Culture, AI and the human side of reputation – how the real brand experience starts with people

Katharina Auer:

In an age of carefully crafted messaging, organizations spend enormous effort defining their brands. They invest in purpose statements, values, visual identities, and campaigns designed to shape perception. Yet the companies that earn genuine trust tend to understand something simpler: people are the brand.

A brand is a promise. It is the commitment an organization makes to customers, partners, suppliers, communities, and employees about what they can expect. Reputation is the lived experience of that promise.

No customer experiences a strategy. They experience an employee. They build trust through the individuals who represent the organization every day. Whether someone works in engineering, procurement, finance, HR, customer service, or field operations, they shape how the organization is perceived through thousands of decisions and interactions.

The same is true in the digital world. A customer may interact with a portal, chatbot, mobile app, or AI-powered support tool, but their perception of the company is ultimately shaped by the experience those tools create. If a digital platform makes it easy to find information, resolve an issue, or connect with the right expert, it strengthens trust. If it creates frustration, the brand promise is weakened. Technology delivers the interaction, but people design it, manage it, and remain accountable for the outcome. Customers may remember the app, portal, or AI assistant they used, but they judge the organization by the experience it delivered. AI isn’t changing this reality. If anything, it’s making it more visible.

As organizations deploy AI-powered tools across recruiting, performance management, customer service, and decision support, employees are the ones interpreting what these systems mean and translating that into trust. In my experience, people are rarely worried about AI itself. They’re worried about what it means for their job, their expertise, and their ability to make decisions. When leaders are clear about why AI is being introduced and where human judgment still matters, adoption tends to be far smoother. When it arrives without explanation, or begins replacing decisions they used to own, it can feel like a threat to their role and expertise. That anxiety inevitably influences how they interact with customers, colleagues, and the organization itself. That’s why conversations about AI have become culture conversations. 

The risks of getting AI wrong are equally visible. Maybe you remember the delivery company chatbot that was manipulated into swearing at customers and criticizing its own employer. The incident generated significant attention and ultimately led to the AI component being disabled. The lesson was not simply about technology failure. It demonstrated how quickly trust can erode when organizations lose control of experiences that directly represent their brand.

Recruiting is one of the earliest and most important tests of how responsibly organizations apply AI in the brand experience. Screening tools promise speed and consistency at a stage that may have been slow and patchy. Yet these systems are often trained to identify patterns based on previous hiring decisions. Candidates from non-traditional backgrounds, career changers, individuals with employment gaps, older candidates, first job seekers, or simply those whose CVs are not optimized for keyword screening can be filtered out before a human ever reviews their application. 

This is also a reputation issue, many of which have been posted on LinkedIn of late. Every candidate leaves with an impression of the organization, whether they receive an offer or not. Organizations can lose exactly the kind of talent that would strengthen culture, diversity of thought, and innovation without ever realizing it. Keeping humans fully involved at the points where candidates are screened helps protect both talent quality and reputation. The fundamentals haven’t changed. People want to feel that they’re being treated fairly, understand how decisions are made, and know that somebody is accountable when something goes wrong.

Customers experience a similar shift. AI-driven personalization, chatbots, and self-service tools can make interactions faster and more relevant, but they can also make a company feel impersonal, particularly when customers cannot understand how decisions are being made or struggle to find a path to human support. A well-designed chatbot can resolve simple issues in seconds, build confidence, and free employees to focus on more complex problems. A poorly designed one does the opposite. When customers find themselves trapped in repetitive loops, forced to repeat information, unable to explain context, or unable to reach a human being, frustration quickly replaces trust. Customers do not distinguish between the company and its chatbot. They view the experience as one and the same.

As routine interactions become automated, the moments where a human being is involved carry even greater weight in shaping perception, for employees and customers alike.

This is why the strongest organizations are not necessarily the ones with the best technology or AI, or the most compelling campaigns. They are the ones where employees understand what the company stands for and can translate that purpose into daily actions. The best cultures make strategy practical. People understand not only where the company is going but also what that means for them and the work they do every day. People internalize meaning, relevance, and daily experience.

Stories play a critical role in bringing the brand to life. A value such as customer focus becomes tangible when employees hear about a service engineer who prevented a customer shutdown in the middle of the night or a team that solved a seemingly impossible challenge. Stories transform abstract concepts into memorable proof points. They show what the brand looks like in action.

Culture is also reinforced through repeated experiences: onboarding, recognition moments, leadership conversations, leadership behaviors, learning journeys, customer stories, and team rituals. Over time, these experiences become part of an organization’s identity – ‘the way we do things around here’. 

And perhaps the most influential role in all of this belongs to managers. While senior leaders define direction and corporate functions enable it, managers translate culture into everyday reality. They connect company direction with team priorities and individual decisions. For many employees, the company is experienced through their manager.

This has direct implications for how organizations define their brand promise in the first place. One thing I think organizations still get wrong is separating the employee experience from brand. We spend enormous effort defining the customer promise, while the employee promise is often treated separately, when it should be part of the overall brand promise. The commitment an organization makes about how it develops, listens to, recognizes, and supports its people is as real and visible as any customer-facing pledge because employees experience it directly and then carry that experience, consciously or unconsciously, into every interaction with colleagues, customers, partners, suppliers, and communities. It requires the same rigor as customer commitments: honoring what is promised during recruitment, onboarding, development, performance conversations, and organizational change. A gap between promise and experience can erode trust just as quickly as a broken customer commitment. 

The organizations that inspire real loyalty create something deeper than alignment. They create a sense of belonging. Employees feel connected to the purpose, proud of the contribution they make, and part of something larger than themselves. That emotional connection is where advocacy begins. People naturally become ambassadors when they believe the organization says something about who they are and what they value.

Ultimately, reputation isn’t built through campaigns or communication alone. It’s built through experiences. Through how people are treated. Through whether commitments are kept. Through the decisions leaders make when things get difficult. Over time, those experiences are what people talk about.

A brand is a promise
Reputation is the lived experience of that promise
Technology can help scale it
People are the ones who bring it to life every single day

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Katharina Auer is VP/Global Head of Internal, Service, HSE, Suppliers & Partners, SD Communications, Communications Business Solutions at Hitachi Energy. She is a recognized corporate communications & change leader and strategist with focus on measurable outcomes. She has worked for companies such as GE, AstraZeneca, Shell, Rio Tinto, Zurich Insurance, ABB and gained multi-cultural experience in the UK, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Nigeria, and South Africa. She has also served as a non-executive board member and co-chaired the Conference Board’s European Corporate Communications Council. Katharina is a Strategic Member.