Artificial intelligence can help turn company culture from words on a wall into something real – Elie Rashbass explains how

Strong and healthy cultures help businesses and employees thrive. Weak or toxic cultures, on the other hand, harm both the workforce and the business’s bottom line. Companies know culture matters and recognise exactly what values they want. However, listing and wanting certain values, even if you mean it (which most companies do!), doesn’t make them a reality.  

The missing link is in-the-moment and context-specific coaching based on the company’s values 

The move towards hybrid and remote working environments, with greater digital interaction, has made the problem even more stark. However, new AI-powered technologies and solutions can help with the challenge and have the potential to change the way businesses think about embedding culture.  

The bottom-line impact of a strong culture

Top-rated culture companies experience nearly double the revenue growth of companies with the lowest-rated cultures. That isn’t surprising when you consider that embedding the right culture improves employee performance, engagement and lowers staff turnover. Engaged employees are more productive, with a study from the Queens School of Business finding that unengaged employees had higher rates of absenteeism and accidents and made more errors.  

This is a common issue with data showing that less than a quarter of employees worldwide feel engaged, contributing to a productivity loss of $8.9 trillion globally. Additionally, evidence suggests that having a better culture improves employees’ health. It is therefore abundantly clear that fostering a strong, positive organisational culture is essential – for all stakeholders. 

Gartner’s Top 5 Priorities for HR Leaders in 2025 report highlighted that “97% of CHROs want to change some aspect of their organisation’s culture. It’s not that they don’t have a clear vision of their desired culture or that employees aren’t invested in it, but organisations are struggling to align the dream with reality and bring culture to life in day-to-day work.”  

It is clear that the issue isn’t around identifying the right culture, but rather about making it real. There has been some interesting research into this sizable gap between cultural aspirations and cultural reality. Research from MIT found that there is no correlation between the cultural behaviour a company emphasises as its official corporate culture and its actual culture on the ground. In fact, sometimes there was a negative correlation between reported and actual culture.  

Why traditional approaches fall short

The lack of correlation isn’t surprising when you think about what tools companies are currently using to try and create this correlation. It often boils down to posters on the wall saying “We are innovative” or standalone activities, outside the flow of work, such as corporate training days. These tools don’t naturally translate into innovation in real projects.  

The missing link is in-the-moment and context-specific coaching based on the company’s values. That would have been previously unthinkable. But today, most of our work interactions happen digitally with over 50% of American employees spending more than 16 hours per week, on average, communicating digitally about work. With each message, email and reply, culture is being formed and perpetuated. Previously, these interactions were invisible (from a potential to coach in real-time perspective), but that doesn’t have to be the case any more.  

How AI can make culture stick

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has opened the door to this being possible. Large Language Models (LLMs), in particular, can be harnessed to oversee and learn from employee behaviours. This will allow them to act as coaches, encouraging colleagues to reflect on a given interaction in meaningful and outcome-shifting ways.  

The technology is scalable and will continue to become even more efficient overtime. In fact, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang recently predicted a millionfold increase in computing power over the next decade. While exponential growth is nothing new for computing power what we are about to experience will be on a completely different scale.  

Elie Rashbass is CEO and Co-founder of ScultureAI