Published on: July 23, 2026 at 9:34 am
At a time when the impact of artificial intelligence is so high on the business community’s lists of hopes and fears, a company’s culture is as important as ever.
According to Academy of Management Scholars Jennifer Chatman of the University of California, Berkeley, and Glenn Carroll of Stanford University, the authors of the 2026 book Making Organizational Culture Great: Moving Beyond Popular Beliefs, AI can be used to help shape the kind of strong culture needed to successfully execute a company’s strategy.
Chatman said that AI may not be the biggest challenge to the way a company’s culture—its values, norms, attitudes, practices, and beliefs that shape how an organization operates—emerge through its employees’ interactions with each other. The COVID-19 pandemic caused an even greater disruption, at least so far.
“The question around remote work was harder to answer because culture started to ebb as people interacted less,” Chatman said. “One of the short-term effects that AI will have is to reduce the headcount in organizations, but the bodies still standing will tell AI what matters and define what criteria should be used to make decisions.
“That’s going to require people to interact, and that means culture will still be relevant,” she said.
AI’s role in cultural development
“A friend of mine at Google, who really thinks about these things, says he actually believes AI might facilitate cultural development,” Carroll added. “For example, he says in a big organization you might spend a lot of time right now trying to find the people you need for a team or who think alike about the company’s values and strategy.
“With AI, you can identify those people much more quickly and put them together,” he said. “That will help people build the culture rather than undermine it.”
Carroll said that he’s not a prognosticator about the AI-transformed future of work, but he doesn’t think it’s just another business fad like many others he’s seen.
“One wonders whether this is another case of ‘This too shall pass,’” he said. “It doesn’t feel that way.”
