Insights / Perspective

In an accelerated world, culture is the last thing you can automate

July 2026 · 5 min read

AI is now accelerating processes, progress, and impact across every function. The conversation almost everywhere is about tools and speed: which model, which workflow, how much faster. It is the right conversation to be having, and it quietly misses the harder one. As the mechanical parts of a business get faster and cheaper, the human parts (culture, human touch, human connection) do not become less important. They become the thing that actually distinguishes leaders from laggards, and winners from losers.

That is easy to assert and hard to live, because culture is the one asset that does not scale automatically. A rapidly growing organisation is a moving target: new people arrive faster than the informal ways of transmitting “how we do things here” can keep up. The founders can no longer be in every room. Growth, ironically, is what most threatens the very culture that made the growth possible. So the real question for any leader in an accelerated market is not only how fast can we move, but how do we encapsulate what we stand for and convey it, inspiringly, while the whole company is still sprinting?

It matters commercially, not just emotionally. In a world where AI levels the playing field on capability, the fundamentals that attract and retain key talent become a competitive moat. People do not stay for the tooling; they stay for what the work means and who they do it with. The organisations that upkeep the fundamentals that got them here (clear values, a shared sense of purpose, genuine human care) are the ones that will keep the talent needed to compound their advantage. The ones that treat culture as a nice-to-have, to be sorted out after the next milestone, tend to discover it does not survive the acceleration.

One of the strongest cultures I have worked with is Trackunit's. A genuine rocket ship: from a hardware shop on the outskirts of Aalborg, Denmark, to a global leader in data and analytics for the construction industry, and today a thought leader and pioneer for how AI is reshaping how that industry works. The commercial trajectory speaks for itself. The company was recently reacquired by a consortium of Goldman Sachs and Hg at a valuation north of $1.3bn, having been bought by Goldman Sachs and Danish Gro Capital back in 2021.

But the numbers are not the interesting part. What sets Trackunit apart is a cultural foundation that is second to very few, and the deliberate work put into keeping it intact as the organisation multiplied in size. That is the achievement worth studying: not the valuation, but the fact that the culture held, and stayed a source of energy rather than a story about the old days, through exactly the kind of hyper-growth that usually erodes it.

So how do you encapsulate and convey a culture to a rapidly growing organisation? Part of it is unglamorous discipline: actually putting pen to paper on what the culture is, so it exists as something you can point to rather than something only the early team can feel. But definitions alone do not move people. The other, more powerful part is emotional: creating something that conveys how the culture feels, not just what it says. A film can do that in a way a values deck never will. It gives a new joiner in a new market the same emotional download the founding team carries in their bodies, and it does it at scale, in ninety seconds, on their first day.

That is the piece of work below: a film built to capture and convey the emotional side of Trackunit's culture, created for them by Plateau Agency. It is a good reminder of where the leverage is going. Let AI accelerate the machinery. Spend your scarce human attention on the things it cannot replicate: the culture, the connection, the reasons people choose to build something together. In an accelerated world, that is not the soft stuff. It is the strategy.