The Three Tribes Framework

Every organization deploying AI falls into one of three behavioral archetypes — or tribes. These tribes define how teams approach AI adoption, implementation, and governance. The critical insight: organizations skewed toward any single tribe consistently underperform those with balanced representation across all three.

This framework emerges from analysis of enterprise AI deployments across 500+ organizations, correlating behavioral patterns with measurable business outcomes. The data reveals a stark reality: 78% of organizations have adopted AI in at least one function, yet only 39% report a meaningful impact on EBIT. The 39-percentage-point gap isn’t a technology problem; it’s a tribal imbalance problem.

Understanding your organization’s tribal composition is the first step toward closing this gap.