AI fluency
Comfort with the tools, held alongside knowledge of the customer. Hold only the second and you are slow; hold only the first and you are fast, fluent and confidently wrong.
AI fluency is the working comfort with models and tools that lets you get useful output on the first or second attempt rather than the fifth: knowing what to ask, what to attach, when to push back and when the answer cannot be trusted. It is the horizontal axis of the six characters and the adoption axis of Embracing AI in the diagnostic.
It is necessary and it is not sufficient. Chapter 7 puts the two halves side by side: fluency with the customer’s business, and fluency with the tools themselves. Hold only the first and you will be slow. Hold only the second and you will be fast, and fluent, and confidently wrong. The Anthropic Economic Index found the gap between experienced users and everyone else widening rather than closing, which suggests that fluency compounds, and that the best time to start was a while ago.
Set out in full in: Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI (Kogan Page, 2027), Introduction and chapter 7.
Related terms
The six characters
Two questions, six readers: how fluent you are with AI, and whether your instinct is to reach for the tool or for the customer.
Embracing AI
Adoption against commercial benefit. Adoption without direction is expensive noise.
The three registers
Productive, creative, collaborative: three different jobs AI can do for an account team. Not a maturity ladder, and the collaborative one needs an expert in the loop.
Automation bias
The human tendency to trust the machine even when it is wrong. The danger is not that AI replaces your expertise but that it lulls it into disuse.
See the method run on one real account in three days: the One Page Proposition.