Why AI Literacy Matters in 2025

Just a disclaimer: This is the longest email you’ll ever receive from us. If you can get through this, you have what it takes to become an AI savant.

Picture this: Your marketing team just spent three days crafting the perfect campaign brief. Meanwhile, your competitors used ChatGPT and Claude to generate five different creative directions in one hour, tested three of them and already has ads running while you’re still in the planning room.

This is not a hypothetical future scenario. It’s happening right now and the gap is widening every day.

The truth is the biggest threat to your business or employability isn’t your competition’s new product or pricing strategy. It’s your own AI illiteracy.

The New Business Reality

“Workers who use AI daily are 64% more productive and 81% more satisfied with their jobs than those who don’t”(Slack). While your team struggles with the same old processes, AI literate businesses are operating with superpowers. Ultimately, impacting your bottom line.

Take contract reviews for a legal team. It might take 6 hours reviewing a vendor agreement. An AI-literate competitor’s team does the same review in 90 minutes with higher accuracy, freeing up 4.5 hours for strategic work that actually moves the business forward.

The question isn’t whether AI will impact your industry. It’s whether you’ll lead the transformation or get steamrolled by it.

The Compounding Advantage That Changes Everything

Most companies dabble with AI. They try ChatGPT for a few emails, write marketing copy and maybe automate one simple task. They see a 5–10% bump in productivity before hitting a plateau. Why? Because they treat AI as a collection of tools, not a business transformation machine.

Smart, AI literate organisations builds systems. Each use case teaches them something new about their processes and that knowledge compounds into the next project.

Consider a mid-sized accounting firm that started small: they used AI to summarise client financial documents, saving junior staff 3 hours per week per client. Not revolutionary, but useful.

Through this process they realised something: clients were asking the same complex tax questions repeatedly. So they created an AI assistant trained on current tax code that could provide preliminary advice, positioning them as the “instant expertise” firm in their market.

Each step built on the last. They weren’t just using AI tools- they where building an AI-powered competitive moat. Result? 40% faster client turnaround, 25% higher margins and a waiting list of new clients who heard they where the “tech forward” accounting firm.

That’s the compounding effect in action. Small, consistent improvements that create exceptional returns over time. If your team becomes just 1% more efficient each day through AI tools, that’s a 37x improvement over a year.

Creating Markets Your Competitors Can’t See

Efficiency is just the start. The real upside is AI-driven innovation.

AI-literate companies uncover opportunities that competitors can’t even see and are completely invisible to traditional thinking.

Take Stitch Fix for example, founded by Katrina Lake. Katrina saw that personal styling was a luxury service available only to the wealthy. But she realised that AI could analyse millions of data points—body measurements, style preferences, past purchases, returns, feedback—to spot patterns invisible to humans. That insight created a whole new market: affordable personal styling at scale.

The result? She created an entirely new market category. Stitch Fix grew to $1.34B in annual revenue by 2024, with customers spending an average of $533 a year (Stitch Fix)- far more than the typical e-commerce relationship. Customers where now buying a personalised experience that didn’t exist before AI made it economically viable.

Katrina used AI to identify and serve a billion-dollar market segment that traditional retailers had completely missed. That’s the level of opportunity hidden in your own data—if your workforce is AI-literate enough to find it.

The Talent War

For employees, AI literacy is career insurance. For companies, it’s the ultimate talent magnet. While you’re debating whether to invest in AI training, your best employees are teaching themselves. And your competitors are hunting them.

Microsoft’s research shows that 71% of business leaders would rather hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills than a seasoned professional without them (Forbes). Job postings requiring AI skills pay 28% higher salaries—around $18,000 more per year (Lightcast).

Top talent isn’t chasing titles—they’re chasing growth. They want to work somewhere that feels like the future, not the past.

Think back to the early 2000s. If you were a brilliant software engineer, Google wasn’t just another job - it was where you went to work on the most interesting problems with the best tools. That environment was a magnet for A-players and those A-players made Google even stronger.

The same dynamic is playing out with AI literacy today. Your best people want to sharpen their skills, automate the boring stuff and spend time solving meaningful problems. If your company doesn’t offer that, they’ll find one that does.

Call to Action

The divide between AI-literate and AI-illiterate organisations is growing by the day. The companies (and people) who embrace AI literacy now will lead tomorrow. AI-literacy isn’t about replacing your team - it’s about making them unstoppable. Start small, build systematically and focus on creating compounding improvements rather than one-off efficiency gains.

The question isn’t whether you can afford to invest in AI literacy. It’s whether you can afford not to while your competitors are building their AI-powered future.

The gap is widening everyday. Which side do you want to be on?

• In the coming weeks, I’ll share playbooks and tools to build AI literacy into daily workflows.

• Remember: AI doesn’t replace people—it upgrades them. But only if we learn how to use it.