Transforming Your Organization in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

All organizations, including cultural organizations, face an unprecedented transformation due to the emergence of generative and agentic Artificial Intelligence. The issue is not whether to “adopt” AI or not, but to understand how this anthropological mutation can serve the democratic and humanistic mission of the cultural sector by cultivating collective intelligence.

An invisible yet radical transformation

I have the feeling, and I’m not alone, that our world is changing at high speed, quietly. An enormous amount is happening, but this transformation remains largely imperceptible. Investments in artificial intelligence are massive, dizzying sums are being mobilized, entire laboratories are working day and night to redefine the boundaries of what’s possible. Yet nothing seems to show through in our immediate daily lives.

As Laurent Alexandre and Olivier Babeau write in Learning Differently in the Age of AI (2025):

“The most troubling thing about the AI era is ultimately not the speed of changes. It’s their invisibility and the absence of revolt. It’s the indifference of a humanity that doesn’t yet feel expropriated from its cognitive monopoly when it already is.”

This invisibility reminds me of John Carpenter’s film They Live (1988): only those who wear special sunglasses and maintain an attentive gaze can discern the ongoing change, see the slogans behind street posters, and the iron faces behind certain human faces. We are living through what Bernard Stiegler called a “disruption,” meaning a transformation so rapid that it doesn’t give individuals and societies time to adapt.

Faced with this acceleration, the issue is not to be “for” or “against” AI. It’s about understanding that the world is changing and positioning ourselves, not in denial or blind rush forward, but in an awareness of the transformations underway. Moving toward this awareness means cultivating our humanity.

From work-as-employment to work-as-transformation

Alexandre and Babeau assert:

“It’s work itself that’s changing in nature. Human beings are no longer cogs in a slow and hierarchical system, but the switchpersons of a swarm of intelligences. They no longer execute but orchestrate. The rarest and most precious skill becomes the ability to work with the unknown, to explore the margins, to conceive the unprecedented.”

This evolution raises an important question in the field of organizations: insofar as the use of artificial intelligences can substitute for certain skills, this risks having the effect of diminishing people’s own competencies. For employment not to become absurd, we must enable teams to acquire new competencies, properly human ones, that escape automation.

Work, in its very etymology (which doesn’t come from the Latin tripalium, as long believed, the instrument of torture, but from the root of travel in English, meaning voyage, transformation), evokes displacement, metamorphosis. As André Gorz already said in Metamorphoses of Work (1988), we must move from a society of work-as-employment to a society of work-as-creation, where human activity rediscovers its creative meaning.

The essential skills for remaining inscribed in tomorrow’s social space are no longer technical but profoundly human: creativity, empathy, the ability to accompany transformations. These are precisely the qualities that the traditional work system devalues. But they constitute the heart of cultural missions!

Collective intelligence as method

What needs to be cultivated, developed, is connection. Creating connections between people, creating cooperation, establishing collective intelligence, including to better use artificial intelligences and to do things together that machines cannot do.

Cooperation is therefore essential. The production of the common good requires decentralization and communication between all these decentralized mini-centers. Large companies that want to function flexibly and nimbly must reorganize themselves into micro-poles that cooperate with each other and mutually enrich one another. This produces far more conclusive results than globalizing centralization.

As the Alexandre-Babeau duo also writes:

“What’s dying isn’t human work. It’s standardized execution, the rigid model of lifetime employment. What’s being born is augmented work, mobile, hybrid, supported by powerful tools but more than ever dependent on the quality of the minds that mobilize them.”

Thus, the culture of connection, relationships, mutual stimulation, emotion management, psychosocial skills, becomes absolutely crucial. This is what will enable certain structures to resist and even prosper: the combined movements of using artificial intelligences and cultivating a powerful humanism.

Reflection for a two-phase support proposal

I propose to cultural structures an iterative support approach, where through collective intelligence mechanisms (and not just artificial intelligence!), we will bring teams into cooperation with AI to define through experimentation the areas where these technologies enable improvement of work processes, people’s qualifications, as well as the exercise of missions.

