From AI Literacy to AI Fluency
Closing the real readiness gap
Companies are spending millions on AI training. A recent survey from CIO.inc reveals 75% of organizations have already developed, or are actively developing, formal AI upskilling plans.
We're equipping our teams with the latest tools, running workshops on prompt engineering, and celebrating every new adoption metric. We are building what we believe to be an "AI-ready" workforce.
With 69% of leaders saying most of their AI projects don’t even make it to operational use, why are so many of these "ready" teams still failing to create meaningful business value?
The problem is that we've been solving the wrong problem. We’ve successfully trained for AI Literacy — the basic ability to use AI as a tool. But we’ve failed to cultivate AI Fluency — the deeper, strategic ability to know when, why, and how to apply that tool to solve a novel business problem.
Literacy is tactical. Fluency is strategic.
An AI-literate employee can take a sales report and ask an AI to summarize it. An AI-fluent employee can look at a disjointed sales process and ask, "Could an AI agent be built to automate this entire workflow, from lead scoring to proposal generation?"
The first is an act of optimization. The second is an act of imagination.
This is the new execution gap. Most corporate training programs stop at literacy. They teach employees the features and functions of the new AI tools at their disposal, but they don't teach them how to think critically about the systems in which those AI tools operate. They create competent users, but not strategic innovators.
This gap is where AI adoption stalls. It's why we see a flurry of activity — employees using AI for small, personal productivity tasks — yet no fundamental change in core business processes at many organizations. We may have an army of AI-literate employees who are making our broken workflows run slightly faster, but we lack the AI-fluent leaders who can design entirely new, game-changing ones.
Closing this gap requires a new kind of training. It means moving beyond tool-based tutorials and focusing on:
Systems Thinking: Training teams to see and map entire business processes, not just individual tasks.
Problem Framing: Teaching them how to define a business problem in a way that AI can actually solve.
Strategic Restraint: Cultivating the wisdom to know when not to use AI, because a simpler, non-technical solution is better.
An AI-literate workforce is a cost of entry in 2025. But an AI-fluent workforce is the only sustainable competitive advantage. The companies that thrive will be the ones that understand the difference and invest in closing the real readiness gap.
