This article was originally published in the Clarity at the Top newsletter on LinkedIn.
Culture Project
The other day I was in a meeting with a group of senior leaders. They were proud. They had selected someone to lead their AI initiative. They had allocated budget. They had a phased rollout plan. Milestones on a Gantt chart.
I sat there and thought: this is exactly how you implement Microsoft Word.
And that is the problem.
The foundation you are skipping
Building a house without a foundation does not fail at the end. It fails at the beginning. You just do not find out until later — when the walls crack, when something collapses, when someone gets hurt.
Translate that to business: the project stalls. The adoption numbers disappoint. People revert to their old tools. And the head of AI who was hired with such fanfare is now explaining to the board why the ROI is not where it was supposed to be.
The missing piece is not the technology. It was never the technology.
It is culture. That is the foundation. Start there or do not be surprised when the house falls.
The wrong person in the wrong seat
Here is a question no one asks when they are hiring a head of AI: Is this person exceptional at soft skills?
Because the further AI develops — and it is developing faster than most boardrooms are comfortable acknowledging — the closer it gets to something that resembles a person. Something that knows how you think. Something that anticipates your next question before you ask it. Something that learns your preferences, your communication style, your working patterns.
You are not onboarding a software system. You are, in a sense, onboarding a colleague.
And yet the instinct is always to hire the most technical person in the room to lead it. The one who knows the architecture, the infrastructure, the model parameters.
That person may be exactly wrong for the job.
What you need at the front of this cultural shift is someone who can walk into a room of skeptical, overwhelmed, pressured human beings and make them feel that AI is not a threat to them. That it is, in fact, the first colleague they have had in years who is genuinely and entirely on their side.
How culture actually changes
I will give you an example from my own work.
I recently rebuilt my website. I know how to write HTML. I do not have any particular sense of style — if you have seen my wardrobe, you already know this.
So I told Claude — the AI I was working with — exactly that. I said: style is not my thing. Help me.
It did not send me a color palette. It asked me what I love. What moves me. What I find beautiful in the world.
I told it about Scandinavian furniture. The smoothness of the wood. The curves. Nothing aggressive, nothing heavy. The way those pieces feel when you touch them — like the designer understood that objects should give something to the person holding them, not demand something from them.
The AI took that and built the visual language of my website from it.
That is an epiphany moment. Not because the technology was impressive. Because the conversation felt like it was with someone who was actually listening.
That is what your employees need to experience. Not a training module. Not a productivity target. A conversation where the AI helps them with something real, something that matters to them, and does it in a way that makes them feel better at the end than they did at the start.
One of the tasks I had been dreading most in the website project was going through hundreds of photographs. I knew it was going to take me most of a day. It took six minutes.
The moment your employees each have their version of that six-minute experience — the moment AI takes something they have been dreading and handles it in six minutes — that is when the shift happens. Not from the training program. From that moment.
What this means for you as a leader
You cannot ask your people to trust something you have not trusted yourself.
If you are going to stand in front of your organization and tell them that AI is going to change how they work, you need to have a story. A real one. Something that happened to you. Something specific and personal, where the AI did something that you did not expect, that saved you time or aggravation or both.
If you do not have that story yet, you are not ready to lead the cultural shift. And the cultural shift is the only one that matters.
The good news is that it is not complicated to get there. Open the AI. Tell it you do not know where to start. Tell it what you are working on. Tell it what is sitting on your desk that you have been avoiding. Ask it: How do we do this together?
That is the whole brief. Everything else follows from there.
One thing to remember
AI does not take credit for the work when the project ends. It does not have a hidden agenda. It will not go home at five because it has a dinner reservation.
When your people genuinely understand what that means — that they have something working alongside them, tirelessly, without ego, without politics — there is no more resistance. There is just adoption.
And when adoption happens person by person, something larger shifts. The individual changes. The team changes. The organization changes.
That is how culture actually moves. Not from a strategy document. From one real moment of understanding, multiplied across every person in your company.
AI is a culture project. Start with the culture.
This edition is adapted from the Clarity at the Top podcast. Watch the full episode on YouTube.
If this edition prompted a question worth exploring — about your organization’s AI direction, your board’s readiness, or your own leadership approach — Thomas Anglero works with a small number of senior leaders on exactly these conversations.
Thomas Anglero is a Strategic AI Advisor to Boards and Executive Leaders, and founder of MerkabaPhi AS based in Oslo, Norway. Clarity at the Top is published weekly for senior executives navigating AI transformation.
Enquiries and speaking bookings: Anglero.com