The Cultural Barriers Blocking AI-Driven Planning
A question came up on our LinkedIn that felt worth exploring:
“What is the biggest internal cultural hurdle organisations face when trying to move long-established, spreadsheet-reliant planning teams onto a continuous, AI-powered system?”
It’s a good one, because the biggest blockers rarely come from the technology itself. They come from people, habits, and long-established ways of working.
We recently spoke with a Finance Director at a £100m construction firm. He’s talented, experienced and absolutely committed to Excel. He still complains about his last ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) project, questions the cost of cloud, and compares systems purely on licence fees and server costs. Improvements like strengthened security, better usability or reduced IT burden simply aren’t part of his thinking. Spreadsheets feel familiar, safe, and entirely under his control.
He’s not the only one who thinks this way. That mindset is far more common than many organisations admit. Entire finance teams have grown up modelling, building, and fixing things themselves. Their spreadsheets are personal. They trust them and naturally, they want to keep them.
So when AI-driven, continuous planning comes along, the resistance is rarely about capability. It’s usually a reluctance to accept change, even when that change can make work faster and easier. Moving to centralised, governed data requires confidence, transparency, and a willingness to trust a new organisational approach.
We see this especially among senior finance leaders who have spent their whole careers working a certain way. Some embrace change immediately. Others need time, reassurance, and evidence. Once they see the speed, accuracy and clarity that Planning Analytics and watsonx bring, the resistance usually fades. But culturally, that first step is always the hardest.
The good news is that these barriers aren’t fixed. They shift quickly when organisations give people the support they need. When change is communicated clearly and led from the top, it has a far higher chance of success. Cultural change doesn’t happen because you install new technology. It happens when people start to trust a new way of doing things.
And for many teams, that begins with simply seeing the results, especially during budgeting and forecasting, on AI-powered planning tools like Planning Analytics and watsonx.
If you’d like to discuss how to bring your team together around a single source of truth, or if you’d like to see a demo, please get in touch.