Editorial
The future of work is here and it’s dynamic. To convert this opportunity into an advantage, organizations must make a strategic shift from digital literacy to digital fluency. Digital literacy means knowing how to use digital tools and feeling confident doing so. Digital fluency, however, moves beyond the basics. It’s about creating value and innovating with those tools in dynamic, ever-changing business contexts.
A recent MIT report, based on 300 deployments representing $30 to $40 billion in investments, found 95% of enterprise AI initiatives fail to deliver measurable value. The failure isn’t due to the technology, but rather because organizations lack the fluency to integrate technology into business and human workflows. The 5% that succeeded shared a common differentiator: they operationalized digital fluency, not just digital literacy, allowing them to transform and adapt at scale.
My prior series laid out the five principles that Digital Employee Experience (DEX) — a blueprint anchored in reference architecture, complete context, unified workflows, integrated platforms and continuous measurement. These principles help organizations design work environments where technology and human experience intersect seamlessly. But in practice, one insight has become clear: operationalizing DEX requires more than execution.
That’s where digital fluency comes in. Let’s delve a little deeper.
Essential Digital Literacy
Digital literacy evolved from earlier concepts like computer and media literacy, which emerged during the early days of personal computing and mass media. Initially, digital literacy focused on technical skills. As digital platforms became central to work and life, their definition expanded beyond technical proficiency. Today, digital literacy is the ability to engage with digital tools and platforms to accomplish everyday tasks responsibly.
Contrary to common practice, this sequence prioritizes digital literacy skills not by familiarity, but by their role in safe, responsible and effective use of digital ecosystems. It includes practical skills such as:
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Respecting governance principles including organizational policies, standards and regulatory requirements.
Managing devices and credentials, including the use of password vaults for secure and trusted access.
Understanding basic data concepts like file types, data attributes and how to classify and handle information as confidential, personal, or public. This is essential for informed decision-making.
Using productivity and collaboration tools like Gmail, Slack, Microsoft 365, and Zoom effectively. This is critical for communication and output.
Logging into and navigating digital workplace SaaS platforms with confidence.
Without a strong digital literacy foundation across the workforce, transformation initiatives stall. Employees struggle to adopt new tools, workflows become inefficient and security risks multiply. These gaps slow innovation, creating a disconnect between technology investments and business outcomes.
That’s why a digital literacy baseline assessment should be the cornerstone of any transformation effort. Tools like Northstar Digital Literacy, Cloud Assess or enterprise platforms such as Mercer | Mettl help organizations identify skill gaps and prioritize training that is relevant and integrated into their operating environments, before introducing new technologies.
Why Digital Literacy Isn’t Enough
While digital literacy ensures employees can use tools, it does not prepare them to connect technology to business strategy and human experience. For example, a team knows how to use Slack but can’t redesign workflows to integrate AI-driven collaboration. Or a manager who understands dashboards and KPIs but cannot interpret patterns to improve employee experience. These gaps are not technical, they are strategic.
Historically, these gaps have been reinforced by organizational silos. IT teams focused on systems; business units focused on outcomes and HR focused on people. When these domains operate in isolation, employees learn to use tools but not to connect dots across functions.
Another common scenario: organizations invest in advanced analytics platforms, but employees only extract surface-level reports. Without fluency, insights remain untapped, and decisions fail to align with business goals. As a result, technology becomes a passive cost center instead of a growth enabler.
Now, AI is dismantling traditional silos. Digital fluency equips an organization to thrive in flatter structures. As coordination layers and rigid hierarchies give way to human-agent organizations, people and intelligent systems will co-create outcomes. This transformation is cultural. Decision-making becomes distributed across the hybrid workforce, workflows are automated and adaptability defines success. In this environment, digital fluency is a universal survival skill, enabling employees to move beyond tool usage to designers of human-agent ecosystems.
Leaping to Digital Fluency
Digital fluency enables employees to think digitally, act strategically and design for people. These capabilities have traditionally been framed as leadership essentials, but they can’t wait till the top of the career ladder. Fluency must be developed across the workforce.
Digital fluency rests on three interconnected pillars:
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Digital Literacy: Foundational technical competence to use tools and platforms effectively. This confidence removes friction and fear when adopting new tools, accelerates onboarding, and builds trust in digital systems.
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Business Acumen: Understanding how decisions ripple across strategy, operations, and financial performance. Assessing the downstream impact of technology choices ensuresthat investments deliver measurable impact, digital initiatives stay aligned business outcomes, and resources are not wasted.
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Experience Intelligence: Designing and optimizing human-centered experiences, powered by empathy, collaboration, and interpretive skills. Creativity sparks differentiation, both human and business by transforming data into meaningful interactions that serve employees.
Together, these pillars enable employees to adapt, innovate, and lead in an environment defined by constant change and digital acceleration. Embedding these pillars as a global capability into organizational culture, and not just individual skill sets enables the broader vision of agility and trust shaping boardroom agendas.
In the rest of this series, we’ll dive deeper into the second and third pillars, Business Acumen and Experience Intelligence and explore how to develop them so we can transform the way we work. Organizations that embrace these pillars will prepare their workforce for the future, unlocking agility, resilience and innovation at scale.
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Stay tuned for Part 2: Building Business Acumen for the AI Age.
Editor's Note: Read more about the skills and knowledge we need in our workplaces today:
- Waking Up to Our Power: Human + Digital Capabilities for a Future-Ready Workforce — Beyond technical know-how, the future-ready worker needs a new blend of human and digital skills — anchored in awareness.
- These 6 Soft Skills Will Be Critical in the Future Workforce — Taking decisive action now to develop these six soft skills will position your organization to meet future challenges.
- How to Assess Employee Digital Literacy — Employee digital literacy will only grow more important in the years ahead. But before you can build it, you need to set a baseline. Here's how to get started.
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