For Pernod Ricard, the $10 billion spirits and wine company whose flagship brands include Absolut, Chivas Regal, Jacob’s Creek, and Malibu, accelerating its digital transformation is a priority. Three years ago, when the French company started using artificial intelligence to drive sales, it braced itself for a revolt by its salespeople. But its fears proved to be unfounded: In fact, the salesforce embraced A.I. because the technology added to, rather than replaced, its experience and knowledge.

Pernod Ricard fostered trust in its algorithms by using business experts to design them, and by gathering extensive feedback from the first users. The company ensured that the reasoning behind the A.I.’s decisions was communicated clearly to employees, and that its recommendations reinforced salespeople’s pitches. Using A.I. has not only improved Pernod Ricard’s performance, helping it optimize its advertising budget allocation and leading to increased revenues per salesperson, surprisingly, it has also changed the company’s culture. “Our people are more confident, have greater clarity [about their roles], and morale is higher,” points out Pierre-Yves Calloc’h, Pernod Ricard’s chief digital officer.

Every CEO worries that culture will make or break their company’s A.I. deployment, but few realize that, conversely, A.I. can also transform organizational culture. When companies use the technology successfully, employees across the organization are able to perform more efficiently and collaborate more effectively. As a result, cultures change, altering employees’ behaviors as well as their goals. The recent 2021 MIT SMR–BCG research report on A.I., based on a global survey of over 2,000 managers, identified—for the first time—a slew of cultural benefits that accrue because of A.I., which we will focus on in this column.

Deploying A.I., according to our study, changes one or more of the four dimensions of organizational culture, viz collective learning, collaboration, morale, and role clarity. In all, 58% of the companies we surveyed reported that the use of A.I. increased team efficiency and decision-making quality. And within that group, as many as 97% noticed an improvement in at least one of the culture-related parameters, while 51% of the sample registered improvements on all four dimensions.