AI Literacy
Reading and writing are no longer enough. In the age of AI, corporate literacy now demands something new. You must know how to use AI tools competently, and you must be digitally literate enough to know when those tools are lying to you. This is not a theoretical concern as it is already costing organisations money, credibility, and in some cases their leadership positions.
AI Literacy
Wafula Meshack
AI Literacy: The Skill Every Boardroom Now Needs
For most of modern history, being literate meant one thing. You could read a page and you could write a sentence. That single measure decided who got hired, who got promoted, and who got left behind in the corporate world. It was a reasonable measure for a world built on paper, memos, and printed reports.
That world is gone. In its place is a workplace where a chatbot can draft a legal brief in seconds, where a video call can be entirely fake, and where a national government can publish an official policy document full of citations that were never real. Reading and writing are no longer enough. In the age of AI, corporate literacy now demands something new. You must know how to use AI tools competently, and you must be digitally literate enough to know when those tools are lying to you.
Let me be precise. This is not a theoretical concern as it is already costing organisations money, credibility, and in some cases their leadership positions.
When AI confidently gets it wrong
Consider South Africa. In April 2026, the Department of Communications and
Digital Technologies published its Draft- National AI Policy for public comment. The document had already been cleared by Cabinet. Then journalists at News24 discovered that at least six of the policy ' s sixty seven academic citations were fabricated. The journals did not exist. The researchers credited had never written the papers attributed to them. Communications Minister withdrew the policy and called it an unacceptable lapse. Two officials were later suspended once internal investigations confirmed that ChatGPT had been used in editing the document without proper verification.
What makes this case so instructive is the nature of the failure. The document did not crash or return an error message. It produced fluent, well formatted, confident text that read exactly like the output of a competent researcher. The only way to catch the fabrication was the kind of methodical human checking that AI is supposed to make unnecessary. A country trying to write the rules for artificial intelligence was undone by its own unverified use of the technology.
South Africa is far from alone. In the United States, attorney Steven Schwartz
Reading and writing are no longer enough. In the age of AI, corporate literacy now demands something new. You must know how to use AI tools competently, and you must be digitally literate enough to know when those tools are lying to you. This is not a theoretical concern as it is already costing organisations money, credibility, and in some cases their leadership positions.
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