Redefining Leadership with AI Values & Cultural Sustainability Today

Sarah Hassaine brings 20 years of expertise in culture strategy, corporate responsibility, and international development. With experience at Amazon, Qualcomm, and Deloitte, she champions equity, inclusion, and sustainable impact through leadership, community engagement, and strategic program management.

In an insightful interaction with Global Woman Leader Magazine, Sarah shares her insights on how values-based leadership must evolve amid rapid AI-driven change, balancing innovation with cultural integrity, embedding genuine social sustainability, and navigating authentic culture versus branding across diverse global teams.

With AI reshaping business at breakneck speed, how do you see values-based leadership evolving to balance innovation with long-term cultural integrity across global teams?

This is a question that is keeping me up at night actually! I believe it is more critical than ever to leverage values as a guide to how we interact and use the AI tools and solutions.  Values need to inform our tone, our prompts, and how we assess the relevance and validity of the AI we use. And moreover, just because we as humans are using technology, does not mean we are changing neurologically and biologically. Companies will still need to meet and anticipate their evolving needs for growth, communication and transparency almost at the same pace of the AI transformation. Or else you risk losing talent and engagement.

Workforce trust is under strain due to AI-driven restructuring. How can organizations embed social sustainability in daily operations without making it feel like a performative initiative?

As someone who manages Social Sustainability reporting, my first advice is to make sure there is an enterprise-wide understanding of what it is and why it is important to every team and leader across your business. Social sustainability is everything that touches your people - your customers, your employers and your suppliers

If a company values its people then it will naturally care about their development, about their culture, their giving back efforts and the impact they are having on their communities and the environment. It becomes performative when a company claims one thing but actually lacks the programs, resources, and measures. With AI’s proliferation, I anticipate the return on social sustainability to be calculated more by companies as they think through time saved, faster decision-making and skills needed.

How do you distinguish between culture as a branding narrative and culture as a lived system—especially when scaling D&I across countries with differing social and regulatory landscapes?

The lived system needs to be well-oiled - authentically embedded in the language, behaviors and business practices Employees need to know the company values, what resources are available to them, and how to operate within the company culture. Learning a culture takes time…just think anytime you start a new job. It takes 6 - 9 months to “sort of” feel like you are getting the hang of it and building trust. And for global companies it is even harder given cultural nuances in tone, expectations, and work ethic.

The distinction with a “branding narrative” is that a company can tell any story it wants to in its brand. It can leverage story-telling that appeals to emotions, use pictures that showcase people that represent the world we live in and talk about its culture in social media and to candidates to attract talent - however, the brand may not actually reflect the full lived system internally. The collaboration of teams that drive social sustainability efforts, like D&I and employee engagement, and Brand and Marketing is key to ensuring alignment and compliance.

As inclusive design becomes a regulatory and moral imperative, what blind spots do you see in current accessibility approaches within product development? How should companies audit for them?

The biggest opportunity is for the project plans and budgets to account for accessibility considerations and testing from the onset. Accessibility needs to baked into every step of the product design and test phase, however many companies are either forgoing or rushing through it due to the stressors of getting to market and budget constraints.

I was so excited to see the European Union mandate accessibility in 2025 as this will ensure companies take the necessary steps to design inclusively.  I think companies need to have product teams that are made up of people of all abilities, that are neurodiverse and from different backgrounds and experiences so that all perspectives are poured into prototyping. And from there, testing should also be done on a wide representative pool of people. When you design with accessibility in mind, you are designing a product that anyone can use.

In light of growing ESG scrutiny, how can companies reimagine corporate giving—not as charity, but as strategic cultural scaffolding that reinforces internal belonging and external reputation?

Corporate Giving has long been a practice that drives a sense of pride, builds brand identity, and drives culture for its people. Employees feel good when their company supports their communities where they work and when they can either volunteer or donate. Getting teams to volunteer together builds belonging and enables them to get to know one another. It is a bit of a win-win for companies as they provide a medium for employees to give back and engage with one another and in their communities, while simultaneously putting the brand out there in a positive light.

The pendulum may be swinging in the United States but for many global companies, similar reporting is done for other countries as well. Corporate giving is important to many country governments, for example in India, companies are required to give back a certain percentage of revenue. In other countries, like Germany, companies get tax breaks for their giving efforts. Re-imagining it in the US at the moment may mean re-evaluating the causes and resources.

How do you sustain employee engagement and cohesion when algorithmic decision-making starts to dictate performance metrics, hiring patterns, and even idea prioritization in cross-functional teams?

Communication. Communication. And Communication. It is important for teams to come together and agree on the process, what success would look like, and how they will measure. Regular touch points for cross-functional teams that have dashboards for transparency and a culture of easy communication and psychological safety will excel because we are entering a world where we will need to make faster decisions, we will need buy-in, and thus, we will need trust. If you have trust, the engagement and cohesion will come naturally. The trust in the process and strategy and the trust in one another is key. Going back to people, it will still remain about the people, despite the technology.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article are solely those of the individual author and do not reflect the views of any business organization.