Beyond Content: Using AI to Build Culture

Here's a fun experiment: Open ChatGPT, Claude or other AI tool of choice and type in "what does it mean to learn." Read the response. Then look at the AI learning solution you're evaluating or already using.

To what extent does that tool critically reflect the definition you just read?

I keep seeing the same celebrations on LinkedIn: Gorgeous AI systems that create personalized learning paths. AI tools that generate content and platforms promising just-in-time delivery of exactly what each learner needs. The technology looks beautiful and is genuinely impressive.

AND: I'm curious — and so ready to shift the conversation — about what becomes possible next.

When I ask ChatGPT what it means ‘to learn,’ it tells me:

"To learn is to internalize something new so that it meaningfully changes how you think, feel, or act.
Notice what this defies:

• If you read something and nothing changes, you haven't learned.

• If you can recite a concept but can't apply it, you haven't learned.

• If you "know" but don't do, is it learning or storage?"

We know real learning involves behavioral change, sense-making, applying knowledge in new contexts, often through social interaction and reflection. Most AI learning platforms have mastered making content accessible and personalized — that's genuinely valuable work.

There's another frontier we could explore together: how AI might support the cultural sense-making that turns content into capability.

Many organizations list teamwork as a core value yet train people individually, prioritizing skill competence while underinvesting in team coherence. We can train 500 people on feedback skills and still not have a feedback culture, because culture lives in how teams make sense of challenges together, not in what individuals consume separately.

The two most critical learning journeys in any organization are onboarding & leadership development. Both require cultural transmission, contextual sense-making, and team formation. Leadership development is more than skills training. At any brand, it's a mix of hard and soft capabilities, company history, strategic ambitions, and the moment you're in, usually passed down through stories & legends from leaders who lived it. Right now there's a huge opportunity to explore how AI might support these moments in ways we haven't imagined yet.

• What if AI helped teams learn together instead of just delivering content to individuals faster?

• How might we leverage AI as a contextual intelligence layer?

Imagine a tool that monitors both your internal reality + the external pressures your people are navigating.

Internally: stock performance, survey signals, team dynamics.
Externally: political volatility, financial markets, environmental events, religious holidays, regional conflicts.

Your team is working on leadership presence while your stock dropped 20%, your US employees are processing election outcomes, and your team in the Middle East is observing Ramadan. AI could weave those contexts into scenarios: "How does your approach to one-on-ones shift when your team is carrying external stress you can't control? What does empathetic listening sound like across these different pressures?"

Or imagine AI that helps surface equity and power dynamics in real time. A manager is preparing for a difficult conversation. AI reviews the history: last three check-ins focused on the same performance gap with zero improvement, manager tends to soften feedback with this direct report but not others, the employee mentioned feeling overlooked in their last performance review. AI offers: "You've circled this topic three times without clarity. Here's a conversation framework rooted in our brand values + behavioral science that might help you get traction. Would you like to try it?"

Rather than automating the conversation, AI is giving the manager better situational awareness before they walk into the room — surfacing patterns they might miss in the day-to-day stress of running the business.

Then humans do the learning work: the conversation, the reflection, the cultural translation. AI didn't teach anyone, it created better raw material for the sense-making that teams need to do together.

Or imagine AI in a live facilitated session, noticing patterns the facilitator might miss. Not replacing human judgment, but catching when a team keeps deflecting, or when a question reveals deeper misalignment. This could support L&D teams who struggle with facilitator capacity by helping less experienced facilitators catch what senior practitioners would notice. That's AI supporting team sense-making at scale, across cultures & contexts, rather than automating individual content consumption.

This changes what we ask vendors from "how personalized is your content delivery," to "does your tool help teams make sense of challenges together?" Not "how much can you automate" but "how does this build culture, not just skills?” The technology exists to do this. We're just still aiming it at a different target than we could be.

I recognize building this is complex — technically, economically, organizationally. Yes, data integration is hard (cue the 18-month timelines + $2M budgets), and GDPR and privacy considerations are real. But some of this could start simpler than we think: external context from RSS feeds, internal data leaders already have access to, layered intelligence that enhances rather than replaces existing tools. Complexity has never been a reason to avoid problems worth solving.

We've been focused on AI content and learning paths for the past few years now; I'm hoping we can shift the conversation forward. If you're working on AI for learning — as a vendor, buyer, or practitioner — what would team-centered learning look like at your org.? How could AI strengthen the cultural conversations and collective sense-making that build capability for your teams?

I'm genuinely curious what you're seeing, building, or experimenting with. Companies getting this right will be the ones who understand that learning is so much more than tailored content. Real cultural learning is what happens when teams work through real challenges together, with the right context & support.

Let's build toward that. 🙌🏻