I've been writing a series of blogs covering the steps a CEO and Board should take in implementing AI.

The first blog was focused on the CEO and how they needed to execute a successful AI strategy

The End of Incrementalism: A CEO’s Guide to the AI Revolution 

The next blog covered what the leadership team needed to do in a 30, 60, 90 day format

The 90-Day Sprint to Exponential Advantage: A CEO’s AI Integration Playbook 

And now this blog is a training outline designed to move your organization from a "push" model, where experts try to force AI ideas into the business, to a "pull" model, where every employee understands AI well enough to actively seek it out for their own workflows.

AI Literacy Training: From Incrementalism to Exponential Advantage

Program Objective: To equip every employee, from the front line to the boardroom, with the literacy required to treat AI as a fundamental utility rather than a side project.

Module 1: The New Industrial Revolution

Target: All Employees

  • Understanding the Shift: Why traditional incremental improvements are no longer enough to combat market margin compression

  • AI as Utility: Shifting the mindset to view AI like electricity, something that should be integrated into every system to create a compounding "enterprise brain"

  • The Velocity of Change: Understanding that AI represents a shift comparable to the Industrial Revolution, where value now comes from infrastructure and platforms rather than just data commodities.

Module 2: Thinking in "Natural Language"

Target: Product, Engineering, and Operations Teams

  • Designing for Humans: Moving away from designing systems based on old software constraints and toward designs that align with humans and natural language

  • Technical Debt Literacy: Identifying how legacy architectures hold critical information hostage and prevent the deployment of LLMs or SLMs

  • The Observability Layer: Training teams to envision a future where conversational systems aggregate data across all domains, ops, financials, HR, to synthesize and act

Module 3: The Interdisciplinary Talent Profile

Target: HR and Hiring Managers

  • The New Candidate Profile: Shifting focus from pure analytical horsepower to curiosity, open-mindedness, emotional intelligence, and a willingness to experiment

  • The Intersection of Domain and Tech: Encouraging "interdisciplinary" skills, pairing domain expertise (like history or biology) with computational skills

  • Empowering Responsible Heretics: Learning how to identify and protect employees who are willing to challenge legacy systems and "sacred cows"

Module 4: Execution over Innovation Theory

Target: Leadership and Management

  • Collapsing Strategy and Execution: Learning to operate in a world where strategy and execution have merged into a single motion

  • Business First, Tech Second: Training leaders to focus on specific business applications rather than getting bogged down in software and data choice debates

  • Sunsetting Legacy Systems: Developing a plan and explicit permission to navigate stakeholder friction when retiring old processes

  • Quarterly Adaptation: Moving away from multi-year cycles toward a regional, quarter-by-quarter adaptation strategy

Module 5: Governance and Acceptable Risk

Target: Board of Directors and Senior Executives

  • Bridging the Knowledge Gap: Utilizing training to ensure board members don't slow the company down with "hand-wringing" caused by a lack of AI understanding

  • Defining Outcomes: Shifting board focus from "doing AI" to articulating clear outcomes: efficiency, resilience, and growth

  • Risk Calibration: Establishing clear guidance on acceptable AI risk, ensuring AI is not held to an impossible standard compared to human error.