Article: How AI agents shape brand culture

How AI agents shape brand culture

AI agents shape brand culture by stepping into the place where behaviour actually happens: the workflow. Not later, not in some glossy keynote about tomorrow, but now. In the emails they draft, the meeting notes they summarise, the priorities they sort and the small choices they quietly place in front of us.

The difference with a standard AI tool is that an agent does not just answer a question. It stays embedded in the work: remembering agreements, lining up next steps and quietly shaping what people start to see as normal.

An AI agent becomes a culture carrier the moment it stops merely executing tasks and starts influencing behaviour. At that point, agentic AI is no longer just a useful helper. It becomes a quiet form of internal branding: software that makes people feel, day after day, what an organisation truly values.

So the real question is not whether you use this technology. It is who writes the instructions your agents live by. If you do not build in your values, the default setting will do it for you. And that default setting is usually called faster, flatter, more efficient.

Poorly calibrated agents do not weaken culture with one big mistake, but with a thousand tiny simplifications: safe words, lazy priorities and the average taste of the internet as the quiet boss.

In simple terms: AI agents shape brand culture when they influence decisions, language, priorities and rituals at work. That is why agentic AI belongs in the conversation about internal branding, not just IT or productivity.

How likely are AI agents to become culture carriers?

Short answer: very likely. Not in the science-fiction sense of agents taking over, but as a quiet layer inside work software that pre-selects options, frames choices and nudges behaviour. The question is not whether AI agents will touch brand culture, but how consciously we teach them what to carry.

Three signals point in the same direction. In August 2025, Gartner predicted that 40% of enterprise applications would include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index 2025 shows that leaders expect teams to build multi-agent systems, train agents and manage agents within five years. McKinsey described in 2025 how almost all organisations are using AI and many have already begun working with agents, while also noting that real scale depends on redesigning workflows.

Not a prediction from a model, but my strategic estimate: the chance that agents will influence everyday choices in organisations within 12-24 months is very high: 80-90%. The chance that they will steer culture consciously, consistently and with human judgement is lower: 40-60%. Not because the technology cannot do it, but because culture is not a plugin. You have to translate it into rules, rituals and checks. Otherwise the agent will still steer; only then towards speed, convenience and the average taste of the internet. And the internet rarely wakes up elegant.

AI agents and brand culture

AI agents are built to help us, but help is never neutral. Every email suggestion, every meeting summary and every priority setting inside a project tool comes from an underlying logic. If that logic is not sharply configured, technology defaults to the path of least resistance: pure efficiency.

The result? An office full of competent strangers who happen to share the same workspace. That is why calibration matters. We need to feed AI agents explicitly with the values we care about as an organisation. An agent needs to know whether it should steer towards values such as care, creativity or winning. Without that direction, an agent is a tool without a compass.

And then comes the uncomfortable question: who gets to decide that direction? Leadership, HR, brand, IT, or the team that actually has to work with it? If agents become culture carriers, writing instructions becomes a form of power. Leave that to one corner of the organisation, and you are not automating the culture; you are automating the preference of the loudest voice in the room.

Our own test ground: Notion and agents

At BR-ND People, we believe in practice what you preach. Since the summer of 2025, we have been experimenting with this new reality ourselves. We have moved our internal workflow into Notion and now let our daily tasks be guided by specially trained agents.

This AI practice within BR-ND People has largely been the work of Ayu Koene and Sinyo Koene. With backgrounds in mechanical engineering, software engineering and digital design, they bring exactly the mix this work needs: systems thinking, a maker’s instinct and a feel for human use.

Kim Cramer, myself and the other boomers in the team have meanwhile gone through our own, mildly painful change. Over the past months, we have felt the resistance personally: the discomfort, the new routines, that moment when your old way of working waves at you one last time. But honestly: we can no longer do without it. The scepticism did not disappear because somebody gave a polished demo; it disappeared because the thing works. And by now, slightly annoyingly, we are converts.

The values we stand for are woven directly into how those tasks are guided. The agents 'know' what our strategy, culture and 23plusone values are. That nudges our behaviour, again and again, in the direction we actually want to go.

That may sound abstract, so here is what it looks like in practice: in a proposal, an agent can check not only whether the planning works, but also who on the client team needs to feel ownership from day one and which ritual will make that visible.

What works in a small agency cannot simply be lifted into a healthcare organisation, municipality or corporate with thousands of people, formal consultation processes and legacy systems. But the principle stays the same: every agent that shapes the work also shapes the behaviour around it.

New, healthy heuristics and rituals start to form in our work. Technology reminds us at the right moments to go the extra mile for a colleague, or to look for the more rebellious edge in a creative proposal.

A dynamic system that moves with us

Identity and culture are never finished. That is why our system is not static. Every year, the whole team asks whether the values we stand for are still the right ones. Do they still fit who we are and what the world asks of us?

When needed, we adjust the instructions of our agents straight away. This creates a living system that moves with the identity of the organisation and the needs of our team. Values then do not bloom on posters, but show up as small, precise nudges in the daily flow.

The shift: from poster to instruction

People remain the architects of intent

Does this mean we hand over control to the machine? Quite the opposite. Precisely because agents steer so strongly, the human role as curator of intent becomes more important than ever.

We set the direction; technology helps us hold that direction in the mess of the working day. We build brands people can feel, supported by technology that understands what drives us. The spreadsheets were already correct. Now we make sure people do not get flattened in the process.

How do you see the balance between agent-led steering and team autonomy in a dynamic model like this? If you would like to talk it through and explore what this could mean for your organisation, contact Alexander Koene or Kim Cramer.

Quick answers

• How do AI agents influence brand culture? They influence the micro-decisions people make every day: what gets prioritised, how messages are framed, which behaviours are nudged and which rituals become normal.
• What is the link between AI agents and internal branding? Internal branding turns values into behaviour. AI agents can support that by embedding those values into workflows, prompts, templates and decision rules.
• What makes agentic AI different from ordinary automation? Automation follows a fixed task. Agentic AI can interpret context, make suggestions, coordinate steps and steer choices inside a workflow.

Sources

• Gartner (2025), Gartner Predicts 40% of Enterprise Apps Will Feature Task-Specific AI Agents by 2026
• Microsoft (2025), Work Trend Index: The year the Frontier Firm is born
• McKinsey (2025), The state of AI in 2025: Agents, innovation, and transformation