Why Industry Must Move Beyond AI Literacy
Wow - the piece from a couple of days ago about AI and schools resonated with readers; so glad it got people engaged! Many non-educators reached out and asked “hey, what about my industry…..” so I thought I’d capture some thoughts related to broad industry AI literacy versus fluency.
Industry leaders of course, are not blind to the promise of artificial intelligence. Most executives can now speak comfortably about AI in boardrooms, and many organizations I’ve dealt with have experimented with chatbots, automated analytics, or generative design pilots. This represents a form of literacy: the capacity to recognize AI, describe it in broad terms, and gesture at its risks and opportunities. Literacy, however, is not a strategy. It is not enough to keep a company relevant in a market where disruption moves faster than planning cycles.
The organizations that will separate themselves from the pack are those that cultivate fluency. Fluency is not defined by vocabulary or experimentation, but by mastery. This idea of mastery is something that really took hold for me when I was in education. What does it mean in an organizational sense though? It’s the ability to wield AI with intent, integrating it into the core of operations and strategy, not as an accessory but as an engine. Where literacy produces scattered pilots, fluency builds lasting platforms. Where literacy fuels PowerPoint slides, fluency transforms business models.
The Illusion of Progress
Across industries, there is a familiar but troubling pattern. Companies announce AI initiatives, showcase pilot projects, and generate a flurry of internal excitement. Six months later, little has changed. Processes run as before, customers experience no difference, and the promised efficiency gains evaporate into reports and dashboards. This is the literacy trap: mistaking exposure for mastery, mistaking buzz for value.
The literacy trap is seductive because it reassures leaders that they are “doing something with AI” without requiring them to make the structural changes that fluency demands. It is safe, and safety feels prudent. Yet in a competitive landscape, safety is often the riskiest choice. While one company circles in the literacy trap, another is redesigning supply chains with predictive models, reshaping customer engagement with autonomous agents, and embedding AI into its product itself. The difference compounds, and over time it becomes existential.
What Fluency Looks Like
Fluency in industry begins with depth. It is not enough to have employees who can use AI tools at a surface level. Fluency requires technical guides who understand how AI actually works: engineers who can chain models together, integrate APIs, construct agent workflows, and bend these systems to the specific shape of the business. Without this depth, organizations mistake basic automation for transformation. They stop at using an AI model to draft a report, when the true advantage comes from reimagining the reporting process altogether.
Fluency is also cultural. It lives in leadership decisions where AI is not treated as an experiment on the margins but as an element of the strategic core. It shows up when leaders ask not, “Which AI tool should we try?” but, “Which of our business problems is most worth re-engineering with AI at the center?” This reorientation shifts AI from novelty to necessity, from literacy to advantage.
From Projects to Platforms
The final marker of fluency is durability. In the literacy phase, AI exists as isolated projects, often tied to individual champions. When those champions move on, the work stalls. In fluency, AI becomes a platform capability, embedded in infrastructure, governance, and organizational memory. It ceases to be the responsibility of a few and becomes part of how the whole enterprise operates. That shift, from project to platform, is what turns AI from experiment into advantage.
The Call to Industry Leaders
The challenge before industry is stark. Literacy is no longer a competitive edge; it is barely table stakes. Markets will not reward firms for knowing what AI is. They will reward firms for reshaping themselves around what AI makes possible. The distance between literacy and fluency is not measured in vocabulary but in courage: the courage to change processes, to invest in technical depth, and to commit to transformation that touches the core of the enterprise.
The leaders who take this step will not simply survive disruption. They will define the contours of their industries in the decades to come. Those who hesitate, comforted by literacy, will discover too late that the future is fluent, and it belongs to those who had the foresight to move beyond awareness into advantage.