AI LITERACY IS THE NEW COMPUTER LITERACY

My wife asked me by the pool last weekend where all this AI stuff ends up. She’d just watched one of those doom videos. Smart people, serious faces, saying the jobs are going away.

Here’s what I told her.

Forget the argument everybody’s having about whether AI destroys jobs or creates them. Play the most optimistic case. Say the number of jobs in this country three years from now is exactly the same as today. Not one fewer.

You’re still in trouble. Because most of those jobs will have titles that don’t exist right now.

“Office administrator,” that title goes away. “Computer programmer,” gone, or turned into something you can’t go search for today, like “AI orchestrator for accounting.” Same headcount, different work, different skills.

And here’s the part the doom videos skip: the person who loses the old title is almost never the person who gets the new one. Not unless they know how to actually use these tools.

I’ve seen this movie before. So have you.

Thirty years ago, computers showed up in offices. There was a stretch where knowing how to use one was a specialty. Then it wasn’t. It became the floor. Picture someone in their mid-fifties back then, thirty years of experience, takes shorthand, types up the notes. Sharp, reliable, valuable. And one day the answer to “do you know how to use this?” is “what’s Windows?”

Thirty years of experience didn’t save that person. The skill set did, or the lack of it sank them.

That’s where we are again. AI literacy is quietly becoming a basic skill, not a specialty. And most people are still treating it like a specialty.

I’m not telling you to become a technologist. I’m not one. I’m an operator who learned to think with these tools. For the last week and a half I’ve been running my whole business out of one working window: the writing, the follow-ups, the tracking, the busywork that used to eat my day. It’s not magic and it’s not complicated. It’s a skill I picked up on my own real work.

That’s the thing nobody tells you. This isn’t “AI training.” Sitting through a class on what a large language model is won’t move your business an inch. What moves it is learning your own use cases, the three or four things you do every week that hurt, and getting AI to actually do them, on your keyboard, with your accounts.

The gap between the people who cross that line and the people who don’t is going to be the whole game. Not fewer jobs. A skill line, and which side of it you’re standing on.

You don’t have to cross it alone, and you don’t have to cross all of it at once. You just have to start.

If you want to get on the right side of this line, let’s talk. Thirty minutes, no agenda. We’ll find the work that’s costing you time and figure out if AI can take it off your plate.

Book a call: kerzie.ai/schedule

Wade Kerzie

Founder, Kerzie AI Solutions

kerzie.ai