A Framework to Adopt AI Without Sacrificing Your Culture

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AI tools have the power to transform your agency’s operations — the systems, the processes, and, of course, the people who run them.

It’s that last part that likely keeps you up at night.

After all, you know your team well enough to know they won’t all respond the same way. Some will run with the new tools immediately. Others will resist, covertly or otherwise. And the people whose expertise defines your firm may be the most conflicted of all.

What you don’t have — yet — is a clear read on where each of your people actually stands. You have hunches. But you don’t have a  framework for assessing your team’s readiness before the rollout begins.

That gap matters. The tools you’re building are only as valuable as the team’s willingness and ability to use them. A well-built AI platform that half your firm never adopts is a failed investment, regardless of how great the tech is.

Sustainable AI implementations start with an honest read of the people the tools are being built for — and a tailored plan to support them through the adoption process. 

The 4 dimensions that influence AI adoption

Many AI adoption frameworks sort people into a single category — the champion, the skeptic, the laggard — each with a suggested approach. But a single label condenses too much. The same “skeptic” tag can cover both a senior designer whose career feels threatened and a junior producer who just had an underwhelming first experience. Those aren’t the same person, and they don’t need the same response.

Each person’s attitude toward AI adoption is influenced by at least four distinct variables: Posture, Craft anchor, Agency, and Role fit. 

Reading someone accurately means reading all four together, not sorting them into a single bucket. Here’s what each variable captures and why it matters.

Posture: orientation toward AI

Posture is the dimension most existing frameworks focus on. It captures each person’s feelings about AI adoption and runs along a spectrum from actively resisting AI to proactively building new capabilities with it.

Reading posture accurately matters because it tells you where to meet each person. Someone resistant needs something different from someone who is already comfortable experimenting. And both need something different from a team member who’s so captivated by the new technology that they’re already pulling ahead of leadership in terms of fluency. 

Posture is the dimension that’s most likely to move with the right support. Unlike craft anchor or role fit, which describe something closer to a person’s underlying orientation or a structural fact about their position, posture is responsive to what happens around it. 

How change is communicated, whether someone feels supported while experimenting, whether early stumbles are met with patience or judgment, and the extent to which a person’s seat feels “safe” — these and other factors can nudge a team member one way or the other along the posture spectrum. A resistant posture today doesn’t necessarily predict a resistant posture in six months. That’s what makes it worth tracking over time, and worth investing in directly.

But posture alone is a surface reading. It tells you how someone is orienting, but not why. It doesn’t tell you what’s underneath, or whether their orientation is stable. 

Craft anchor: where professional pride lives

In my experience, this is the dimension that most clearly predicts how a team member will respond to a new AI tool, at least initially. 

Some team members derive their professional identity from their sense of craft — the specific expertise they’ve built, the skills they’ve honed, the way they’ve come to be recognized as a master of their particular domain. Others derive it from outcomes — the results they help produce, the problems they help solve, the value they help create. 

Both are valid ways to operate, and most people are somewhere on the spectrum rather than at either end.

The more craft-anchored a person is, the more they tend to feel threatened by AI. It makes sense. Craftspeople are process-oriented. They care deeply about the techniques and processes they’ve honed as well as the tools they use, all of which may be radically disrupted by AI. 

Resistance isn’t a personality flaw of craft-anchored people. It’s a legitimate response to a technology that’s changing what they do and how they do it. 

Outcome-anchored people, by contrast, tend to be more focused on the ends than the means. If AI helps them get to better outcomes more efficiently, that’s a good thing, process be damned. As a result, they usually adopt AI more quickly than their craft-anchored counterparts. 

It’s important to note that certain disciplines, like writing and graphic design, are intrinsically more craft-anchored. But it’s still possible for a writer or designer to be more or less outcome-oriented by nature. For instance, you might have a designer on your team who is innately more outcome-anchored than your finance person, who happens to be wedded to her custom-built spreadsheets. On our writing team, we saw a range of responses to the new technology, based in large part on the degree to which each person was craft-anchored or outcome-anchored. 

