Companies are now tying promotions to AI competency, which sounds reasonable until you realize what that actually means in practice.
The logic is seductive: AI is reshaping work, so employees who master it deserve to move up. Fair enough. But somewhere between the strategy meeting and execution, this has evolved into a system where knowing which buttons to click in ChatGPT has become a legitimate credential for leadership.
Consider what this looks like on the ground. Your colleague who still uses Excel formulas the way they did in 2003 is now competing for a director role against someone who can write a decent prompt to Claude. The Excel person built the financial model that saved the company two million dollars. The prompt person made a PowerPoint deck 15 percent faster. Guess who gets the office with the window?
The absurdity deepens when you realize most “AI proficiency” assessments measure whether you know AI exists and have tried it once. Suddenly, the person who spent three weeks learning Midjourney to make memes has a competitive advantage over someone who has spent fifteen years understanding how to actually run a department. We are promoting based on novelty, not judgment.
Here is what actually matters: AI is a tool. Using a tool well requires wisdom about when to use it, when not to, and what happens when it fails. Those skills take time to develop. They are not learned in a two-hour workshop. Yet companies are treating AI adoption like it is the new MBA—a credential you earn, tick off a box, and suddenly you are management material.
The real tell? When your company starts promoting people primarily because they are comfortable with new software, you have stopped evaluating leadership and started evaluating resume formatting. That is not progress. That is just novelty dressed up as strategy.