How AI Will Expose a
Broken Brand

In recent months, we’ve seen headlines that reveal just how quickly AI is exposing company culture. Consider the CEOs who openly admitted to firing employees who refused to use AI tools. Their message was clear: adopt AI or leave. But coercion is not adoption, and fear is not strategy. This kind of leadership undermines trust and signals to both employees and customers that the company values compliance over creativity (ITPro, 2025).

On the other side of the spectrum, many celebrated when OpenAI posted a job for a content strategist with a salary approaching $400,000. At first glance, it seemed like validation that content still matters in an AI-saturated market. But validation is not the same as culture. A closer look at the posting revealed something different: expectations of life-immersion, an emphasis on growth and acquisition over humanity, and ownership of the ChatGPT voice without much agency inside the company itself. These are my interpretations as The Marketing Psychologist™ — and they reveal the internal brand signals companies send in high-growth phases.

This is the paradox of internal branding. Externally, the brand celebrates humanity. Internally, the signals reveal something else. The language a company uses in job postings, the way it structures leadership behaviors, and the pace it demands of employees are the real windows into culture. And when AI enters the picture, those windows become floodlights.

As I’ve said before: AI is a soft skill. Its value lies not in the technology itself, but in how leaders and teams choose to approach it. A strong internal brand creates psychological safety and adaptability, allowing AI adoption to strengthen trust. A fractured internal brand leads to exposure, resistance, and lost credibility (Edmondson, 1999; Shen, 2025).

Why Internal Brand Matters More Than Ever

A brand doesn’t begin with a logo or a tagline. It begins inside. Internal brand is the lived culture — the shared beliefs, the psychological safety, the everyday experiences that employees carry into every customer interaction. Amy Edmondson’s pioneering work established psychological safety as the cornerstone of learning and adaptation: teams innovate and take risks only when they believe it is safe to do so (Edmondson, 1999).

When the internal brand is strong, employees embody the external promise with consistency and authenticity. When it is misaligned, customers sense dissonance almost immediately (Edmondson & Moingeon, 1998). That is why internal brand health often predicts external trust more than any marketing campaign ever could.

Case Study – Happily.ai
Happily.ai demonstrates what this looks like in practice. Their platform uses gamified feedback and continuous dialogue to build safety into everyday communication. By embedding systems of open exchange, the company created higher engagement and stronger alignment between employee experience and customer outcomes. The results are self-reported, but they highlight how systems reinforce internal brand before external amplification (Happily.ai, 2025).

Leaders who invest in the internal brand create cultures where AI adoption becomes smoother and more sustainable. Without that foundation, every new tool only multiplies misalignment (Kim et al., 2025).

AI as the Stress Test for Psychological Safety

AI adoption acts as a stress test. It exposes whether a culture is rooted in learning or in fear. Psychological safety is the difference between employees feeling free to experiment or feeling pressured to comply (Edmondson, 1996).

Research confirms this. Anxiety reduces long-term AI use, while trust predicts whether employees will sustain adoption over time (Shen, 2025). Ethical leadership plays a central role in whether AI adoption empowers or erodes well-being (Kim et al., 2025).

Case Study – Cresta
Cresta illustrates this reality. Through its Connext program, the company built a “fail forward” culture, framing AI experimentation as safe and necessary. Leaders emphasized that failure was not a liability but a learning process. Alicia Picard, who leads the initiative, highlights that framing failure as progress increases adoption and reduces fear (Cresta, 2025).

The lesson is simple: AI does not create fear. It reveals it. Companies with psychological safety already embedded treat AI as a tool for learning. Companies without it treat AI as a mandate, and the result is resistance, anxiety, and disengagement.

The Cost of Misalignment in High-Growth Companies

For high-growth companies, misalignment comes with an especially steep cost. Many chase amplification — ads, funnels, visibility — before clarifying their internal brand. The result is conversion drag. When internal and external signals conflict, acquisition costs rise, trust declines, and teams become burned out. Research shows that disclosure of AI use can erode trust when misaligned with culture (Acar et al., 2025).

Case Study – CarGurus
CarGurus avoided this pitfall by forming an “AI Forward” working group to pilot tools internally. Instead of pushing adoption through fear or speed, the company prioritized employee sentiment, feedback, and shared learning. This created credibility in the process and built trust that AI adoption was in service of people, not just performance (Business Insider, 2025).

When alignment comes first, AI accelerates clarity. When it doesn’t, AI amplifies chaos. This is the paradox of growth: the faster you move, the more important internal brand alignment becomes (Tong & Kang, 2025).

Internal Brand as the Strategy, Not the Sideshow

Too many leaders treat internal brand as HR’s responsibility and external brand as marketing’s domain. In reality, they are the same strategy seen from two perspectives: one focused on employees, the other on customers.

