--- title: "The Ident Series: How to identify dead company culture in the age of AI and agentic work" url: "https://getsorted.valuebull.com.au/ident/" updated: 2026-10-25 demo: true --- > **Demo content.** Items marked [DEMO] are made up for illustration and must be replaced before launch. # The Ident Series: How to identify dead company culture in the age of AI and agentic work **Short answer:** Dead company culture is culture that exists only on paper: values on a wall, a strategy in a deck, habits nobody chose. The Ident Series is a free 12 week guide from GetSorted to finding it, department by department, now that AI agents are doing real work in Australian businesses. ## How does the series work? Every Monday from 5 October to 21 December 2026: a full article on the site (with PDF and EPUB downloads), a six to seven minute solo podcast episode, a short version on Medium, and a worksheet that turns that week's ident check into an AI prompt. Each week covers one part of the business with the same five sections (the warning signs, the gap, the AI test, the connection and the ident check) and the same five questions: what does the company say, what's actually written down, what really happens, what happens when AI gets involved, and where does the problem travel next. Each week adds to a company culture map. **The central idea:** AI doesn't automatically fix a broken culture. It makes the gap between what a business says and what it actually does harder to ignore. ## The 12 weeks ### Part 1: Diagnosing the problem (weeks 1 to 3) 1. **The big picture**: [What dead culture looks like when AI joins the team](https://getsorted.valuebull.com.au/ident/dead-culture-meets-ai/index.md) (5 Oct 2026). Five warning signs, how AI exposes the differences between stated values and everyday behaviour, and a way to investigate the whole organisation. Weekly check: Find the five warning signs and where they might already exist in your business. 2. **Leadership team**: [The leadership team: where culture starts dying](https://getsorted.valuebull.com.au/ident/leadership-team/index.md) (12 Oct 2026). Priorities nobody remembers, decisions that never travel, competing objectives and strategies that only exist in presentations. What happens when AI agents start reading the plans? Weekly check: Follow one leadership decision from the meeting room to the people expected to act on it. 3. **Customer service**: [Customer service: where AI meets your culture first](https://getsorted.valuebull.com.au/ident/customer-service/index.md) (19 Oct 2026). Inconsistent policies, unwritten exceptions, conflicting instructions, and what happens when AI agents have to respond without the benefit of someone's experience. Weekly check: Test whether your customer service team and an AI agent would make the same decision using the same information. ### Part 2: How culture travels (weeks 4 to 6) 4. **Team leaders**: Team leaders: the translation layer (coming 26 Oct 2026). Team leaders translate leadership's intentions into everyday work. Inconsistent interpretation, informal rules, missing feedback loops and the hidden work managers do to keep teams going. Weekly check: Ask three team leaders to explain the same priority and how their teams are expected to deliver it. 5. **Sales**: Sales: the promises nobody wrote down (coming 2 Nov 2026). Sales makes commitments and negotiates exceptions the rest of the business has to deliver. What happens when those promises never reach the CRM, but an AI agent is expected to act on them? Weekly check: Trace one customer promise from the sales conversation through to delivery and support. 6. **Marketing**: Marketing: when AI writes in a voice you never agreed on (coming 9 Nov 2026). AI can scale your messages, and expose how little agreement there is about the brand, its values and its promises. The gap between what marketing says and what the business delivers. Weekly check: Compare your brand guidelines, real customer communications and the instructions given to AI marketing tools. ### Part 3: Where culture becomes behaviour (weeks 7 to 9) 7. **Operations**: Operations: the exceptions that only lived in people's heads (coming 16 Nov 2026). Documented processes, and the exceptions, shortcuts and workarounds only experienced people know. AI agents need instructions, permissions and reliable information, so they find the gaps. Weekly check: Find three processes where the documented procedure differs from what people actually do. 8. **Finance**: Finance: what you measure is what you believe (coming 23 Nov 2026). A business can say it values collaboration and long-term thinking while rewarding cost cutting and short-term targets. AI agents optimising against those metrics can repeat the contradiction at scale. Weekly check: Compare three stated values with the budgets, KPIs and incentives actually used to make decisions. 9. **People and HR**: People and HR: values that never reach onboarding (coming 30 Nov 2026). Values introduced in recruitment and onboarding, then quietly replaced by unwritten rules. How values reach hiring, development, reviews and the AI systems supporting people processes. Weekly check: Compare the handbook and onboarding material with what people meet after their first 90 days. ### Part 4: Making culture operational (weeks 10 to 12) 10. **Technology**: Technology: giving agents permissions your culture can't explain (coming 7 Dec 2026). AI agents don't just read. They access systems, start workflows and take action. Who decides what they're allowed to do, and what happens when access, accountability and expectations disagree? Weekly check: Pick one AI agent or automation and trace its instructions, permissions, decision limits and escalation. 11. **Product and delivery**: Product and delivery: standards nobody can find (coming 14 Dec 2026). Quality standards and delivery expectations that depend on a handful of experienced people. When AI agents help build and deliver, missing standards become inconsistent work and hard handovers. Weekly check: Take one recent deliverable: which standards were written, which were assumed, and who decided it was good enough? 12. **The full map**: The culture map: putting it all together (coming 21 Dec 2026). Where expectations break between departments, which problems start upstream, which unwritten habits keep the business running, and where AI agents could reinforce, expose or help fix them. Weekly check: Build your company culture map, connecting values, decisions, behaviours, systems, incentives and accountability. Podcast links on this page are [DEMO] placeholders.