Hey everyone,
After spending 17 years working in AI at big tech, I decided to go solo to tackle something that kept coming up in my corporate life:
Most professionals want to use AI but few actually know how.
In talking with hundreds of users since starting working on my AI learning platform, I’ve realized most people fall into three groups:
- The fearful: They’re worried AI will replace their job, so they avoid it.
- The overwhelmed: They want to learn, but get lost in the noise endless tools, jargon, and hype.
- The frustrated users: They’ve tried ChatGPT or other tools but get poor results because they don’t know how to prompt with real context or connect AI to concrete use cases in their job (e.g. marketing, sales, or product work).
According to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report, AI-related skills are among the fastest-growing in demand globally, yet fewer than half of workers have received any kind of AI training. The gap is widening faster than companies can close it.
Here are a few early lessons I’ve learned building in this space:
- AI literacy ≠ learning how to prompt. People don’t need to “learn AI,” they need to learn how to apply it to their decisions and in their day day to work.
- Consistency > intensity. Short daily learning beats binge courses every time.
- Context drives adoption. Once users see how AI helps them specifically, fear turns into curiosity and usage sticks.
I’m curious from the entrepreneur side:
Is “AI fluency” actually becoming a hot topic inside your companies or industries yet?
Do you see employees, clients, or customers trying to skill up, or is it still more hype than action?
I left big tech after 17 years in AI to go solo, here’s what I’ve learned about the real AI skills gap
byu/UpSkillMeAI inEntrepreneur
Posted by UpSkillMeAI
9 Comments
it may differ by sectors. for example, those more manual processing, manufacturing, healthcare, vs those digital industries like media, tech related..
how can i learn to prompt properly? and have you had many customers from the video production industry?
Listened to someone brag about an admin panel built by claude in 20 minutes and i couldnt hide the wince. Security nightmare waiting to happen
Hey dude, mad respect for stepping out of big corporate and going at it solo. Totally feel you on the AI literacy point. IMO, ppl overthink it, it’s like any tool – it’s less about being a specialist, more about knowing how to use it effectively. But 100%, giving workers hands-on experience in a real-world context – that’s where it’s at. Not enough emphasis on that rn, imo. Also, daily learning > binge learning – that’s some golden wisdom right there. Thanks for sharing!
Good points
Any good resources (yt channel for example?) where to about ai?
Ai fluency is definitely a hot topic for c-suites. I don’t see how you can create a business out of that though. There’s nothing to teach other than “stop being lazy and experiment with it til you figure it out.”
It’s like trying to teach computer literacy in the 80s and 90s. The people too dumb to learn won’t learn, and the problem takes care of itself in a decade or two with demographic shifts.
This is partly why I created EarlyInsightsLab.com. It’s a newsletter of project briefs for UX designers and researchers based on emerging tech trends.
But I honestly think it’s worthwhile for anyone interested in or being pushed to use AI.
I don’t think AI fluency is just about learning how to use it, it’s also about getting more opinionated about the technology that will start to define our generation.
Running a small service business, I’m seeing the same three buckets. What works is role-specific mini playbooks with short recurring practice tied to a simple metric like faster briefs or fewer revisions, not big courses. Are you leaning into job-based paths over tool-based?
You did 17 years in AI? So you were at the dawn