:Hey High Stakers,:

Good morning and welcome to the 8th issue of High Stakes!

AI Literacy: The New Excel

High time enterprise sellers and buyers must stop treating AI fluency like a side hobby.

 ☕ 1-Minute Briefing

In the ’90s, knowing Excel was a cheat code. It wasn’t on the job description, but without it, you were deadweight.

GenAI has reached the same inflection point.

Today’s edge isn’t in building the model. It’s in knowing how to work with one.

This edition provides practical DIYs to get more than just AI-literate:

• What "AI literacy" really means

• How to drive upskilling inside teams, without new budgets

• A real case of delivery transformation (without doing any AI infra)

🔍 Deep Dive: Are You Behind Already?  

Ignore the “we don’t have AI talent” excuse. 

The real problem? Most teams are waiting for permission to try.

Buyers aren’t.

• 70% of CIOs now expect AI fluency in every new hire

• RFPs are asking vendors to “show AI in your delivery process”

• And internal copilots are quietly compressing delivery cycles by 30–40%

If you’re in IT services, the truth: Clients assume at least one person on your team knows how to use GenAI well.

If they can’t spot that person, they may not call you back.

 🧠 AI Literacy ≠ AI Engineering

Forget prompt libraries. Forget knowing model parameter counts.

Real-world AI fluency = Can you use AI to do your job better, right now?

Examples:

• A customer success exec drafts QBR slides in their client’s tone using GPT

• A delivery manager automates sprint retros using Slack + GPT + Zapier

• A junior BA summarizes 200 rows of messy feedback into clean insights

• A PM tests a new feature idea in ChatGPT before writing a spec

This is the bar. 

I know, it's shockingly low, but climbing fast.

🛠️ 3 Quick Wins to Build AI Fluency Internally

1. Run a 30-Day Prompt Sprint
   

• Assign a daily prompt challenge per team. 

• Each person takes a recurring task (client update, report draft, email writeup, whatever) and tries to do it faster with ChatGPT.

• Posts results in a shared Slack or Teams thread.

• Zero budget. Just reps. 

• Metric them for fun. Scroll for examples.

2. Host Role-Specific Copilot Jams
   

• Set up one-hour workshops by job function. 

• Let peers teach peers: 

  • Designers demo 3 things Figma Copilot helps with

  • Engineers walk through how Copilot speeds code review

  • Ops teams show how Notion AI helps them prep meeting agendas

• No slides. Just real screens, real workflows, real gains.

3. Create a Client-Facing AI Toolkit
   

• Don’t start with internal use cases. Start with projects.

• Identify 3 client workflows your teams repeat (e.g., onboarding docs, weekly status updates, report generation, anything really).

• Then build and share a plug-and-play GPT prompt or Copilot routine for each.

• Frame them as productivity boosters. Why? Because clients feel that benefit.

 👤 Who’s Your Internal AI Champion?

Hint: it’s not the “AI Strategy Lead” on paper.

Real champions show up in Slack at 11pm with a GPT workaround.

• They write custom prompts for teammates.

• They ask, “Can we automate this part?”

Find them. Back them. Give them room to experiment.

Checklist to spot them:

• They’ve built at least one internal tool (even if crude) using GPT or Zapier

• Others are borrowing their prompts

• They keep experimenting without being told

• They don't ask for permission—they show up with results

These are your future edge.

Not a shiny AI Centre of Excellence. Not a 12-month upskilling roadmap.

Just three champions with a bias for trying.

📏 Show Progress Without Fancy Dashboards

Don’t waste money on “AI adoption metrics.”

Track these four instead:

• Prompt Volume / Week: are people actually using it?

• Saved Output / Week: are they reusing what works?

• Time Saved per Task: real-world impact, not just usage

• Template Reuse Rate: how often team-built solutions get copied

Wrap these into a single internal “AI Assist Score” to share with clients or execs.

That is low-friction, high-signal. 

 📈 Case in Focus

Let’s talk about a 100-person IT services firm. Sounds almost like mine 😊.

£10M ARR. Good clients. Delivery was... okay.

Margins were thinning. The founder kept hearing “we need more people.”

Instead, they tried this over a real dev project:

• Launched a 4-week internal “GPT Jam”

• Each pod (BA, PM, QA, Dev) had to ship one reusable prompt

• No new tools. Just ChatGPT and existing workflows

What happened next:

• The QA team built a GPT prompt that wrote 80% of test case drafts

• A PM created a workflow that went like this >> Monday.com (to collect project status strands, other options to them available)→ use GPT → generate email for status reports

• One BA made a client-tailored “Insights Explainer” bot that summarized survey results

The change?

• Delivery capacity up 3X

• Cross-sell within client jumped (they loved the “no fancy, automation angle”)

• Internal morale soared—people finally felt smart again

It wasn’t about AI. 

It was about giving your smartest people permission to make things better.

 🧰 The Playbook

To request these helpful cheat sheets/ checklists, just reply to this email with “playbook“ or you can connect or follow me on LinkedIn to get daily actionable insights and I will send these to you as Google Drive links.

• 🟦 AI Champion Spotter Checklist: Not everyone with “AI” in their title is your real champion. This helps you find the quiet doers who actually move the needle.

• 🟨 Prompt Sprint Tracker Template: Turn GenAI from theory to habit: in 30 days, no extra tools. Just track, share, and watch the compound interest of better prompts.

• 🧩 30-Day AI Fluency Builder (a sort of mini-curriculum) for Mid-Market Services Teams: Forget slide decks. This kit builds practical GenAI skills, job by job. Perfect for mid-market services teams who need to show, not just talk AI.

 💬 Your Turn

You’re hiring someone new.  They’re not technical—but they’re sharp.

What’s one AI skill they must walk in with? 

(Reply here or comment on the LinkedIn post. Best answers featured next week.)

Best,
Srini

P.S. Share this with your team. The companies taking action now aren’t just keeping up, they’re setting the bar. Your 2025 delivery expectations might depend on it.