How to Build an AI-Ready Culture

Generative AI can

be applied almost anywhere that information is consumed or created, so its potential to improve business productivity seems vast.

Practically every organization is considering how best to use it, whether that’s for speeding up routine tasks like drafting emails and summarizing reports or enhancing more complex, industry-specific workflows.

Unlike many enterprise technologies, however, adopting generative AI is not just about implementation, it’s about culture.

Generative AI’s capabilities are non-deterministic and forever shifting, so it rewards experimentation and knowledge sharing. It doesn’t always give the same answer or the right answer, requiring new ways of thinking about the role of computers at work. Its success is a product of its accessibility—it runs on the cloud and operates via natural language—but that same ease-of-use creates a high risk of shadow IT. And if all that weren’t enough there are the inevitable fears that the technology could steal jobs, breeding resistance to using it in the first place—or at least admitting to usage.

So how do you create a culture that will allow your team to thrive in the era of generative AI? A recent roundtable event hosted in London by WIRED Consulting and the global STEM workforce consultancy SThree explored this important question—and revealed its urgency. “STEM professionals are losing up to six hours each week due to insufficient AI support,” says Rakesh Patel, SThree’s managing director for the UK, France, and Belgium. A report by SThree based on a survey of 2,500 STEM professionals globally found that almost half believed their company lagged behind competitors on AI. Patel believes that “culture is the key ingredient people most often forget when they’re trying to put their business at the front of the pack.”

Here’s what we learned from the roundtable about how to get it right…

Set the ethos at the top

A good AI culture should incentivize adoption and experimentation while mitigating risks. It should have a clear sense of aims and intentions, promote transparency and encourage collaboration and openness.

Culture starts at the top, which means the CEO and the board need to embrace and lead the change. “Otherwise, what ends up happening is you have pockets of change remaining at pilot status and not moving across the whole organization,” says Sana Khareghani, professor of practice in AI at King’s College London and a trustee at the Institute for the Future of Work.

While leaders don’t need to be AI experts, setting this culture requires some knowledge of the technology. The problem is, this knowledge is often lacking, and it can be hard for C-suite figures to admit as much. “They’re too senior to ask questions, and even the people who report into them are too senior to ask questions,” says Khareghani. The result can be layers of decision-making based on little understanding. Indeed, 48 percent of respondents to SThree’s survey believe their organization’s leadership fails to grasp the potential productivity benefits of AI.

The solution? “It’s about creating a safe space for the most senior people to ask what they would deem dumb questions,” says Khareghani. Bring in an outside expert if necessary to help answer these, drawing on industry-relevant examples.

Address concerns head on

Leadership onboard, you need to convince the rest of your team. While STEM professionals often have a strong desire to use AI, don’t be surprised if the broader pool of employees aren’t immediately enamoured with the idea of integrating generative AI into their roles. You may see it as a productivity boon; they may see it as a threat to their jobs.

To address this, be upfront about what you’re hoping to achieve with the tech. If you’re not planning on making redundancies, but instead upskilling your staff so they can spend more time on the tasks AI can’t do, then tell them.