How To Build Team Cohesion When Everyone Uses AI Differently

Everyone’s using AI their own way. Here’s how to build team cohesion.

I saw it in my own team before I saw it anywhere else, and at first it didn’t feel like a problem at all. Everyone had thrown themselves at AI without being asked. We were all busy, curious, and more productive than ever. That’s the dream isn’t it!

It was only when I looked closer that I noticed we’d each built a completely different way of working. Nobody had done a thing wrong. We’d all just run in different directions and reached different ideas and conclusions.

And it’s not just us. AI use in large Australian businesses has nearly quadrupled in a few years. It’s safe to say that the tools have arrived far faster than any shared way of using them.

Silos have snuck back into teams

The old silo was easy to spot, whole departments that rarely collaborated with each other. 

So what does siloed mean now? Let’s imagine a team of eight. A few work remotely, others come in on hybrid days. They get along, have a few laughs, and the culture is very supportive, helped along by the virtual team building that regularly gives everyone a reason to come together, wherever they are. 

Look a little closer, though, and every one of them has built their own way of working with AI. Rather unsurprisingly, 86% of Australian employees expected to use AI reach for their own personal tools on top of the ones their business provides. That independent, proactive problem-solving is a real strength, but the Gartner survey it comes from confirms that nearly everyone is running their own setup.

AI lets us output more than ever, but in the haste of getting it all done, I have noticed that the time it saves has a habit of sneaking back in. You read the draft back, working out what’s spot on, what’s confidently wrong, and where it wandered off from the brief. A meeting gets added to align the numbers, then another to reconcile two versions of the same brief, and that lovely little speed advantage slips away.

The thing is, cohesive teamwork isn’t just about whether people get along. It’s about whether the work lines up too, and that team of eight get along beautifully while still turning out work to eight different standards. Real cohesion is culture and shared ways of working combined. High performing teams build on each other’s momentum, sharpens each other’s thinking, and reach results none of them would have found alone. 

So how do you bring your team back together?

The good news is this is a very solvable problem, and it’s the kind of work we’ve been doing since 2008. It starts with a real conversation about how your team creates value, not just how they feel about each other. 

You also can’t talk a fragmented team back together. You have to give them a shared experience that does it for you. Something as simple as a shared DiSC language changes how people read each other, giving a team a common way to talk about how they each work. But understanding each other isn’t the same as moving together. That’s what a program like Beat the Box is built for. It hands a team a locked box full of puzzles no one can crack alone, so the only way through is to combine what each person is individually good at. And because they’re having fun while they do it, the lesson about pulling together really sticks. Or if the shift is bigger than that, our Change Management workshop gives teams the tools to calmly and proactively move through uncharted territory.

That matters more now than it used to. AI hasn’t just changed what everyone works on, it’s changed how each person gets there, and most teams have never had a conversation about that part. A shared way of working has to include a shared way of working with AI, or the same fragmentation just shows up again next quarter.