Why Is Everyone Suddenly Panicking About AI Literacy?

The joke stopped being funny when the work started changing.

Author

Glenda Carnate
January 23, 2026

Read time: 2.5 minutes

There was a point when “AI literacy” seemed like a buzzword. That point was short-lived.

It was easy to laugh at first. Just another framework, another course, another thing that experts said everyone would need “eventually.” Most people thought that AI was something that specialists did while the rest of the world just went about their business as usual.

And then the tools appeared everywhere... inside documents, dashboards, workflows, and decisions. And then, not understanding how AI reasoned, failed, or hallucinated was no longer a harmless gap. It slowed many things down, introduced risk, and made conversations tougher. The joke wore off, but the gap didn’t.

Here are five rules for AI literacy:

  1. The term "AI literacy" does not refer to the ability to create data-based models, but rather to the ability to identify risk factors (i.e., things that will not work or may hurt you).

  2. AI literacy does not mean knowing how to build good/dangerous/trusted AI systems. It means being aware of the potential abuse of AI systems and the consequences if they fail (i.e., "hallucinate").

  3. AI literacy does not mean you know the most relevant question to ask when trying to discover how an AI made a decision based on the information supplied to it.

  4. AI literacy varies across each function of the organization. Therefore, executive, analyst, operations, and engineering teams should each have their own training kit.

  5. AI Literacy should be considered an industry standard. It should not be confused with "magical" technology, but instead be viewed as a technology that is an extension or enhancement of our current methods of process improvement.

💡Key Takeaway: 

AI Literacy is not about having a technical background. AI literacy is a skill that people need to possess in order to make informed decisions in a world that is rapidly becoming reliant on AI. While people may have laughed about AI before, due to its distance from their lives, it now resides in their daily workflow, making it less amusing to ignore AI's impact on their jobs and careers.

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