Artificial Intelligence: The key to innovation in corporate culture

How Artificial Intelligence is transforming the culture of innovation in companies

Entrepreneurs, financiers, and economists love to create metaphors involving eating. For today’s topic, here are three famous phrases that lead me to propose a fourth:

• “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” – Peter Drucker
• “Software is eating the world” – Marc Andreessen
• “Artificial Intelligence is eating software” – Jensen Huang

And here’s the fourth:

• “Artificial Intelligence eats culture for breakfast”

Why will AI significantly impact organizational culture?

First, let’s think about how a company’s culture is an aggregate of the cultures of its people. While it may lean more toward the thinking and actions of its leaders or influential professionals, the organization ultimately moves thanks to the energy, drive, and boldness of its people. However, this movement can go in various directions—some beneficial, others detrimental, or even stagnant if immovable forces prevail.

Artificial Intelligence will act as a battering ram to break down many walls, especially those preventing innovation. It’s hard to imagine that companies that were early adopters of the Internet or e-commerce have suffered in the long run. Improvements in employee productivity and customer satisfaction are clear indicators of their success. Now, with the arrival of GenAI, these benefits could multiply exponentially—by x10, x100, or even x1000. Just thinking about the compounding interest of these advancements should have us throwing daily celebration parties.

The 3A Method

But let’s get practical. Where should you start if you want to use Artificial Intelligence to transform your organization’s culture of innovation? We can divide this into three phases: Analyze, Learn, and Automate—the 3A Method.

• Analyze

Alternatively, we could call this phase “Appreciate” because it feels like a gift that, in just two years, we now have hundreds of tools at our disposal with incredible capabilities to help us work better, boost productivity, and amplify creativity. As we use these tools, we should analyze and understand the value they bring to our work and how they improve our activities. Start by applying these tools to areas where you already have expertise, as this is where the quality of results will be most visible.

• Learn

As we use GenAI for tasks we already understand, we’ll notice when it works well and when it makes errors or produces low-quality results. This will help us internalize when and for what purposes these tools are best used. Then comes the time to take a step further—using them for tasks we’re unfamiliar with or know little about. In this phase, the AI transitions from an assistant or co-pilot to a teacher or mentor. It can help us learn to do something new, like programming or speaking a different language. For example, you can publish code, identify errors, and ask the AI to fix them.

• Automate

After going through the previous phases, it’s time to think about automating specific tasks or processes within your work or organization. This could involve developing your own intelligent agents with the autonomy to execute assigned tasks. While this technology still requires some advancements, it’s likely we’ll see it soon, especially given the strategic focus of major tech companies.

Conclusion: AI as the key to the future of business

If we have the technology and it delivers positive results, what reason could there be not to adopt it? Concerns remain regarding security and privacy, but no one is suggesting we hand AI the red button. Ultimately, we will learn to understand when and how to use this technology without imposing such high barriers at the outset that we block all the good it can bring. While regulations for these tools are necessary, equivalent rules already exist for IT and the Internet, which can be extended to this new technology.

Lead the Change

It will be up to us to decide how we approach this revolution, and we may not have much time for hesitation. If we adopt AI now, we’ll gain a significant advantage in the future. If fear holds us back, catching up later will be much harder when competition is already fierce.

If you want to learn how to integrate Artificial Intelligence into your company’s transformation strategy and become a leader of change, join our Executive Program: Leadership with Artificial Intelligence.

Remember: Technology doesn’t transform companies; people do, with the help of technology.