AI fluency: How to build your firm's capacity using a leadership-first approach

Building AI fluency isn’t about turning every employee into a tech expert. Rather, it’s about equipping every member of an organisation with operational fluency to interact with AI systems effectively.

Another essential skill is critical literacy – the discernment to evaluate AI outputs, recognising if they are incomplete, misleading or biased. This requires the cross-checking of information, questioning assumptions and understanding the probabilistic nature of machine learning. And finally, ethical awareness – the capacity to navigate the moral dimensions of AI use.

This includes respecting privacy, avoiding harmful applications and recognising the broader societal implications of delegating decisions to machines.

Without this AI fluency, organisations risk underusing their AI investments, mismanaging the risks and falling behind their competitors.

Organisations hoping to thrive in the digital economy should adopt a three-tiered training approach, targeting leaders, developers and end users. It starts at the top.

Beyond technical skills, leaders must be at the forefront of understanding AI’s potential, its limitations, ethical implications and how their investments will align with their business goals to ensure that business applications will benefit their competitiveness and resilience.

Leaders have a critical role to play in driving adoption, managing resistance to change, and fostering trust within the organisation. They must have confidence in the choices they are making in the tools they introduce and ensure that the necessary training and knowledge are embedded across the entire organisation.

To nurture AI fluency, leaders must invest in skills development and training programmes.

For example, the Kenya AI Skilling Alliance, the Kenya Private Sector Alliance and Fastlane are offering targeted AI and cybersecurity training for organisational leaders and roles in finance, legal, banking, education, HR, and marketing.

This knowledge must cascade through middle management to frontline employees. For Kenya to deliver on its digital economy ambitions, AI skills must move beyond the basics. This shift requires significant investment in advanced digital skills, industry partnerships and institutional capacity-building.

The writer is the skills director, Microsoft Elevate