Most Teams Are Using AI. Almost None Are Using It Well (The AI Culture Stack)
The AI Culture Stack: the three layers every leader needs to build for their team to truly thrive with AI
In this issue:
Two Teams. Same Tools. Completely Different Results.
Why Most AI Adoption Stays Shallow
The AI Culture Stack
Why This Matters for Leaders
Building the Stack: The One Shift
How This Plays Out in Real Teams
Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)
Final Thoughts
Two Teams. Same Tools. Completely Different Results.
A few months ago, I was talking to two engineering managers in my company. Both of them had similar team sizes, worked on similar domains, and had similar AI tooling budgets.
One of them, Kevin, was buzzing with excitement. His team was using AI across the board, not just writing code faster, but rethinking how they approached problems entirely. They were running multiple experiments in parallel, something they wouldn’t have tried before. They were catching issues earlier through AI-powered automation tests. They were spending more time on the hard thinking, and less on the mechanical work.
Kevin told me that AI had fundamentally changed what his team was capable of.
The other manager, Vikram, was frustrated. His teams had the same tools, and a similar rollout, but the adoption in his team was thin. Some of his team members used them regularly, but most didn’t. And the ones who did were mostly using it for basic tasks such as drafting emails, generating boilerplate code, etc. - things that saved minutes, not hours. So, in the grand scheme of things, nothing in his team had fundamentally changed.
I’ve seen this pattern too many times. Two teams, same access, same tools, completely different outcomes. And almost every time, the difference isn’t the technology.
It’s what the leader built around it.
Why Most AI Adoption Stays Shallow
When most leaders think about AI adoption, they think about access.
They buy the tools, set up the subscriptions, and run a few lunch-and-learns. Some of them even share a few prompt templates on their team Slack channel.
And then they ‘wait’ for the transformation to happen.
But guess what: in a majority of cases, that transformation never happens. What they get instead is a small pocket of enthusiasts or ‘power users’. These are team members who would have figured it out anyway, and didn’t really need that nudge. But the majority of the team only dabbles occasionally and defaults back to how they’ve always worked.
If you ask me honestly, I don’t think this is a ‘people’ problem, or even a ‘tools’ problem. I think it’s a culture problem.
And culture, in the end, is the leader’s job.
The teams that truly thrive with AI aren’t the ones with the best tools or the biggest budgets. They’re the ones where the leader has deliberately built something underneath the tools: a set of conditions that make deep, confident, thoughtful AI use possible.
I call this the AI Culture Stack.
The AI Culture Stack
Think of your team’s relationship with AI as a vertical stack of three layers, each one building on the one below.
