WORK
The BetterUp Research Partnership
Brown's April 2026 research collaboration — the empirical test of whether AI deployment actually improves organizational performance, and under what conditions.
The BetterUp research partnership, announced in April 2026, represents Brown's most direct empirical engagement with the question of whether AI deployment produces its promised performance gains — and what variables determine the answer. The emerging data challenges the dominant narrative that AI adoption correlates with performance improvement. Whether AI improves organizational performance, the research finds, depends less on how much leaders use the technology than on the kind of culture they create around it. Organizations with high trust, psychological safety, and the relational behaviors Brown's BRAVING framework specifies see significant performance gains from AI deployment. Organizations with low trust, defensive cultures, and armored leadership see performance gains that are marginal, negligible, or negative — despite investing equivalent resources in the tools themselves.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The strategic implications reframe the AI investment calculus. The billions flowing into AI capabilities will not pay off without corresponding investment in the human foundations — trust, development, and culture — that determine whether the tools actually improve performance. Brown's