On-Brand, In-Culture: How AI-Capability and Cultural Dissonance Influence Organizational Creativity

Abstract

Marketing teams use AI to adapt creative outputs across cultures faster than ever before. This study asks whether speed comes at a cost to cultural meaning, and who pays it. We surveyed 101 marketing professionals in multinational firms and tested whether AI-Capability drives Organizational Creativity both directly and indirectly through Cultural Dissonance. Using a disjoint two-stage PLS-SEM approach, we find a strong direct effect of AI-Capability on Organizational Creativity, carried by marketers' cultural interpretive skill rather than by the technology itself. Two further patterns emerge. First, what we term the "Tower of Babel Isolation": a condition where AI use is visible individually but hidden organizationally because the routines that would convert tacit operator know-how into shared firm assets are absent. Second, Cultural Dissonance is broadly reported across markets but operates as an ambient friction rather than as a mediator between AI-Capability and creative output. Together, our empirical evidence tells a single story: AI alone does not produce creativity. Individuals alone do not produce creativity. Organizations do. In an age of digital isolation, the collective practice, the community of meaning-making that turns creative work into culture, is what stands to be lost.