AI literacy can’t just be a new hire requirement. It has to be an inside job for your current team.

I just finished the new MIT report that is making headlines - “The GenAI Divide - the State of AI in Business in 2025”. Lots of valuable insights for leaders and people managers trying to get real value from GenAI.

📰 Key headline: 95% of organizations are getting “zero return” on their GenAI investments (defined as AI deployment beyond pilot phase with measurable KPIs, assessed after 6 months.”

❓So what are the reasons for this? A few patterns I see (and MIT’s data echoes):

▶️9 out of 10 employees prefer personal AI tools over approved business/enterprise options - a huge red flag. The root cause is usually weak, restrictive, custom-built internal tools with zero personalized guidance.
▶️Companies are racing to ship customer-facing AI while underinvesting in internal enablement – training, change management, and professional development for their own teams.
▶️Successful companies are decentralizing their AI approach and enabling their front line managers and individual contributors to unlock impactful AI use cases. When AI power users are acknowledged and engaged, they drive changes in workflows and culture.
▶️Vendor partnerships are 2x as likely to beat in-house builds when those partnerships come with accountability from vendors and hands-on training embedded for employees.

There’s also a significant gap in the report I can’t ignore: MIT talks about the need for accessible tools/systems that can “learn” about an organization – and it is completely silent about how *employees* learn and are trained on how to use AI tools.

And this nugget is tucked at the end: executives say AI literacy is a fundamental capability for new hires. Yet there’s nothing studied on the necessity of enabling AI literacy (via training) for the people already on the team. That’s the biggest miss in the report.

📢 Why this matters:
Your current employees know your org, your customers, and what “good” looks like. When they get time, training, and permission to apply GenAI to real work, you get faster drafts, clearer decisions, and measurable wins – without waiting on another tool rollout or tech team to give you all the answers.

💡Bottom line:
AI literacy starts with the team you already have. Invest in their skills and confidence now. That’s how the personal wins people are getting outside your systems become organization-level outcomes inside them.