AI literacy
What is AI literacy?
The knowledge staff need to use AI systems competently and see their limits. Under Article 4 of the EU AI Act, in force since February 2025, providers and deployers must ensure their people have it, sized to each person's role and context. In practice it means a working grasp of what the tools can and cannot do, not a formal certificate.
Why it matters
The people who most need to understand AI are often the ones assumed to need it least. Attention goes to training the staff who use the tools daily, while the executives who approve the budgets and choose the vendors get a pass. That is backwards. A leader who cannot tell a genuine use case from a confident sales pitch makes expensive bets on the wrong things, and no amount of user training downstream repairs a bad decision made at the top. Nor is this a one-time briefing. The tools shift fast enough that last year’s understanding is already going stale, so the knowledge has to be topped up rather than ticked off once and forgotten.
In practice
A leadership team weighs a large AI investment and, without a working grasp of what the tools cannot do, buys the impressive demo over the plain tool that would have fit the real problem. Literacy is what lets the same group ask the awkward questions early: where does this fail, what does it cost at scale, who checks the output. Those questions save far more than they cost to learn.
