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AI fluency foundations
Cultivating an AI-Fluent Culture
Activate an AI-ready culture that empowers employees to innovate from the ground up while equipping leaders to provide the vision, safety, and structure needed to scale AI’s impact. In this session, Libby Rodney, chief strategy officer at The Harris Poll, explores how to shift employee mindsets, foster psychological safety, and build AI fluency across your organization.
If organizations aren't having these conversations right now, they’re missing the opportunity to get people in an AI mindset. That is what is going to create the flywheel effect that the technology will have across the organization.”
Meet the expert behind the insights
Libby Rodney, Chief Strategy Officer, The Harris Poll
Libby Rodney leads the Thought Leadership and Futures practice at The Harris Poll. Known for her future-forward insights and strategic frameworks, Libby helps organizations navigate today’s cultural and technological shifts while anticipating what’s next. Her recent research explores how AI is transforming workplace culture and how leaders can build trust, safety, and AI fluency from the ground up.
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Beyond Aspirations: Building the AI-Fluent Workplace
As the next step in our AI learning series, our experts return for a live, dynamic conversation that dives into the nuances of scaling AI fluency across your organization. Save your seat to get real-world perspectives on the personal, technical, and cultural shifts that can turn AI curiosity into workforce capability.
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Understand the key takeaways
1. AI fluency is a mindset, not just a skillset
AI fluency goes beyond knowing how to use tools; it’s about cultivating the confidence and curiosity to integrate AI into everyday workflows. Employees who are AI fluent feel empowered to experiment, fail, and drive innovation, even when formal guidance is still evolving. It’s a shift from passively learning new software to actively co-creating with AI. Leaders who focus solely on tools or training risk missing the deeper transformation: AI fluency lives in how people think, not just in what they know. When organizations actively support this shift—through open dialogue, encouragement, and autonomy—they spark the cultural momentum needed for AI to scale with impact. The more fluency grows, the more adoption accelerates, creating a flywheel effect of innovation.
Leaders need to think about AI as not just a tool you figure out how to use. It's more of a mindset. The more you work with AI, the more it changes how you collaborate with it, how you design things, and how your workflows evolve.”
2. Aligning top-down vision with bottom-up reality
Across organizations, there’s often a mismatch between executive-level enthusiasm and employee-level reality. While C-suites strategize on AI transformation, many employees are hesitant to actually use AI because they are unsure of what’s allowed or afraid to use it incorrectly. This disconnect creates hidden friction and missed opportunities. Without clear communication and cultural alignment, even the most ambitious AI roadmaps will struggle to gain traction. Leaders must create space for both bottom-up experimentation and top-down transparency so that innovation and fluency can meet in the middle.
3. Psychological safety is foundational
One of the most powerful yet overlooked levers for AI adoption is psychological safety. Building AI fluency requires creating a workplace where people feel safe to experiment, fail, and learn with AI. Many employees aren’t holding back due to lack of interest, but because of anxiety about making mistakes or being replaced. With 60% of workers—and 65% of Gen Z—fearing their jobs will become obsolete, hesitation is widespread. Stories of missteps leading to punishment or termination only reinforce this fear. To counteract that, organizations need to be transparent about AI policies, reward experimentation, and clearly define expectations and boundaries. The message should be clear: Trying AI is encouraged, and learning through doing is valued, not penalized.
What we found in our research with ETS is that there’s this huge FOBO, which is the fear of becoming obsolete. In fact, 60% of people globally fear becoming obsolete, and 65% of Gen Z do. The younger you are, the more afraid you are.”
Bridge the AI adoption gap
Grammarly’s intuitive AI editor, assistant, and agents help connect leadership vision with everyday workflows. Grammarly works across 500,000+ apps, accelerating adoption for employees at every skill level—so the tools you invest in actually get used. With Grammarly, teams build fluency naturally, not in silos.
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4. Employees are shifting from doers to directors
As AI takes on more of the execution and becomes the “doer,” employees are essentially stepping into “director” roles, guiding, managing, and shaping how AI is used in their work. This shift isn’t individual—it’s organizational. To make it successful, leaders need to reimagine roles, redefine expectations, and prepare teams for a future where even entry-level employees act as directors, orchestrating AI agents to complete their workflows. That means investing in training, recalibrating how talent is developed, and creating clarity around what these new roles look like in practice. Preparing for this organizational shift across functions and levels is key to building real AI fluency and enabling confident, organization-wide adoption.
5. Champion curiosity, not perfection
When it comes to building AI fluency, progress beats polish, and leaders play a crucial role in setting the tone. Highlighting success stories, making space for safe failure, and publicly celebrating AI wins—no matter how small—help replace fear with momentum. This isn’t about expecting everyone to master AI overnight. It’s about fostering a culture where curiosity is rewarded, learning is continuous, and progress is visible. When employees see that curiosity and trying something new with AI leads to recognition (not reprimand), it builds the psychological and cultural lift to transform fear into fluency.
Give employees dedicated time to just play with AI. Show that experimentation is actually a priority. Celebrate and reward the people who are using AI to boost creativity, innovation, or efficiency. You must signal that trying AI is a good thing.”
Apply what you’ve learned
Next steps for executives
Model transparent AI use. Share your own experimentation—even what didn’t work—to build psychological safety org-wide.
Create opportunities for bottom-up input through open forums, surveys, or team discussions about real AI use cases and concerns.
Create shared signals of AI success. Celebrate real examples in all-hands meetings or company comms to show what “good” looks like.
Redefine expectations at every level. Update job descriptions, role expectations, and training to reflect the shift from doers to directors.
Invest in cross-functional enablement. Support fluency across functions through Learning and Development partnerships, AI toolkits, or internal champions.
Choose tools that support AI fluency at scale
Building AI fluency requires more than training. It takes tools that meet people where they are, help them grow, and evolve alongside them. Whether you’re looking for personal tools to experiment with or rolling out AI to your entire organization, here’s what you should look for:
Personalized and contextual
The best AI tools adapt to you and your organization—learning your voice, understanding your workflows, and getting smarter over time.
Ubiquitous by design
True fluency happens when AI is with you wherever you work. Look for tools that integrate into your daily flow—not ones that interrupt it.
Built for AI-native work
AI tools should do more than assist. They should collaborate with you—helping you prompt, iterate, and get to stronger outcomes faster.
Trusted by security leaders
Fluency can scale only when trust is in place. Choose tools that are secure by default and embraced by IT and end users alike.
Explore curated resources
Agentic AI 101: Understand the Basics
Building AI fluency starts with understanding the basics. Explore this beginner-friendly guide to a fast-moving field. We’re covering what agentic AI is, what sets agents apart from the AI you’re used to, and how organizations are already putting it to work.
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How Grammarly Became Customer Zero for Its Own AI
Go behind the scenes of Grammarly’s own AI adoption journey. Learn how internal champions, clear guidelines, and cultural alignment built the momentum for our Marketing team to increase their AI fluency.
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Prepare for What’s Next: AI Trends to Watch
Hear Tim Sanders (G2, Harvard Business School) and Luke Behnke (Grammarly) unpack the agentic AI shift—from hype to how-to. This on-demand webinar is your shortcut to clarity on what’s next in enterprise AI.
View more →
Ready to level up your team’s AI fluency?
Empower your team with AI they’ll actually use, right in the tools they already use. Grammarly works where your team works, putting fluency at their fingertips and making success scalable.
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