Wanted: A shift in business culture that puts people at the heart of an AI transformation

Yet, for most, AI remains patchy—scaling beyond the pilot phase to enterprise-wide impact feels elusive. Leaders grow frustrated as the transformative promise of AI remains, to some extent, out of reach.

This frustration is understandable. But calls for “move fast" and “scale quickly" miss a fundamental lesson from history: technology alone does not transform organizations—people do. Making AI truly transformative means making it work for employees, not imposing it as top-down coercion.

The path to transformative productivity gains is rarely a sprint. It’s a marathon shaped as much by organizational adaptation as by technological innovation.

Consider the switch from steam to electric power in manufacturing. At first glance, electrification should have been an immediate upgrade—replace steam engines with cleaner, more controllable electric motors.

Instead, it took two decades or more for factories to reorganize their floors, redesign workflows, retrain workers, and build management systems aligned with the new power source. Only then did productivity surge.

Or look at container shipping. When Malcolm McLean introduced the shipping container in the 1950s, its impact wasn’t immediate. Ports worldwide had to install new cranes, redesign docks and rethink logistics.

Railroads and trucking companies had to align schedules and cargo handling. It took nearly 20 years for the global economy to reap the massive benefits.

Consider the adoption of personal computers. Introduced in offices starting in the 1980s, PCs initially were isolated and underused, often seen as “digital typewriters." Real productivity effects took off only as new networking, software ecosystems and user skills matured more than a decade later.

This long and winding road is famously captured by the “Solow paradox." Economist Robert Solow observed in 1987, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics."

His insight wasn’t that computers weren’t useful—it was that the necessary organizational transformations lagged the technology itself.

AI faces this same test. The technology is advancing at a blistering pace, promising astounding capabilities. But powerful as the tools are, without changes to workflows, culture and employee involvement, the full potential is untapped.

Yet, many companies take a different path. Some attempts to scale AI end up coercive: such as an edict from the top to “use AI or else," often without sufficient training, involvement or trust-building.

A recent example is how some large consulting firms deploy AI mandates, which can breed resentment and superficial compliance rather than real adoption. The future lies instead in a hybrid approach that combines deliberate, strategic leadership with energized grassroots engagement.

First, organizational leaders must champion workflow digitization and automation. This means mapping how work actually gets done across departments, identifying bottlenecks and redesigning processes to embed AI where it delivers the most impact.

This top-down framework sets the direction, aligns investments and ensures accountability.

But bottom-up momentum is equally vital. Employees—those who understand daily realities—must be enabled and encouraged to learn and experiment with AI tools, build departmental applications that solve real problems, and share successes and challenges with peers and leaders.

This creates a culture of AI fluency and ownership, transforming it from an imposed burden into an empowering productivity partner.

Further, making AI work for people and not to replace them. This ethos centers around the principle that AI should augment human judgment, not replace it. When workers see AI as a way to remove drudgery, gain insights and focus on meaningful tasks, they become allies in transformation.

The alternative—AI-as-threat—will generate resistance, fear and attrition. Building this trust requires transparent communication about why AI is being introduced, how it contributes to both organizational goals and employees’ own work experience, and what protections are in place for jobs and development.

Employees want to know that AI isn’t here to “take their jobs," but to help them do their jobs better and open pathways for growth.

Behind this cultural shift must lie solid technical foundations. AI thrives on clean, integrated and accessible data, which traditional enterprises often struggle to provide due to legacy systems and siloed information. Without that foundation, AI pilots produce isolated wins but no enterprise-wide flow.

Equally important is technology that delivers personalized, context-aware AI experiences embedded smoothly in workflows, not requiring employees to shift platforms or learn new interfaces unnecessarily.

Evidence is mounting that employee-centric AI programmes outperform top-down mandates. Firms that cultivate active AI user communities, provide training and embed AI into daily work pace faster, innovate more and see better retention.

Tech companies like Workday and Microsoft are leading with human-centered AI initiatives, combining deep employee involvement with strategic workflow integration. Their successes confirm that AI adoption is as much a people challenge as a technological one.

AI’s promise is immense: greater efficiency, innovation and competitive advantage. But no technology can fulfill that promise without human partnership.

For CEOs committed to scaling AI, the question isn’t whether AI can transform work—it can. The question is: How do you create the conditions where employees want AI to transform their work?

That means moving beyond pilots and mandates to a cultural strategy that puts employees front and centre, equipping them to drive AI initiatives within a foundation of strategic workflow digitization and data governance.

When you make AI work for people, it will work for your business, delivering returns far beyond what technology alone can achieve.

The author is chair of the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, founder of the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME) and former chairman of Microsoft India.