It will be meaningless by Christmas

Emma wrote our AI Fluency Score in June, 0 to 5, and asked me to roll it out across the team. I sat on that task for three months and overthought it, which is very unlike me.

Here’s why.

Every time I picked it up I could see what would go wrong with it. Every new model from Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot absorbs a little more of the skill that used to sit at the level above. Careful prompting took real practice a year ago and takes almost none now, so a rung that used to mean something had dissolved. We are also still working out where AI genuinely earns its place in our work. Honestly? I thought that if I rolled the scale out now, it would be meaningless by Christmas.

Let me reassure you. The AI Fluency Score will be meaningless by Christmas. We have rewritten it twice already and I expect that to continue for as long as the models keep moving.

What I had wrong was treating that as a reason to wait. The alternative on offer was never a better scale later. It was no shared language at all, and conversations about who could do what that went nowhere, because nobody had the words for it.

A rough scale we argue about every quarter has turned out to be far more useful than the stable one I was holding out for. If you are sitting on something similar because it is not finished, it is probably the same mistake.