Organizations that successfully navigate artificial intelligence (AI) transformation share one thing in common: They’ve intentionally built a culture where people can learn continuously and adapt confidently. This foundation matters more now than ever. The pattern shows up consistently across companies at every scale through technology implementations that stall, teams that resist adoption and transformation initiatives that fail to gain momentum despite substantial investment. When you trace back to understand why, you discover that culture and having the right skills in place determine whether technology gets adopted and whether transformation succeeds.

Most organizations build their technology strategy separately from their culture strategy, treating them as distinct domains. They establish a culture team to manage values and a separate group to handle technology implementation, expecting these parallel efforts to somehow align. Culture determines whether strategy succeeds, and leaders who understand this foundation build it deliberately and intentionally.

What the Research Reveals

The latest Pearson and ServiceNow Workforce Skills research reveals why this matters. The research analyzed 5,600 jobs across 12 countries and identified 59 roles that will grow by at least 50% over the next five years.

These roles require people who can work alongside technology, exercise sound judgment in ambiguous situations without established playbooks and navigate continuous change. They include positions like AI ethics advisor, human-AI experience designer, IT business partner and industrial-organizational psychologist.

While technical skills are growing at the fastest rate, human skills — including leadership, collaboration and judgment — are becoming essential across every country, industry and organization. This pattern shows what transformation demands from people and why culture becomes the prerequisite foundation.

Organizations can’t fill these complex roles, and they can’t execute meaningful transformation without having already built a culture where people are willing to develop these capabilities.

The 4 Conditions That Shape Transformation

Working with organizations through AI transformation reveals four specific conditions that determine how a culture responds when change accelerates.

1. Connection

Connection matters more than ever when people start working with AI. We need to create opportunities for employee-led communities, shared experiences and team-building moments that strengthen collaboration. Leaders must equip employees and teams at all levels with tools, experiences, programs and communities needed to bring culture to life in meaningful and actionable ways.

2. Psychological Safety

Psychological safety emerges when people can admit what they don’t know, ask for help, and learn new ways of working. Leaders create psychological safety by being open about their own AI learning journeys and by treating their own mistakes as valuable learning lessons.

3. Accountability

Accountability sustains culture through consistent follow-through on what matters. When we innovate relentlessly, execute with excellence and collaborate across boundaries, expectations stay clear, progress gets tracked, wins get celebrated and challenges get addressed. When accountability happens across all levels of an organization, culture becomes durable and self-reinforcing.

4. Continuous learning

A continuous learning mindset takes hold when leaders visibly invest in their own growth, admit what they are learning in real time and openly discuss their failures and course corrections with their teams. Leaders who build this culture create environments where people are willing to learn continuously. They ask what people need, invest in real development and create space for people to grow.

Developing Managers to Build These Conditions

Managers play a key role in AI transformation. As learning leaders, it’s our job to ensure they have the tools to lead their teams successfully through change.

Begin with an honest assessment. Ask which of the four conditions truly exist in the organization right now, based on what employees experience day to day. Compare what managers believe exists with what their teams really experience. Then, identify which leader populations have the greatest influence and where the biggest gaps exist between aspirations and reality.

Redesign leadership development around building these conditions through sustained, experiential learning. Create peer learning cohorts where leaders practice giving real feedback, discuss their own change anxiety, and work through real problems together. Leaders learn how to create psychological safety by experiencing it in their own development.

Scale this work intentionally down the organizational chart. Culture develops in conversations between frontline managers and their teams every week. Frontline managers shape culture through daily conversations with their teams. The organizations that win are the ones that intentionally equip these managers with the skills and tools to foster psychological safety and accountability.

Lastly, measure culture outcomes rather than training completion rates. Track how employees in teams with engaged leaders experience belonging, psychological safety, and learning opportunity. Correlate these factors with retention, engagement and innovation.

Why This Matters Today

AI transformation is coming to every organization. An organization’s success navigating that transformation depends on whether it has already built a culture where people are willing to learn continuously, where leaders can navigate change with confidence and where teams view change as opportunity for growth.

Culture is the foundation that determines AI transformation success. Start building this foundation now.