✅ AI Fluency: The Key to Unlocking AI ROI
To understand our AI readiness as a society, at AI4SP, we developed a comprehensive digital skills assessment –The Digital Skills Compass™, by analyzing accepted methodologies, thousands of job postings, and insights from our proprietary database of 10,000+ AI tools.
Our approach identified the minimum skills needed to thrive in the AI-driven digital economy. Scores between 50 and 60 indicate solid digital skills for effective, secure, and responsible use of existing technologies and readiness for AI tools.
Thanks to our partnerships with academia, nonprofits, and leaders like Microsoft, over 27,000 individuals have completed their assessments in one year.
Our data spans all worker types, not just Knowledge Workers. The conversational AI revolution makes it accessible to anyone with a mobile device, democratizing participation.
🚨 Beyond AI: We have a Digital Skills Debt
Our global data, with input from 27,000 individual assessments, shows that employees across all industries have a digital skills score of around 45/100. A minimum of 55 is needed to embrace Generative AI.
We see significant gaps in fundamental digital competencies; these are the average scores across 27,000 individuals:
- Data privacy, device/online security, and online collaboration: 41/100.
- Data confidentiality and understanding of privacy regulations: 28/100.
- Online safety and reputation management: 32/100.
- Evaluating information reliability: 28/100.
At this level, individuals typically:
- Have a basic awareness of privacy and security issues but struggle to implement robust protective measures.
- Can perform simple online collaborations but lack proficiency in more complex digital teamwork scenarios.
- Often need assistance in managing data securely or identifying potential online risks.
- Struggle with understanding and applying data protection regulations like GDPR.
- Have difficulty managing their digital identity and protecting their online reputation.
- Show significant weakness in discerning if information comes from trusted sources.
Addressing fundamental gaps is a crucial baseline. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report highlights that over 50% of all employees will need tech-related reskilling over the next 18 months.
📚 The AI Skills are also lagging
- 50% of Knowledge Workers are proficient in one or more single-purpose AI apps.
- Less than 10% are proficient in creating effective prompts, a fundamental skill for using ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot.
- Higher Education is not ready: Less than 10% of surveyed higher education institutions in WA and CA are incorporating fundamental training on using Gen AI, preserving confidentiality, or discerning if information comes from trusted sources. Most are unprepared to integrate AI into their teaching and administrative processes.
- According to Gartner, by 2025, 70% of employees will use AI-assisted technologies daily in their jobs, up from 29% in 2023.
💃🕺🏿🪩 Stop bridging the skills gap with methods from the 90s.
Traditional training, as defined for the personal computing era, isn’t cutting it. Videos, slide decks, classes? CTOs and HR leaders report less than 20% engagement and negligible impact on increased productivity.
What works?
- Experiential learning. With over 1,800 active users of Copilot Ada in ~20 organizations, we confirm that learning by doing outperforms other mechanisms by a factor of 3x in terms of engagement and 1.4x in speed to proficiency.
- Internal AI ambassadors.
- Start with single-purpose AI tools from reputable vendors before diving into more complex company-wide solutions.
- Focus on Digital Essentials: Security, critical thinking, information literacy, and data privacy.
📣 Executive Roundtables in Australia, Brazil, UK, and the US
Input from C-level executives:
- Information Overload: The market is saturated with tech jargon, new features, and apps, overwhelming users and sales forces alike. Traditional training methods are struggling to keep pace.
- AI Superuser Phenomenon: Specific roles are experiencing 2x to 10x productivity boosts with AI, but these gains are limited to a small subset of employees with a solid baseline of digital skills.
- Digital Skills Debt: A new framework quantifies the cost of lagging digital competencies, emphasizing the need for targeted upskilling and the potential ROI of closing skill gaps.
- Long-term AI Adoption: Leaders acknowledge that realizing AI’s full potential is a years-long process, requiring widespread skill elevation and educational system changes, tempering expectations of immediate organization-wide gains.
- CTOs are deliberately slowing down company-wide AI deployments. The leading reasons are challenges in standardizing AI processes across diverse departments, Data privacy concerns, and the slow pace of skills upgrades necessary before widespread implementation can succeed.
Resources
- Digital Skills Compass: Identify your team members’ gaps.
- AI Compass: Discover AI’s potential for your organization.
- Copilot Ada: 24/7 AI coach for each team member for a complete month, for less than the cost of the ☕️ Grande skinny milk triple shot cappuccino they need to stay awake 😴 during one traditional training.
- All our Data and Insights
Luis J. Salazar
Founder | AI4SP
Sources:
Our insights are based on data from over 140,000 individuals and organizations who used our AI-powered tools, participated in our panels and research sessions, or attended our workshops and keynotes.
