We exist because students are entering an AI-changed workforce their schools haven’t caught up to.
Get AI Literate is an independent project to make AI literacy a measurable, teachable competency, built on a 7-pillar framework, anchored by a free assessment, and published openly.
It started with one frustration: watching talented graduates enter a job market where AI fluency was assumed and never taught. The pages on this site exist to close that gap, one cohort at a time.
The origin story, in plain language.
Get AI Literate started with a frustration: watching talented students graduate into an entry-level job market that AI was rewriting in real time, and watching universities try to catch up at the pace of a committee.
In 2023, the first wave of generative AI hit business, marketing, and communications work harder than almost any other field. Research synthesis, first-draft copywriting, campaign reporting, data summaries, the apprenticeship work that used to teach new hires the trade, became AI-augmentable overnight. Recruiters started asking candidates how they use AI. Most graduates couldn’t answer.
The gap we kept seeing
Existing AI training programs were built for working professionals, for analysts who already understood the workflow they were inserting AI into. They assumed workplace context. They assumed prior experience with the deliverables. They assumed someone senior would catch the model’s mistakes.
Students entering their first roles had none of that. They were being handed a brand-new tool and expected to use it well in workflows they didn’t yet understand, on work whose quality they couldn’t yet judge. The same tools that made experienced employees more productive made inexperienced ones less safe.
“Our seniors don’t know which questions to ask the AI, and they don’t know how to check the answers it gives them. We’re sending them out underprepared.”, Career-services director, public Big Ten university
A framework, not a tool list
The first version of GAIL was just a one-page rubric on a whiteboard. Seven competencies that recruiters and faculty kept naming, sometimes in different words, but always the same underlying skills.
A year of pilots, faculty interviews, and rewrites later, those seven became the 7-Pillar Framework, a working taxonomy of what it actually takes to be AI literate in an entry-level role. Independent enough to assess. Connected enough to teach in sequence. Practical enough to map to a job description.
Where we are now
GAIL is independent, debt-free, and built on the premise that students own their AI literacy, not their university, not their employer, not the tool vendors. The free assessment exists because we believe the first benchmark of someone’s AI fluency shouldn’t cost money. The framework is published in full because gatekeeping a literacy standard defeats the point of having one.
We partner with university career centers and academic departments who want to fold the framework into their senior-year readiness program, and with employers who want a shared language for AI fluency on résumés. The work is ongoing. The framework will be revised. So will we.
“I built this because I kept seeing the same gap and no one else was going to close it.”
I’m Fred Faulkner. I’ve spent 25 years working in marketing and technology, the last decade of it watching AI quietly reshape the entry-level workforce I came up through.
Universities are doing their best, but their curriculums are six to eighteen months behind the tools recruiters expect graduates to know. That gap costs students offers, salary, and confidence in their first months on the job.
GAIL exists to give students something to point to, a framework, an assessment, and a body of resources they can use without waiting for their school to catch up. You own your AI literacy. We’re here to help.
Anchored in research employers actually trust.
The 7-Pillar framework is independent, but not invented from scratch. It maps onto the standards educators and employers are already aligning to.
- Aligned with the UNESCO AI Competency Framework for higher education
- Consistent with AACSB guidance on technology in business education
- Maps to McKinsey workforce AI-skill documentation
- Grounded in NACE employer expectations research (2024–25)
- Built explicitly for students entering the workforce, not for the professional training market
Try the assessment. Read the framework. Tell us what we missed.
The framework is in active revision. If you teach, recruit, or hire AI-fluent graduates, we want your field notes.