AI is being deployed everywhere — in São Paulo call centers, Tokyo manufacturing floors, Lagos fintech startups, and Berlin hospital systems. But most AI narratives are written in one cultural dialect and broadcast to the world as if that’s sufficient. It isn’t.
As an anthropologist, I’m here to tell you that in today’s global marketplace, your AI story needs to do more than resonate, it needs to resonate everywhere. And that challenge is harder now than it has ever been, because AI carries radically different meanings depending on where you stand.
In some cultures, automation signals progress and liberation. In others, it triggers deep anxiety about dignity, displacement, and who gets left behind. The technology may be universal. The human experience of it absolutely is not.
Layer on top of that the disconnection crisis already fracturing workplaces globally — employees feeling unseen, leaders communicating in metrics rather than meaning, entire teams being handed AI tools with no story about why — and you have a recipe for widespread resistance dressed up as indifference.
The solution isn’t a better slide deck. It’s empathy at scale: finding the human threads that connect us across borders, while respecting the very real cultural differences that shape how people receive change.
Have you ever dealt with this? You’ve crafted what feels like a compelling AI narrative, rolled it out across regions, and watched it land brilliantly in one market and fall completely flat in another. The message didn’t change. The audience did. That’s not a translation problem — it’s a cultural resonance problem, and it’s one of the most underestimated challenges in global AI adoption today.
If you’re exploring a global roll out of your AI Strategy, and need to tell a story across geographies and cultures, I can help.