Most leaders will spend a fortune on AI governance before they will spend a single meeting on AI culture.
I understand why. Governance sounds serious. It comes with control, accountability, a chain of command that reminds everyone who is actually in charge. Culture sounds soft, something for the people team, not for the boardroom.
Why does governance without culture fail?
Governance placed on a culture you have not actually looked at does not fix that culture. It reinforces it. A bad culture with strong governance is just a bad culture with better paperwork. I have watched this hold true running a company where my own engineering team is AI agents: structure without an honest look at what is actually happening underneath it just formalizes whatever was already there.
Gartner has the number for this. Only 26% of data governance programs incorporate culture and communication into their strategy, and Gartner predicts that by 2027, 60% of the organizations that keep ignoring that gap will also fail to govern AI successfully.
Why doesn’t the old governance-first rule still hold?
I had this argument properly, with a podcast host recently. He works in governance and change, and his position was that governance has to come first, always, because without control nothing else holds. He is not wrong. He learned that from decades of watching human organizations change slowly, carefully, one policy at a time. But AI does not change at the speed of a policy. It changes at the speed of a download.
What does that look like inside a real organization?
By the time most leadership teams sit down to write their AI governance, their people have already been using AI for months, quietly, without asking. Shadow AI is not a future risk. It is the culture you already have. If you write your governance for the culture you assume is there, the disciplined, wait-for-permission culture, and not the culture that actually exists, you have built a fence around an empty zoo. Every animal is already outside. You just cannot see them from where the fence is standing.
Does governance ever need to come first?
Yes. If your industry is staring down a regulatory deadline, the EU AI Act does not care whether your culture project is finished. Sometimes governance has to go in first, as containment, imperfect and immediate, because the cost of having none at all is not measured in months.
There is no fixed order. There is only a fixed question: which culture are you actually governing, the one you hope for, or the one that is already there?
Get that question wrong, and the strategy built on top of it will fail for reasons nobody in the room can quite name.
Get it right, and you finally know what your organization can actually do with AI, not what you assumed it could.
If you are leading your organization through this, this is the kind of work I do with a limited number of senior leaders each quarter. → https://anglero.com/the-reset/
Strategic AI Advisor, MerkabaPhi AS, Oslo. 450+ keynotes across 30+ countries.
Listen to the Clarity at the Top podcast on Spotify.
Inquiries: anglero.com