Phase 1: Diagnosis and collective experimentation
This first phase aims to identify, with teams, the relevant uses of AI in their specific context. It includes a common core of understanding the issues (history, environment, systems of domination, potentials), then participatory workshops: “My skills with AI,” “My desires with AI,” “My professional needs.” We identify potential “AI mentors” among employees, people who can devote part of their time to helping others.
Sectoral workshops, based on the World Café principle, then allow ideas for uses to emerge to improve work quality in each activity sector. It’s from these workshops that choices and decisions can be made by management.

Phase 2: Evolution of missions and roadmap
The second phase focuses on the evolution of the structure’s missions themselves. Due to the integration of artificial intelligences, missions can be rethought. AI can be a very powerful tool for revealing the actual practices of audiences and staff members, with the aim of fostering deep cultural democracy, respectful of everyone’s rights and dignity.

The goal is to arrive at a roadmap and extremely concrete actions, carried out by the people themselves. Each person must feel like an actor to propose, at their level, to serve the structure’s objectives, and not just be an executor. This is where there are important transformations in management, to be able to welcome the power of collective intelligence while maintaining overall coherence.

The challenge of data and documentation

To exploit the synthesis and analysis potential of generative AIs, we must rethink our relationship to documenting our activities. We need to generate structured data en masse, establish documented experimentation protocols.

The traditional approach to surveys and optimization processes locks us into predefined frameworks that stifle cultural and social innovation. I advocate instead for an exploratory posture where AI helps welcome surprises, by asking non-directive questions to discover invisible patterns and reveal symbolic barriers to cultural participation.

Moreover, the political question is essential. Where are the AIs we use hosted? Who controls these technologies? What biases do they convey? What energy do they consume? These questions are not technical but profoundly political. Within a cultural structure, we must respect Corporate Social Responsibility: the choice of AI tools must be responsible, because the structure is funded by public money.

Cultivating our humanity facing machines

Alexandre and Babeau offer a rather polemical viewpoint, but one that nonetheless makes us reflect on what work is in its ontology:

“The real threat isn’t just Artificial Intelligence. It’s our own laziness. Or rather the economy of laziness, that we carry in our pocket, in the form of apps and notifications. AI doesn’t make us stupid. It reveals how ready we are to become so.”

We cannot prevent the omnipresence of machines, but we can choose to intensely cultivate our human connections. Machines free us from time and effort: let’s take advantage of this opportunity to reinvest in what makes us specifically human. I repeat: the capacity for empathy, spontaneous creativity, contextual judgment.

Martin Buber distinguished in I and Thou (1923) two fundamental relational modes: the “I-It” relationship (instrumental) and the “I-Thou” relationship (authentic). Our challenge is not to transform all our relationships into connections mediated by algorithms, but to preserve and enrich spaces of genuine encounter.

The issue is not to reject machines but to maintain them in their proper place as tools, even though they are cognitive and rapidly evolving. As Jürgen Habermas writes, we must preserve our “lifeworld” (Lebenswelt) against colonization by technical systems. Machines can augment our capacities, but they must not substitute for our fundamental humanity; on the contrary, we must use them as tools to contribute to it. We still need to define what our fundamental humanity is. This is precisely a philosophical project that can be discussed within organizations; if we don’t do this, these machines will destabilize and destroy us, because they resemble us.

Support anchored in experience

I advocate for what I call institutional antifragility based on the quality of human connection. The institutions that will survive and prosper are not those that will have the best technical tools, but those that will have known how to maintain, enrich, and deepen the connections between the people who compose them.

This conviction is rooted in my thirty years of experience supporting cultural institutions in their digital transformations. I’ve seen technologically perfect projects fail for lack of trust between actors. I’ve seen makeshift experiments succeed brilliantly because the team was united. Technology is only an amplifier: it amplifies both our capacities and our dysfunctions.

History teaches that pure resistance is always doomed to failure. Music streaming swept away an industry that had refused to think about digital transformation. Today, refusing to think about AI condemns us to endure it. But thinking about AI doesn’t mean submitting to it. It means developing a collective intelligence capable of negotiating with it, domesticating it, putting it at the service of our human projects.

Not putting blinders on to the changing world and facing it head-on means giving ourselves the means to contribute to taking it in a humanistic, diversified, democratic, and republican direction. The goal of all this is to be increasingly connected to reality, to explore the world around us, the opportunities in connections, instead of still believing that we’re competent thanks to knowledge. No: we will be competent thanks to the culture of connections, empathy, interconnection, the capacity to be enriched by others and to propose new cooperations.