By Sahver Kaya · 4 min readYes, for the most part. AI literacy is knowing what the tools do. Using them well takes power skills like clarity, critical thinking, systems thinking and active listening. Those are two names for one skill, and you only get better at it by practicing.
Most AI literacy programs stop at the first half. People learn the tools in an afternoon, then go back to their desks and prompt the way they always have. The habits that decide the result, like asking why before accepting an answer, never get practiced.
RCM ThinkLabs (rcmlabs.io) builds those habits: short recurring sessions of immersive practice, run by a game-theory engine built on research at MIT, with each person's growth read against their own starting baseline.
What AI literacy usually means
Knowing what the tools do and how to use them: what a model is good at, where it makes things up, how to write a prompt. That is useful, and it is quick to learn.
It is also the easy half. Two people can sit through the same AI workshop, and one of them checks every answer while the other pastes the first one into a deck.
What power skills are
Power skills are how people think, listen, explain and decide with other people. You will also hear them called human skills, durable skills or soft skills. The label changes. The skills stay the same.
Where the two meet
Look at what good AI use takes, and you find power skills. These four come up first.
- Clarity. Saying what you want before you prompt. A vague prompt gets a confident, generic answer.
- Critical thinking. Checking what comes back, including the answer that sounds right.
- Systems thinking. Seeing where the answer fits: who it affects and what it changes downstream.
- Active listening. Hearing what the other person actually needs, so the prompt starts from the right question.
The list does not stop there. Leadership, persuasion and every other skill the AI era asks for belong on it too.
Nobody calls it AI literacy when a colleague does these things well. They just say that person is good at the job.
Why practice beats a workshop
A workshop can tell people to check the answer. It cannot make checking a habit. Habits come from repetition with feedback: a few minutes, often, on a real decision.
That matters more now because AI took over much of the work people used to learn on, the first drafts and the first-pass analysis. The responsibility stayed with them. The practice went away.
RCM ThinkLabs gives the practice back. Each session is a few minutes inside a story, and a character in it tells the person how they reasoned, in private. The next session starts where the last one ended.
How you tell whether it is working
Completions show who finished a workshop. They do not show who changed. We read each person against their own starting baseline, and the habit we watch most closely is asking why before accepting an answer.
At an advanced engineering team working with the U.S. Air Force, the share of questions that asked why went from 1 in 17 to 1 in 7 over 39 days. We measured the habit. We did not measure AI tool usage, and we make no claim about it.
Common questions
Is AI literacy the same as power skills? Largely, yes. AI literacy is knowing what the tools do. Power skills, like clarity, critical thinking, systems thinking and active listening, decide how well people use them. Knowing takes an afternoon. The skill takes repeated practice with feedback.
What are power skills? Power skills are how people think, listen, explain and decide with other people. They are also called human skills, durable skills or soft skills. The label changes and the skills stay the same.
Can AI literacy be taught in a workshop? The knowledge can. The habits cannot. Checking an answer, or saying what you want before you prompt, are habits, and habits come from repetition with feedback.
How do you measure AI literacy? Completions and quiz scores show who finished. To see change, read each person's behavior against their own starting baseline. We measure the habit of asking why before accepting an answer. We do not measure AI tool usage.
Who needs this most? Early-career people, because AI now does many of the first drafts and first-pass analyses they used to learn on. And their managers, who need a way to see who is growing.
See it on your own team.
Sahver Kaya is the founder and CEO of RCM ThinkLabs. An educator, experienced builder, and MIT alum, she is driven by one conviction: artificial intelligence, used well, should make people sharper.
Connect on LinkedIn →