AI use is not the same as AI fluency, and that fact keeps mattering more and more.
I’ve spent about 2,000 hours watching people use AI over the last year.
Here’s what I can tell you: just using AI is not the bar.
AI fluency is 10x more valuable than AI usage. AI fluent teams are running absolute circles around teams that have taken the corporate training on ChatGPT (or CoPilot).
You’re using AI. Maybe your whole company is. Dashboards show adoption climbing. People report time savings.
And yet you might not be getting any actual value from it.
The difference between people who merely use AI and people with AI fluency is the difference between 30 percent productivity gains and 300 percent productivity gains. Between incremental improvement and explosive capability expansion.
Why is that? I’ve spent the last six months trying to understand why some people and teams get explosive results while others get theater. Why 10 people with AI fluency can outperform 500 people with AI training. It’s not just that small startups win! I’ve seen teams at big companies level up massively too.
What I’ve found across teams big and small is surprisingly consistent. After sitting with my notes and findings over the last few months, I’ve come to the conclusion that the real drivers of AI fluency are hidden.
You can’t teach true fluency by teaching a tool, like ChatGPT.
You have to dig deeper, and very few people do.
After looking through my notes across dozens of team engagements, I’ve derived three root principles that determine org-level AI fluency:
Constraints over process
AI-shaped problem solving skills first (there are five pieces to this!)
No infrastructure, for awhile
None of these are about prompting techniques or tool training.
Together, they’re about building judgment that compounds.
Whether you’re an IC trying to 10x your own output, a manager trying to help your team get better, or a leader trying to figure out why AI isn’t showing up in the business metrics—the question is the same.
Are you building capability that lets you tackle harder problems, or are you just getting faster at the easy ones?
This piece walks through the three principles that create AI fluency, breaks down the five transferable problem-solving skills I’ve observed in high-performing people and teams, and gives you three specific questions to assess where you stand.
And yes, there’s a prompt to help you make sense of it all for your unique situation.
My goal is to help you figure out whether you’re building capability that compounds or dependency that will be obsolete in months, and then to give you the tools to take action so you (and your team) can level up.
Let’s get into it.
This is an Executive Circle briefing, a Sunday newsletter exclusively for Founding Tier Members. You can learn more via this 60 second video explaining what’s in each tier, and you can change your plan here. Enjoy, and back to regular programming Monday!
