AI skills are quickly becoming a baseline expectation in hiring, with more employers adding AI fluency to their job descriptions every month. Yet when you ask those same employers what AI fluency actually looks like for the vast majority of roles that aren't deeply technical, most struggle to answer.

Universities still treat AI primarily as a cheating problem, restricting how students use it rather than helping them become fluent. So there's a growing gap between what the workplace demands and what education delivers.

How do we define AI fluency in practical terms, and who should be leading that conversation?

My guest this week is Kathleen deLaski, Founder of the Education Design Lab and author of Who Needs College Anymore?. In our conversation, she shares what employers and students are revealing about AI readiness, and why the current approach risks failing a generation of new talent.

In the interview, we discuss:

What is an AI-fluent workforce?
Preparing learners for a new world of work
Current student attitudes to AI
Is the education system able to evolve quickly enough?
Moving beyond prompts
What replaces degrees in early-career hiring?
Assessing human skills at scale
Articulating what AI skills look like in your organization
What does the future look like?

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