Once you can see this dimension, a lot of what looks like resistance becomes legible. Your best people aren’t dragging their feet because they’re stuck in the past. They’re protecting something they spent a career building. That’s a very different problem to solve than resistance-as-stubbornness, and it requires a very different conversation.

Agency: level of self-direction

Agency is about how much someone is driving their own AI adoption versus waiting for direction. It runs along a spectrum from self-directing (they’re already experimenting, finding tools, integrating them into their work without being told) to responsive (they’ll adopt what leadership introduces) to hesitant (they need active oversight and encouragement to engage).

This dimension matters because it tells you who can lead and who needs to be led. Self-directing people with positive posture are your natural influencers — the people whose adoption pulls others along. Hesitant people, regardless of posture, need scaffolding that self-directing people don’t.

Getting this wrong (treating a hesitant person like a self-directing one, or vice versa) is one of the fastest ways to lose adoption momentum on either end of the spectrum.

Agency is also relatively independent of posture, which is what makes reading it separately so useful. Someone can be positive about AI and still be hesitant about how to move forward with it. Alternatively, someone can be skeptical about AI and still be highly self-directing in how they investigate their skepticism. Reading team members accurately means seeing both dimensions at once.

Role fit: how each role survives the new operating model

This is the most sensitive dimension, and the one that requires the most care to read. 

It’s critical to note that role fit isn’t a read on the person. It’s a read on the role. It’s a structural question about what your operating model looks like on the other side of the rollout, and where that specific role fits into it.

Role fit sits along a spectrum from amplified (AI makes their role meaningfully more valuable) to transformed (their role changes shape but remains) to at-risk (significant portions of their work are directly automatable) to sunset (the role as currently structured won’t survive the transition).

This is where the most honest, difficult conversations live. It requires you to make judgments about the future of your own operating model that may feel both emotionally charged and hard to predict. 

But avoiding it doesn’t make the reality go away. 

If you’re wondering about the future of a seat, the people occupying it most certainly are, too. Failing to address that uncertainty leaves the team feeling the ambiguity without being able to name it. When that happens, adoption becomes charged with unspoken anxiety about what the tools will mean for who. I witnessed this firsthand with the writers on our team, who needed to talk first about how the technology might impact their role before they could relax into an open exploration of the tools themselves. 

Adoption goes much more smoothly, with far less individual stress and cultural fallout, when firms have role fit conversations early and structurally rather than late and reactively.

Reading the team as a whole

Once you can read individuals across these four dimensions, you can also read patterns across the team.

For instance, a firm whose senior craft cohort clusters together at “hesitant posture, craft-anchored, moderate agency, at-risk role fit” is looking at a very specific challenge. In this case, all the training and support in the world won’t inspire this group to embrace the tools. What they need first are honest conversations about what their roles evolve into.

A firm where junior producers cluster at “compliant posture, outcome-anchored, hesitant agency, transformed role fit” is looking at a different challenge — willingness without initiative, at a point in the org chart where the roles are changing shape but not disappearing. That’s a scaffolding problem. It’s very solvable, but only if you don’t confuse it with a resistance problem.

The pattern-level view is what lets you sequence the AI rollout intentionally. Where do you invest early to build momentum? Where do you slow down to make space for harder conversations first? How do you identify influencers with the sway to carry the adoption story to peers who won’t hear it from leadership? 

None of those questions is answerable from a single-category read of your team. All of them become answerable when you put the four dimensions together.

Where this leaves you

If you’re preparing your firm for an AI implementation — or you’re already in the midst of one and starting to see the cracks — your next step is to assess your team’s readiness using a multidimensional framework like the one we’ve covered here. 

It gives you the ability to execute a rollout intentionally, with a plan that supports your people and amplifies adoption, too. Skip it, and you’re sequencing a rollout on instinct rather than evidence. Do it well, and you’ve replaced guesswork with an actual plan for who needs what, and when.

At Newfangled Frontier, adoption consulting is built into every build precisely because tools without team readiness don’t deliver value. Ready to learn more?

Check out Newfangled Frontier