Every era of American growth has demanded a new kind of literacy. The industrial age required workers who could run sophisticated machines. The information age made digital skills a baseline, until spreadsheets became as unremarkable as a telephone. We are now in the early innings of the next shift, and it is moving faster than any before it.

My colleagues Alexis Krivkovich, Brooke Weddle and I recently wrote about what we believe will define this chapter: AI fluency. Not the ability to build AI models, but the practical ability to use artificial intelligence in daily work, fold it into workflows, judge its outputs critically and, increasingly, create with it. AI is fast becoming the common language of work.

The labor market is already sending that signal. Lightcast, which supplies job-postings data to Stanford’s AI Index, found the share of US postings mentioning AI skills rose 60% in the first half of 2026, with fast growth in human resources, customer support, hospitality and finance. Employers are paying for it. An earlier Lightcast analysis of 1.3 billion job ads found postings requiring AI skills offer salaries 28% higher, nearly $18,000 a year, and more than half sit outside IT.

The Bottleneck Is People, Not........

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