AI Fluency is the New Seniority
Something has shifted inside some of the world’s biggest companies. And it’s not something you’ll find in a press release or a restructuring announcement. It’s who’s getting promoted now.
In an interview this week, the CEO of Accenture, Julie Sweet, made it crystal clear: AI isn’t just some tool she wants her people to play around with. It’s how the company operates, full stop. Want to move up? You’ll need to demonstrate you’re working with it. She compared it to the introduction of computers in the workplace decades ago, and she wasn’t wrong. There was a time, not that long ago, when knowing your way around an Excel spreadsheet was a differentiator. Then it became the baseline. And then it became so basic that we stopped mentioning it. Right now, AI is moving through that same arc, except faster. Much faster.
Internal research by Cisco also put some hard numbers to what a lot of people in business are sensing but not yet talking about. Employees recommended for promotion there used AI 50% more often than those who weren’t recommended. They were also 40% more likely to be designated as ‘critical’ to retain. Over at Amazon, promotion packets in certain divisions now require candidates to explain how they’re already integrating AI into their day-to-day work. We’re not talking here about niche tech experiments at the margins. These are major employers who know what’s around the corner and have decided they need to redefine what it means to be a high performer.
The term being used to describe what separates those employees from their peers is AI fluency. Not AI expertise. Not coding ability. Fluency. It’s a distinction that matters.
Fluency means you understand enough about how these tools think, where they’re reliable, when they can ‘hallucinate’, what they’re genuinely good at and what they’ll never replace, so you can work alongside them confidently and critically. It’s the difference between someone who occasionally asks ChatGPT a question and someone who has fundamentally changed how they approach their work because of it. One is dabbling. The other is operating on a totally different level.
There’s already a resistance to all this, but it doesn’t quite seem like resistance. It sounds like ‘we’re just too busy to deal with this right now’. It’s businesses delegating AI exploration to some junior team member who will report back next quarter. It’s the executive who nods along when hearing about AI tools at a networking event but returns the next morning to the same workflow that’s worked fine for the past decade. Right now, that thinking has real career risk, and more importantly, real organizational risk.
Because fluency won’t magically multiply on its own. That same Cisco research I mentioned, also found that employees whose direct managers use AI are twice as likely to adopt it themselves. If the people setting the tone in a business are visibly disengaged from these tools, the message to everyone else isn’t exactly subtle: ‘This is something that’s optional. Still experimental. Not really how we work here.’
None of this means that every employee needs to become an AI whiz. That kind of framing is part of what’s making businesses slow to act right now. They hear “AI fluency” and think it’ll mean training half their workforce to write code. That’s not it. What it actually looks like, at a practical level, is people who know which of their recurring tasks AI can accelerate and who can evaluate an AI-generated output with genuine critical thinking rather than blind trust or reflexive skepticism.
Frankly, that’s not a very high bar. But most workforces aren’t clearing it. A global study from KPMG and the University of Melbourne last year surveyed 48,000 people and found that while 66% are already using AI, less than half said they trust it. I read that as people using the tools but not being equipped to use them well. And that gap between adoption and fluency is where a lot of employer investment in AI vanishes.
The people who close that gap won't be waiting for a company-wide AI initiative to tell them where to start. They'll be the ones who learned the tools themselves, changed how they work because of it, and became the kind of person no performance review can overlook.
Seniority used to mean you’d accumulated enough experience to know how things work. That’s still valuable. But in a world where the tools of work are shifting this fast, it increasingly also means you’ve accumulated enough curiosity to keep learning. Those two things don’t conflict with each other, but the second one is no longer optional.
Fluency isn't just coming. It's already here. The only question is whether you are.
About the Author: Kristi Searle, FCPHR, SHRM-SCP, CPC is the Founder and CEO of Peoplebiz Consulting Inc. Over the past 30+ years, she's helped employers across North America build HR strategies that actually work: not just on paper, but in practice. Kristi is recognized as a leading voice in strategic HR and Indigenous workplace strategy, and she's known for telling it like it is.