Culturally-Aware Prompting in Conversational AI: Enhancing Digital Inclusion and Sustainable Collaboration for Cross-cultural Teams in Australia

With multilingual collaboration increasingly important in digital work environments, linguistic correctness is not sufficient any more for equitable and sustainable cross-cultural communication. This study empirically examines whether Culturally-Aware Prompting (CAP) can enhance the cultural appropriateness, pragmatic politeness, and collaborative effectiveness of conversational AI. This study was conducted within Australia’s culturally and linguistically diverse context. With a fully crossed experiment employing GPT-4o across three language pairs and four task types, finally generating 72 outputs, which were then evaluated through blind human ratings, automated politeness and semantic metrics, and statistical modelling. Results show that CAP significantly improves cultural appropriateness and pragmatic politeness without compromising semantic accuracy. Interaction analyses demonstrate that CAP also contributes to the benefits for linguistically distant language pairs, supporting its potential to reduce communication barriers for non-native speakers and advance digital inclusion. Mediation modelling further reveals that CAP enhances collaborative outcomes primarily by strengthening cultural and pragmatic alignment. These findings position CAP as a practical and scalable mechanism for fostering trust, reducing pragmatic friction, and supporting sustainable collaboration in multicultural teams. An empirically validated framework proposed by this study also lays a foundation for culturally adaptive AI communication design.