The Three Things Your People Need to Get AI-Fluent

April 22, 2026

I ask this question a lot in boardrooms: what are you doing to train your people on AI?

The answer, across the board, is some version of: not much.

And then I ask the follow-up: so how do you expect them to develop these skills?

Silence.

Here's what I keep seeing. Companies are pretty good at getting people the tools: Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, whatever the enterprise license of the moment is. Some are doing a bit of training. And almost none of them are giving people the time.

What I hear constantly from employees is: "Yeah, there's training. I have no time to take it." Or: "The tools are there, but my manager tells me to stop playing with AI and go do my job."

That last one stops me every time. Because you can do your job better if you know how to use AI. The manager who says that is being incredibly shortsighted, and they're probably getting that message from somewhere above them.

This is why I keep coming back to what I call the Three T's to be AI fluent: Tools, Training, and Time. You need all three. Not two. Not one and a half. All three. And right now, most organizations are failing at two of them.

Tools: The Easy Part

Deploying tools is the part leaders feel good about. You procure the license, you send the announcement, you check the box. Tools are visible, measurable, and they make it look like something is happening.

But here's what I've learned from working with organizations across industries: giving someone a tool without training or time to use it isn't an investment. It's a gesture.

A recent Jobs for the Future survey found that 77% of U.S. respondents believe AI will impact the job or career they expect to have in the next 3–5 years, yet only 31% say their employer currently provides AI training.

Training: The Missing Middle

There are two kinds of training that matter here, and most organizations aren't doing either well.

The first is top-down: general literacy about what AI is, what it can do, what it can't, and how to use it responsibly. This is foundational. Everyone needs it. Not just the tech team, not just the early adopters. Everyone, at the same time.

The second is hands-on, contextual, job-specific. This is where fluency actually gets built — not from a general course about AI, but from learning how to use AI for the specific work you are already doing. If you're trying to get better at sales forecasting, you go find resources on AI-powered forecasting. You ask AI how to do it. You learn in the context of a real goal.

And this is the distinction I really want leaders to sit with: literacy versus fluency.

Literacy is knowing what AI is. Fluency is reaching for it naturally, without having to think too hard. It's when using AI becomes second nature, the way you'd reach for a search engine or a spreadsheet without deliberating about it first.

I was in a room recently with about a dozen senior leaders. I asked them to raise their hand if they felt AI-fluent. One person raised their hand. One. These weren't people who hadn't heard of AI. They were active users. They just didn't feel confident. They still felt like they were stumbling.

Fluency closes that gap. And fluency comes from use, not from a training deck.

Time: The Thing Nobody's Giving

This is the one that breaks the whole system when it's missing.

You can have the tools. You can have the training programs. But if people don't have protected time to learn and experiment, none of it sticks. They'll take the training at 11pm on a Sunday if they take it at all, and they won't retain it because they're not applying it.

Leaders need to make this explicit. Not "use AI when you can," but actual time set aside, built into the rhythm of how work gets done.

I sometimes ask leaders: how long do you think it would take to get your people genuinely fluent in AI? They say a year. I push back: what about three months? What would it take to get someone truly fluent in three months, if you actually invested in it?

The look I get is always the same, somewhere between surprise and discomfort. Because the honest answer is: three months is achievable. But it requires treating AI fluency as aninvestment, not a nice-to-have.

The Leadership Mandate

Here's what the Three T's really come down to: this isn't an HR problem or a training problem. It's a leadership problem.

If you believe AI is going to be transformative for your organization, and I think most leaders do, even if they can't quite articulate how yet, then you have a responsibility to equip your people to use it. That means tools, yes. But also real training. And actual time.

The organizations getting this right aren't doing anything magical. They're just being intentional. IKEA trained 30,000 employees across four different tracks—from frontline workers to tech teams to leadership—and paired it with a real commitment to role redesign. They didn't just give people a tool and hope for the best. They built the infrastructure for fluency.

That's what the Three T's look like in practice. Not a checklist. A commitment.

Your Turn

Of the Three T's: Tools, Training, and Time, which one is your organization actually getting right? And which one is quietly undermining everything else? I'd love to hear what you're seeing.

What I Can't Stop Talking About

AI fluency one of the core frameworks in Winning with AI, the book I wrote with Dr. Katia Walsh. If you're building out your organization's approach to AI fluency or trying to make the case to leadership for more investment, the book gives you the full blueprint. Learn more at winningwithai.com. 

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