On Culture: "Culture is Dead"
- Myste Wylde
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Dear Culturati Insider,
When Friedrich Nietzsche wrote “God is dead,” he was describing the collapse of a moral framework that had organized Western society for centuries. Charlie Sull’s “culture is dead” struck me similarly this week: a recognition that another organizing principle may be breaking down—the belief that institutions carry responsibility for the humans operating inside them.
For much of the postwar era, capitalism operated through an implicit social contract: loyalty exchanged for stability, contribution exchanged for mobility, work functioning as a source of dignity and identity rather than income alone. Institutions were imperfect, often deeply so, but they still carried some expectation of stewardship toward the people whose labor sustained them. Workers were viewed as stakeholders in enterprise value, not merely variable inputs.
AI is beginning to test whether corporate America still believes in that obligation at all. The confusion right now is that automation, augmentation, and agency are being treated as though they are the same conversation. They are not.
Automation asks: What can machines do cheaper?
Augmentation asks: What can humans do better with machines?
Agency asks: What happens to people when they lose influence, dignity, and meaningful participation inside systems reorganizing around intelligent technology?
Most organizations are aggressively pursuing the first question while dangerously underestimating the third.
That imbalance is already surfacing in the data. Gartner found this month that companies cutting jobs for AI are seeing little correlation between layoffs and stronger returns, while the organizations outperforming are using AI to amplify human capability, accelerate learning, and improve decision-making. Research across more than 1,200 workers found employees who believed AI strengthened their work showed higher collaboration, stronger adoption, greater well-being, and 32% lower intent to leave, while automation-first organizations experienced higher distrust, burnout, and shallow adoption. Deloitte warns organizations are simultaneously accumulating “cultural debt” as trust, leadership alignment, and workforce adaptation deteriorate faster than AI capability improves. And yesterday, Meta began laying off roughly 10% of its workforce despite reporting nearly $27 billion in quarterly profit, while employees described collapsing morale, distrust, fear, and survival behavior inside the company.
The psychological strain is measurable. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the workforce data arriving alongside the AI boom feels difficult to ignore: nearly 70% of workers now expect AI-driven layoffs within three years, 72% believe employers prioritize productivity over wellbeing, and 84% say burnout is already reducing productivity. 65% report concealing mental health struggles at work, while only one-third strongly believe their employer values their wellbeing at all. The anticipation of displacement itself is becoming an operational variable.
Maybe culture as an employee engagement function is dying. But culture as the operating system governing trust, coordination, adaptability, and human resilience inside volatile environments may become one of the few remaining competitive advantages. The companies that navigate this best will not be the ones that remove humans fastest, but the ones that recognize human agency, trust, and meaning are still essential to long-term performance, innovation, and institutional stability.
Capitalism itself depends on humans having purchasing power, stability, trust, and enough psychological safety to participate in society and markets. One of the defining leadership questions of this transition may become whether the gains created by intelligent systems are shared broadly enough to strengthen society itself or concentrated narrowly enough to destabilize it. As AI dramatically increases productivity, organizations need to reconsider how work, compensation, contribution, and shared prosperity function altogether, whether through shorter workweeks, redesigned roles, broader access to opportunity, or entirely new models for distributing the value created. Beyond the economics, I still believe organizations carry a moral obligation to care for the people whose labor, creativity, and lives helped build them.
As such, the AI era may ultimately force leaders into a harder question than how to increase efficiency or reduce headcount: What are organizations actually for?
