The new McKinsey report I wrote about yesterday shows how quickly the labor market is shifting. Mentions of AI fluency in job postings grew nearly sevenfold in two years and outpaced every other skill in US job ads. It is clear that AI capability has become a baseline job requirement almost overnight. But there is a nuance the report does not fully capture. Employers are asking for AI fluency, but they do not want candidates who can only use AI. They want people who can help them implement their larger AI ambitions.
You can find the McKinsey analysis here: https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_AI_Agents_in_Action_Foundations_for_Evaluation_and_Governance_2025.pdf
TLDR
- AI fluency gets employers interested.
- Organizational fluency creates the value companies are chasing.
- Most of the real work happens across teams, not inside prompt windows.
AI Fluency Is Surging, but It Is Not the Full Skill Set
The sevenfold rise in AI fluency demands reflects what companies think they need. Leaders want workers who understand how to use language models, generate outputs, and speed up tasks. This is reasonable and important, but it only scratches the surface of what organizations must become.
AI tools accelerate work. AI transformation changes work. The second category is where the long term value comes from and it requires a completely different set of capabilities.
Using a model is not the same thing as knowing how to help an organization adopt it.
Why Employers Need More Than Tool Users
Modernizing workflows, increasing productivity, and redesigning processes require more than technical skill in AI fluency. They require people who know how to bring coworkers along with them. They require individuals who can influence procedures, align teams, improve cross functional communication, and help an entire organization believe in the future it is building.
These are not technical tasks. These are organizational tasks.
The real battle is not happening in prompt windows. It is happening in meeting rooms, across cubicles, and on Zoom calls where teams negotiate how work should change. An employee who can build consensus will outperform an employee who can only write clever prompts.
Why Organizational Fluency Matters More Than Ever
Organizational fluency sits at the intersection of communication, systems thinking, workflow design, and cultural awareness. It shows up in the ability to:
- Explain AI driven changes to reluctant teams
- Translate leadership goals into operational steps
- Redesign processes that have been stable for years
- Spot bottlenecks and remove them
- Coordinate work across functions
- Build trust in systems that feel unfamiliar
Companies adopt technology through their people, not through their models. Without employees who know how to guide teams, AI projects stall or turn into isolated experiments that never scale.
Organizational fluency is the force that moves ideas from pilot to practice.
The Skills Employers Are Actually Signaling For
When employers say they want AI fluency, they are indirectly signaling for employees who can do more than generate responses. They want:
- Process redesign skill
- Change management skill
- Team alignment skill
- Workflow orchestration skill
- Cross functional influence skill
- The ability to test, evaluate, and improve AI assisted processes
These are the skills that make enterprise AI adoption possible. They turn technical models into business outcomes.
AI Fluency Gets You in the Door. Organizational Fluency Creates Value.
AI fluency is the entry ticket. It proves you can operate in a modern environment. But organizational fluency is what moves teams forward. It shapes how companies adopt technology, how they scale transformation, and how they build cultures that can adapt to continuous change.
A future ready workforce is not just AI literate. It is organizationally literate.
Employees who bring both will define the next decade of performance and innovation.
Related content you might also like:
- The Future of the Workforce: People, Agents and Robots
- Generative AI Labor Market: Impacts on Jobs and Young Workers
- AI and organizational agility: What Amazon’s Job Cuts Reveal
- AI and Human Intelligence: Redefining the Boundaries
- Agentic AI: Unlocking Organizational Transformation
