What is AI literacy?

Brilliant Noise 28 November 2024

Updated: May 2026. We refresh this page regularly to keep pace with fast-moving AI platforms and policies.

At Brilliant Noise, we work with leaders every day on how to build AI literacy inside their organisations. But before the how, we always come back to a more fundamental question: what exactly is it?

We’ve developed a definition that works for our world – senior professionals in marketing, strategy, comms and creative roles who don’t have technical backgrounds, but who need to understand, evaluate and apply AI tools with clarity and confidence.

A working definition

For us, AI literacy means:

The ability to understand, evaluate and use artificial intelligence tools in a responsible, ethical and effective way.

It’s a developing set of capabilities. Things like:

  • Knowing the limitations of AI tools (and how to spot their blind spots)
  • Assessing the reliability of outputs before making decisions based on them
  • Understanding where AI can genuinely add value in your workflow – whether it’s analysis, content, or decision support

And the critical thinking to use these tools with judgement.

Right now, when most people talk about “AI”, they mean generative AI – large language models and the tools built on top of them. Other forms of AI exist, and may become more relevant to your work over time. But generative tools are where most teams are starting.

Why this matters now

Generative AI is moving quickly from experiment to expectation. Whether your team is ready or not, it’s already shaping how work gets done.

  • The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 projects that 22% of today’s jobs will be disrupted by 2030, with 170 million new roles created and 92 million displaced as AI and other technologies reshape industries. 39% of workers’ core skills are expected to change by the end of the decade.
  • McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI report estimates generative AI could add between $2.6 and $4.4 trillion in annual value to the global economy. But the same report is sobering on the gap between adoption and impact: 88% of organisations now use AI in at least one function, while 94% report not yet seeing significant value from those investments.

The picture is consistent. AI is widely deployed; most organisations haven’t yet figured out how to extract the value. That’s what AI literacy unlocks.

From digital to AI literacy: our path here

Organisations have built new kinds of fluency before. At Brilliant Noise, our thinking about AI literacy grew out of earlier work on digital literacy – back when smartphones, social media and cloud collaboration were reshaping how work happened.

In 2011, our CEO Antony Mayfield spoke at TEDx Brighton about the skills we’d need in the digital age. He talked about:

  • Networks – understanding the systems we work within, online and offline
  • Sharing – as a strategic skill, not a passive act
  • Focus and flow – managing attention and energy in a world of constant connection

That early work led to programmes with Microsoft, the Financial Times and others, helping teams build the habits and capabilities needed to thrive in digital-first environments.

One result of that work was Design Your Day – a short handbook for Nokia (later Microsoft’s mobile division) that introduced neuroscience-backed strategies for structuring time and focus. It was a book about designing better days in a digital world. The same principles are proving essential now, as AI reshapes the landscape again.

What we’re learning about AI literacy today

Running AI workshops, coaching leaders, and building AI capability programmes across global organisations, we’ve seen something consistent: literacy is the byproduct of use, not study.

That’s why we talk about AI fluency. Fluency implies usable skill. And why we focus on hands-on, task-specific learning rather than abstract theory.

Whether it’s drafting a campaign brief or building a custom AI assistant to automate a reporting task, the real skill is knowing how to make the tool work for you.

What literacy looks like in the agent era

The frontier is shifting again. Generative AI is graduating from chatbots into agents – systems that plan, decide and execute multi-step workflows on a person’s behalf. McKinsey reports nearly a quarter of organisations are now scaling agentic AI in at least one function, with another 39% experimenting.

That changes what literacy means. Prompt fluency was about crafting good inputs. Agent fluency is about delegating well: choosing the right task to hand off, setting clear boundaries on what an agent should and shouldn’t do, and knowing how to review the work it sends back. It mirrors the shift managers face when they move from doing the work themselves to leading the people who do it. We’ll explore this more deeply in our forthcoming piece on AI agents.

What next

AI literacy is becoming a defining capability for organisations that want to stay relevant, competitive and creatively strong.

That doesn’t mean everyone needs to become a prompt engineer. It does mean every leader should know what’s possible, what’s risky, and how to build confidence and competence across their teams.

For a deeper dive into how we define and deliver AI literacy, read Prepared Minds, our guide to what AI literacy is and why it matters in the modern workplace.

Last updated: May 2026