Towards shared value,
Myste Wylde, COO
AI Isn’t Paying Off in the Way Companies Think. Layoffs Driven by Automation are Failing to Generate Returns, Study Finds
Fortune By Jake Angelo
Summary: A new Gartner study of 350 global executives found that while 80% of companies piloting AI or autonomous technologies reported workforce reductions, those cuts showed little correlation with stronger returns. The organizations seeing the highest ROI were using AI to amplify employee productivity, accelerate decision-making, and redesign workflows rather than aggressively eliminating headcount. Researchers found workforce reductions occurred at nearly identical rates among companies reporting strong outcomes and those seeing weak or even negative returns, reinforcing concerns that many AI-related layoffs are being driven more by investor signaling, infrastructure funding pressure, or “AI-washing” than measurable operational gains. AI-related job cuts reached more than 49,000 this year alone, yet economists and executives increasingly question whether automation at scale will reduce labor demand long term or simply reshape how work gets done. The larger challenge emerging for leadership teams centers on whether organizations can integrate AI in ways that strengthen capability, adaptability, judgment, and trust while avoiding short-term decisions that weaken long-term performance. |
Dealing with AI’s Cultural Debt
Deloitte By Jason Flynn, Yves Van Durme, Stephen Harrington, Ashley Reichheld
Summary: Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report warns that many organizations are accumulating “cultural debt” as AI adoption accelerates faster than trust, leadership alignment, and workforce adaptation. 42% of workers said their organizations rarely evaluate AI’s impact on people, while 80% of leaders and employees expressed concern that coworkers are using AI to appear more productive than they actually are. Trust in employers declined in 2025 for the first time since 2018, Gallup found only 20% of U.S. workers feel strongly connected to their company’s culture, and 65% of surveyed organizations believe their culture requires significant change to support AI transformation. The report argues that competitive advantage will increasingly depend on whether leaders can strengthen human connection, communication, judgment, and adaptability while redesigning work around intelligent systems. Organizations treating culture as a strategic capability alongside AI adoption are seeing stronger alignment, collaboration, and long-term resilience during transformation. |
Meta’s New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale
Wired By Will Knight and Maxwell Zeff
Summary: Meta began cutting roughly 10% of its workforce yesterday, May 20, despite reporting nearly $27 billion in quarterly profit, deepening what employees describe as “historically low” morale across the company. Workers cite mounting exhaustion, fear, distrust, widening compensation gaps, forced transfers into AI divisions, relentless performance scrutiny, and growing resentment over being monitored to help train the very systems many believe could eventually replace them. Some employees said anyone financially able to leave was actively hoping to be laid off for severance, while others described a collapsing sense of mission, deteriorating confidence in leadership, and a workplace atmosphere defined by anxiety and survival behavior. The unrest comes as Meta dramatically increases AI spending and restructures aggressively around automation, exposing the growing human strain emerging inside organizations racing to operate at machine speed. |
Why Companies That Choose AI Augmentation Over Automation May Win in the Long Run
Harvard Business Review By Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Jeffrey T. Hancock and Kate Niederhoffer
Summary: Organizations pursuing AI primarily through workforce reduction may generate short-term efficiency gains while weakening engagement, retention, collaboration, and long-term capability development over time. Research across more than 1,200 workers found employees who believed their companies were using AI to amplify human capability rather than replace workers showed stronger adoption, higher collaboration, greater well-being, and 32% lower intent to leave. Roughly 60% of employees expressed concern about AI-driven displacement, while organizations perceived as automation-first experienced higher levels of distrust, burnout, shallow AI adoption, and “workslop” — low-quality AI-generated output created under pressure and weak coordination. Companies investing in reskilling, workflow redesign, and human-AI collaboration appear better positioned to strengthen innovation, institutional knowledge, and organizational resilience as AI adoption accelerates. |
7 in 10 Workers Fear AI Layoffs as Burnout, Political Stress and Workplace Distrust Surge
Fair Play Talks By Editorial Team
Summary: A new workforce study found nearly 70% of employees expect AI-driven layoffs within the next three years as organizations accelerate automation amid rising burnout, distrust, and economic anxiety. Among 1,000 full-time workers surveyed, 72% said employers prioritize productivity over wellbeing, 67% reported AI has increased performance expectations, and 84% said burnout is already reducing productivity. The strain appears increasingly structural rather than episodic: 65% said they conceal mental health struggles at work, 57% feel pressure to remain constantly available, and just 33% strongly believe their employer values their wellbeing—down eight points from last year. The findings highlight growing tension between workforce resilience and the pace of AI-driven transformation as companies push for greater efficiency while employee trust, adaptability, and emotional capacity continue eroding. |
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