The Situation
Cross-cultural misunderstanding costs multinational companies time, money, results, and talent. Every day. The cost is real but invisible — because people don’t recognize cultural friction as cultural. They attribute it to personality, competence, or politics. They endure it, manage around it, or escalate it. They never search for a cultural explanation, because it never occurs to them that culture is the cause.
This is why traditional approaches fail. Training helps, but people return to their desks and default to “he’s just difficult.” Books help, but no one opens them in the moment they need them. Chatbots help, but only if someone chooses to ask — and they won’t, because they don’t frame the problem culturally. And even if they did, generic AI can’t help. It scrapes the web and presents superficial explanations for complex interactions.
The solution must be proactive. It must reach people at the moment friction is developing, before they have misread the situation and acted on that misreading. It must operate inside the tools people already use. And it must be grounded in research that is rigorous enough to be trusted by the companies that deploy it.
That is what UC provides. Cultural intelligence — produced through a transparent, repeatable research method — designed to power a Culture Agent within a company’s AI environment.
How the research works
Each country-topic combination is researched independently, using a five-step inductive method.
I examine twelve domains where cultural behavior is observable — from childhood and education through professional life, law, commerce, language, religion, and social customs.
I identify patterns that appear across at least ten of those twelve domains. Only patterns that cross this threshold qualify as fundamental. I describe them in clear, precise natural language — written not as academic theory but as practical intelligence someone can apply.
The research currently covers fifteen countries and sixteen topics, with more in development. The method is the same for every country and every topic. It is systematic, repeatable, and designed to be indisputable.
What companies receive
The Culture Agent — powered by UC’s research — lives inside the AI tools your employees already use. It understands how cultures think and work. It helps employees when they are confused, frustrated, or about to misread a situation.
And through periodic nudges, stories, and reminders, it stays present in their awareness — so that when the moment comes, they think to ask.
Why I built this
I have spent twenty-five years helping Germans and Americans understand each other. I started in a seminar room. I did it one team at a time, one workshop at a time, one coaching session at a time. The work was effective but limited — I could only be in one room at a time.
UC is my attempt to make what I know available at a scale I could never achieve personally. Not by replacing human judgment, but by putting cultural intelligence where it is needed most: inside the systems people already use, at the moment they need it, whether they know to ask for it or not.