Amy Edmondson (2023b) emphasizes that psychological safety is not a perk but a leadership imperative. Systems, not slogans, drive culture (Laker et al., 2025). The companies that succeed with AI adoption integrate belonging and safety into operations, not just messaging.

Case Study – AstraZeneca
AstraZeneca offers a compelling example. The company structured AI governance around ethics audits and transparent frameworks, making accountability a core part of its adoption strategy. This operationalized their internal brand into systems that reinforced trust and coherence across teams (AstraZeneca, 2024).

This case underscores a critical point: internal brand is not a sideshow. It is the strategy. Without it, AI adoption risks becoming another example of technology outpacing humanity.

AI and the Brand Paradox

AI magnifies what is already there. It can accelerate belonging or accelerate fear. It can amplify alignment or amplify dysfunction (Kim et al., 2025). The paradox is that your most advanced technology is only as effective as your most foundational human systems.

Belonging remains the foundation of both employee engagement and customer loyalty (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). AI adoption does not change this truth — it only highlights it more clearly.

Case Study – Cascade Insights
Cascade Insights describes how “shadow AI” — employees using unsanctioned AI tools — is not just rebellion but motivation. It reveals a hunger for innovation and a desire to belong in the company’s future. Leaders who treat shadow AI as a signal of engagement can integrate it into safer, more transparent systems. Those who treat it as defiance miss the opportunity to build trust (Cascade Insights, 2025).

This is the brand paradox: employees and customers alike are not simply adopting tools. They are searching for belonging in the story your brand tells.

Conclusion: AI Doesn’t Break Brands, It Reveals Them

AI is not a cure for broken branding. It is a mirror. If your internal brand is fractured, AI will expose it. If your internal brand is aligned, AI will amplify it into trust, credibility, and belonging.

The BELONG™ Framework reinforces this truth: belonging is the ultimate brand strategy (Burns, 2023). As Baumeister and Leary (1995) demonstrated decades ago, belonging is not optional. It is a fundamental human need.

Leaders who approach AI adoption as a soft skill — rooted in psychology, trust, and adaptability — will find that it strengthens their brand from the inside out. Leaders who treat AI as a mandate will find that it exposes cracks until the entire brand feels brittle.

AI will not save a broken brand. But it can reveal one. And if leaders listen, it can also point the way back to alignment, safety, and trust.

References

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AstraZeneca. (2024). Ethics-based AI governance in enterprise. arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.06232. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.06232

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497

Burns, C. (2023). The BELONG™ Framework: A psychology-backed path to sustainable, human-centered business growth. The Marketing Psychologist.

Business Insider. (2025, June 18). CarGurus formed a working group to test AI tools with employees. https://www.businessinsider.com/cargurus-working-group-employees-ai-experimentation-2025-6

Cascade Insights. (2025). Shadow AI: Why employees go rogue and how leaders can respond. https://www.cascadeinsights.com/shadow-ai-why-employees-go-rogue-and-how-leaders-can-respond

Cresta. (2025). Alicia Picard on innovation, failure, and Connext. https://cresta.com/news/alicia-picard-connext-ai-innovation-failure

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Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Edmondson, A. C., & Moingeon, B. (1998). From organizational learning to the learning organization. Management Learning, 29(1), 5–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507698291001

Edmondson, A. C. (2023b, June 14). Four steps to building the psychological safety that high-performing teams need today. Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/four-steps-to-build-the-psychological-safety-that-high-performing-teams-need-today

Gallo, A. (2023, February 15). What is psychological safety? Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2023/02/what-is-psychological-safety

Happily.ai. (2025). Transforming employee engagement: A case study on the power of open dialogue and continuous feedback. https://happily.ai/blog/transforming-employee-engagement-a-case-study-on-the-power-of-open-dialogue-and-continuous-feedback

ITPro. (2025, June 7). These two CEOs cut staff who refused to use AI tools — but forcing workers will only create more resistance. https://www.itpro.com/business/business-strategy/these-two-ceos-cut-staff-who-refused-to-use-ai-tools-but-forcing-workers-will-only-create-more-resistance

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Kim, B. J., Kim, M. J., & Lee, J. (2025). The dark side of artificial intelligence adoption: Linking AI adoption to employee depression via psychological safety and ethical leadership. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 12, 704. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-05040-2

Laker, B., Ogbonnaya, C., Rofcanin, Y., Gorny, T., & Mariani, M. (2025, August 25). To change company culture, focus on systems — not communication. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2025/08/to-change-company-culture-focus-on-systems-not-communication

Shen, L. (2025). Psychological safety and trust as drivers of teachers’ long-term AI tool usage: The role of anxiety as a barrier. Scientific Reports, 15, 1389. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-13789-4

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