One of my clients said they want the efficiency AI can bring. But they’re worried it’ll erase the feeling of care customers value.

They’re a household-name insurer who wants AI to help their support teams reply to customers quicker. When someone’s making a claim they’re in distress, so they need to know what they’re covered for fast.

What they don’t want is feedback like, "You used to be different. Now you sound exactly like everyone else. Where have the humans gone?"

Her fear is that AI will train their organisation to be average.

In chasing efficiency, they risk eroding 40 years of carefully constructed culture. The human touch customers loved? Gone. Their unusual but brilliant way of handling complaints? Standardised. Their tradition of surprising customers with unexpected gestures? The AI didn't even know it existed.

I see this everywhere now. Companies are asking how AI can make us faster. But they should be asking 'how can AI make us more us?'

The hidden cost

Richard Foster-Fletcher recently wrote: ‘Most organisations aren't adopting AI. AI is adopting them.’

He's spot on.

Think about what happens when you implement ChatGPT or Claude across your organisation. You're not just getting a tool. You're getting a world view. These systems learned from millions of documents from thousands of companies. They know the average way to handle complaints. The typical proposal structure. The standard analysis approach.

And now they're teaching your people to be average.

Every prompt your team types, every response they accept, every decision they delegate - it's training your organisation to think like everyone else. Your marketing team discovers which prompts work, but working just means producing patterns from the training data. Your customer service gets faster, but sounds like it could come from anyone.

Yes, there are efficiency gains, but I believe these are cancelled out by the cultural loss.

Why your way matters

Your competitive advantage was never just about doing things right. It was about doing things your way.

Remember Innocent Drinks putting jokes on smoothie bottles? No efficiency consultant would recommend that. No AI would suggest it. But it built a billion-pound brand.

When First Direct launched with no branches in the 1980s, everyone thought they were mad. Today they consistently top satisfaction surveys. Their way became their wealth.

‘It does what it says on the tin’ turned Ronseal into 90s British icon. 20 years later they asked me “how can we make our strong personality more resonant in today’s less blokey culture”.

These aren't inefficiencies to optimise away. They're what make customers choose you.

But generic AI sees quirks as errors. Your unusual complaint handling? It'll ‘fix’ that to match thousands of other companies. Your distinctive voice? Smoothed into vanilla. Those human touches customers remember? They don't even register.

We're heading toward a world where every company sounds identical. Not because anyone decided to give up what makes them different. Because they're all using the same AI trained on the same data with the same objectives.

The AI responds better to structured queries, so teams structure their thinking. It handles certain tasks well, so those become standard. It prefers specific formats, so those become policy.

Death by a thousand standardisations.

But what if AI could amplify your difference?

The problem isn't AI. It's treating AI like you'd plug in a photocopier.

What if instead of asking AI to write like it writes, you taught it to write like your best copywriters on their best days? Instead of letting it handle customers the average way, you trained it your way? Instead of accepting its definition of good, you taught it yours?

This is what I encourage organisations to do. Forget prompt engineering. Go deeper.

Finding your heartbeat

I use a simple exercise that has a huge impact. I ask teams to share stories of when they've been at their best.

At first, people struggle. We're so used to fixing problems, we've forgotten to notice what works. But then the stories come.

Laura from Severn Trent Water told how she drove through snow to deliver flowers and a hand-knitted romper suit to a customer whose water had been off for days with a newborn. No handbook said to do that. She just knew.

These aren't inefficiencies. They're your heartbeat. Once you've captured them and you understand what you're like at your best, everything changes.

The human advantage framework

Instead of AI adopting your organisation, you adopt AI on your terms. Here's how:

Phase 1: Capture your culture

Start with your people at their best.

What does your star salesperson do differently? How does your best service agent handle impossible situations? What makes your top developer's work elegant, not just functional?

The best companies I work with have a rule - if a customer's in genuine distress, find a way to help. And they give their people a budget so they can take action. No AI would learn this from generic training. But build it into your framework and the AI starts making decisions that reflect who you are.

Phase 2: Build your brand

Now translate that cultural intelligence into something AI can amplify.

Capture your real voice – not the guidelines nobody follows, but how your best people actually communicate. Document your methods – the approaches that work because they're yours. Map your unique problem-solving patterns.

This isn't generic prompt engineering. It's encoding your brand into AI systems that think like you, speak like you, and act like you. Your AI becomes an extension of your best people, not a replacement for them.

Phase 3: Energise your experience

Deploy your culturally-trained AI into every touchpoint. This means marketers keep their creative spark. Sales teams share best practices instantly. Service teams mix expertise with genuine warmth.

Every customer then gets your best experience, every time. Your unique approach becomes systematised without becoming soulless.

The multiplier effect

Get this right and something remarkable happens. Instead of AI making everyone average, it makes everyone excellent. Instead of erasing difference, it amplifies it.

Your people aren't fighting generic AI advice. They're building on foundations that reflect your values. They're not being trained to think like machines. The machines are trained to think like your best people.

But more than that – when AI handles routine work your way, your people are free for the extraordinary work only humans can do. The creativity. The empathy. The judgment calls. The moments that matter.

Two paths

Every organisation faces this choice right now.

Path one: Plug in generic AI and get efficiency gains. Watch your culture slowly converge with everyone else's, become interchangeable and compete on price.

Path two: Capture who you are at your best. Build it into your AI. Get efficiency while amplifying what makes you different, and become irreplaceable.

The technical part isn’t hard as the frameworks exist. What's missing is recognising that culture isn't something separate from your AI strategy. It IS your strategy.

Every day counts

Every day using generic AI is a day your teams forget what makes your way special. Every standardised response trains standardised thinking. Every algorithmic decision reduces trust in human judgment.

Foster-Fletcher asks: ‘How do you know if your strategic thinking is still yours?’

You probably don't. The influence is too subtle and too comfortable.

That's why it’s important to act now, before you forget what you're trying to preserve.

Start here

Gather your teams together. Ask them to share moments when they felt most proud. Not biggest wins – their proudest moments. Not when they made the best efficiency gains – the times they made a difference.

Listen for patterns. What keeps surfacing? What do these stories reveal about who you are when you're brilliant?

Record your best people handling difficult situations. Capture not just what they say but how they think. What do they notice that others miss?

Map your weird. What would efficiency consultants try to eliminate? What would generic AI try to standardise? Those aren't bugs. They're features.

Test it by taking a typical customer query and running it through ChatGPT. Then ask your best service person. The difference? That's what you're about to lose.

The future belongs to the different

Everyone will have AI and be faster, more efficient and cheaper.

A sustainable advantage will be being irreplaceable. Being different. And you can't do this if you sound like everyone else.

Your culture isn't something that sits alongside your AI strategy. Your culture IS your AI strategy.

The organisations that understand this will come out ahead.

But only if they capture who they are at their best before they forget. If they build AI that makes them more themselves, not less.

Your customers don't want another efficient, AI-powered service. They want you.

But will you still exist to give them what they want?

The time to capture your culture isn't when you're implementing AI. It's before AI trains you to forget what makes you special.

Ready to build AI that amplifies your difference instead of erasing it? Let's talk...