Dystopia: when AI nearly killed corporate culture

For a long time, businesses have talked about corporate culture as a human issue, even though they often managed it as a matter of knowledge transfer. They needed to share best practices, make expertise accessible, help new hires understand their environment, and prevent each departure from taking a piece of the collective memory with it.

Artificial intelligence has provided an effective solution to this problem. In addition to retrieving information, it explains, contextualizes, guides, recommends, and is gradually becoming the interface through which employees access the business. As these systems improve, they eliminate a multitude of frictions that organizations had long considered inevitable.

This evolution is generally viewed through the lens of productivity or knowledge management, yet it raises a broader question: what becomes of a corporate culture when the situations that once compelled individuals to interact, ask for help, share their experience, or simply learn from one another become less necessary?

The imagined future described in this column is not that of a business without humans and, in fact, it is quite the opposite. Employees work together efficiently, new hires integrate more quickly, and organizations seem to have resolved some of their long-standing cultural issues, and that is what makes this future worth exploring.

The story of a merger

At first glance, Machinsoft’s acquisition of OpenBS in 2058 seemed no more noteworthy than any other transaction of its kind. Together, the two groups employed nearly one hundred thousand people, had a presence on several continents, and operated in sectors where transactions of this size never went smoothly or even without destroying value, yet, just a few weeks after the announcement, everything seemed to be settled.

Teams were working well together, projects were moving forward, and ultimately, there were few departures. Engagement metrics showed nothing alarming, and even the most experienced managers, those who had lived through the major mergers of previous decades, found it hard to believe just how smoothly things were going.

However, one thing struck observers at the time: the absence of a topic that had nevertheless played a central role in all major organizational transformations at the start of the century.

Corporate culture.

Twenty or thirty years earlier, this would have seemed inconceivable. A merger was first and foremost a meeting of two cultures. Armies of consultants were mobilized to produce diagnostics, impact studies, and change management plans; HR was under pressure and held countless seminars; and executives spent months explaining how two 1+1s would equal 2 instead of destroying value.

But in 2058, the issue seemed to belong to another era.

At the time, however, the question didn’t arise, and most commentators simply assumed that businesses had finally learned to solve a problem that had dragged on for far too long.

But, looking back, things are a bit different because while the issue of corporate culture seemed to have ceased to be a problem, it wasn’t because we had (finally) learned to manage it better, but because it had ceased to occupy the place it once held.

AI has made businesses understandable

The transformation had therefore begun well before the major mergers of the late 2050s.

Originally, organizational assistants addressed relatively simple problems. Companies were accumulating procedures, knowledge, and data at a pace that individuals could no longer keep up with, and finding the right information sometimes became more difficult than doing the work itself. Employees moved from one project to another, changed roles, and worked with colleagues they sometimes never even met in person.

In this context, artificial intelligence was a revolution.

It first made it possible to find information, then to explain it, then to contextualize it, and finally to adapt it to each employee’s specific situation.

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