it’s working for you or against you.
Companies aren’t failing at AI because the tools don’t work. They’re failing because the culture never got on board. Here are three ways to change that.
1. Make Trust the First Product You Ship
Morgan Stanley didn’t just deploy an AI assistant — they earned the right to deploy it. Before rolling out their AI @ Morgan Stanley Assistant, built on OpenAI and trained on more than 100,000 internal research reports, the firm ran rigorous evaluation frameworks to prove the tool met adviser quality standards. The result: once deployed with proper guardrails, adoption reached 98% across the firm’s wealth management teams almost immediately.
That number doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when employees feel the organization respected their professional standards before asking them to change how they work. Trust is not a soft metric — it is the precondition for everything else.
2. Build an AI Learning Culture From the Ground Up
In October 2024, Singtel launched its AI Acceleration Academy in partnership with Nanyang Technological University and the National University of Singapore, committing to train more than 10,000 employees across roles and functions on how to apply AI and data capabilities in their daily workflows. The message this sends culturally is as important as the content: learning is not a one-time event and AI is not someone else’s job.
WTW’s 2025 research on AI adoption echoes this, noting that leaders who embrace continuous learning — shifting the idea from “fail fast” to “learn fast” — consistently outperform peers who treat AI as a deployment problem rather than a development one. Culture changes when learning becomes a shared ritual, not a compliance checkbox.
3. Find Your Superusers and Let Them Lead
McKinsey’s change management research identifies a clear pattern among organizations that scale AI successfully: they find their most enthusiastic internal adopters and put them at the center of the cultural story. McKinsey calls them “superusers” — employees who boost overall uptake not through mandates but through visible enthusiasm and peer credibility. Interestingly, their research found that millennial managers (35 — 44) report the highest AI expertise, at 62%, making them a largely untapped cultural asset in most organizations.
The cultural lens reminds us that transformation does not travel through org charts — it travels through people. When your most trusted colleagues are openly experimenting with AI and sharing what they learn, the cultural narrative shifts from threat to possibility without a single top-down directive.
Culture is not a backdrop to your AI strategy. It is the strategy. The organizations getting this right are not louder about AI — they are more intentional about the story they are telling and who they are asking to tell it.
