Culture Eats Compute for Breakfast
- Vivienne Wei
- Dec 27, 2025
- 2 min read
In the AI arms race, everyone’s talking about GPUs, LLMs, and model size. But the AI value gap is not a compute issue. It’s a leadership design issue.
95% of enterprises are experimenting with AI.
Fewer than 5% have scaled it.
Culture eats compute for breakfast.
The barrier to enterprise-scale AI isn’t infrastructure. It is Governance + Trust + Behavior and how fast an organization can culturally metabolize Agentic AI systems powered by high quality, secure data.
Why AI Initiatives Stall:
Leaders delegate AI rather than champion it
Teams fear imperfection
Success is measured by output, not engagement
In short: misaligned culture erodes enterprise AI ROI.
Real-World Agentic Enterprise Success Stories
Shortly after Dreamforce, our AI agents started to resolve 40% of support cases. Technology didn’t drive scale alone - leadership behavior did:
Executives like Muralidhar Krishnaprasad (MK), Raveendrnathan Loganathan, Bernard Slowey, and Andy White modeled hands-on experimentation
Management rewarded usage, not just precision
Marc Benioff, our CEO, trusted us to iterate and improve
✅ Indeed x Agentforce
Deploying AI Agent on Indeed onboarding workflows unlocked time savings, team satisfaction and more importantly, trust. Our cross-company tiger team focused on:
Clear governance
Strategic enablement
Measuring adoption as a KPI, in addition to efficiency
These Agentic Enterprise stories were successful because leaders treated Culture as Infrastructure.
Strategic Takeaways for Boards & C-Suite Executives
The biggest returns from AI must come from smarter signals, which are not measured by spend. Boards and CEOs must treat culture as infrastructure by modeling adoption from the top, incentivizing behavior change, and designing real-time orchestration loops. The question isn’t just where the AI budget goes, but who is wiring the system to learn, adapt, and scale.
Boards should be asking: “Who’s owning the cultural mechanics of adoption?”
For every dollar spent on AI infrastructure, ask: "What fraction is invested in the culture that enables it?"
The organizations that win this decade won’t just out-compute. They’ll out-behave, and make adoption inevitable.
Three Ways to Accelerate AI Adoption inside Your Org
You can start here:
Celebrate early experiments — even when they’re messy
Reward usage, not just results
Model curiosity from the top down
Because culture isn’t what you say. It’s what you reinforce.
In this next era of intelligent agents, culture will be the differentiator that determines whether your AI effort is a flash… or a flywheel.
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