Today is National AI Literacy Day.

A year ago, I sat down with Sal Khan for a fireside chat on AI Literacy, and I've been reflecting on that conversation as we lead up to today. The challenges and opportunities are different now because so much has evolved with AI in the past year.

Sal said something that stuck with me: "Technology amplifies human intent." Not a coin flip. Not fate. A mirror.

One year later, that framing feels more urgent than ever. Agentic AI is no longer a future vision. It's running inside workflows, classrooms, and homes. The question has shifted from "should we use this?" to "who will use it well?"

That's the gap between AI literacy and AI fluency, and it's wider than most people realize.

Literacy is knowing AI exists, knowing where it impacts life, and roughly how to use it for simple tasks. Fluency is knowing how to ask the right questions, how to push back on a bad output, how to use it as a thought partner rather than a search engine or ghostwriter. It's the difference between a calculator user and a mathematician. Better context and understanding leads to better results.

There won’t be one AI to rule them all. That is obvious as AI adoption and literacy increase, the need for AI fluency also increases. And fluency isn’t about mastering one tool, it’s about knowing which tool to use, when, and why.

We’re already seeing people use multiple AI tools for different purposes. We recently conducted a survey of 1,000 American consumers asking them about their tech habits. People who reported using AI said they have used 4 different AI tools. They reported using roughly 2 different AI technologies every day and 3 per week.

Sal made another point I keep returning to. Even with a world-class free technology available to every student, only 15 to 20% meaningfully engage with it. The constraint isn't access. It's the atrophied muscle of knowing how to ask for help, from a teacher, from a peer, from a system. That muscle matters more now than it ever has.

A lot has changed in a year. AI agents are now embedded in the tools many of us use daily. The emotional dimension of AI relationships is no longer hypothetical.

Pew Research reports that half of Americans are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life.

As AI becomes more embedded in daily life, it won’t just be about intelligence, but emotional intelligence. The systems people trust will be the ones that combine IQ with EQ, understanding not just what we ask, but how and why we ask it. As these systems become more personalized, they’ll also require more trust, raising important questions about who they serve, how they are responsibly designed, and how they use data.

The equity gap in who develops fluency is quietly widening, even as access expands. And the window for getting the norms right in education is closing faster than anyone expected.

On this National AI Literacy Day, I'd push us toward a harder question than "do people understand AI?" Ask instead: are we building the conditions for fluency? For the student who doesn't know how to ask the right question. For the teacher who needs more than a training module. For the community that has the phone but not the laptop or VR headset.

We need educators leading AI design, not just adopting it. We need fluency programs that teach judgment, not just prompting. We need nonprofit and civic players at the table alongside the market. And we need honest conversation about what our relationship to AI tools means for the next generation.

I wonder what I’ll be writing about this a year from now? The future Sal and I talked about, where learners are empowered and AI supports teachers to focus on helping learners and human connection they actually went into teaching for, is within reach. But it won't arrive on its own.

You have power. You have agency. You can help steer the direction. Be curious, that’s the most powerful. The future of AI won’t be shaped by the technology alone, but by how people choose to use it.

What are you doing today to move from literacy to fluency? I'd love to hear it.

Grateful to Sal Khan , Katrina Stevens , The Tech Interactive , and everyone who showed up that day with hard questions.

You can watch the full talk here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlLD8NAYhAQ