How to Evaluate AI Fluency in Your Team — and in New Hires

Key Takeaways:

• AI fluency refers to an employee’s ability to understand and apply AI beyond the basics, reimagining workflows and improving business outcomes. 
• This article explains how Zapier, Indeed and Salesforce measure and build AI skills to improve hiring decisions and productivity. 
• It also shares actionable takeaways for employers looking to advance AI fluency in their teams. 

In March 2023, Zapier CEO Wade Foster issued a “code red” to his staff. 

In an internal blog post, Foster told employees that OpenAI’s newly released version of  ChatGPT, with more advanced code-writing capabilities, must challenge the team to overhaul their roles in an AI-first world.

“The blog was not universally beloved,” Brandon Sammut, Zapier’s Chief People and AI Transformation Officer, said at Indeed’s 2025 FutureWorks conference in September, 2025. But for Zapier, a company that helps users automate workflows with AI, the release of a large language model (LLM) that could help with tasks across the business was a wake-up call. As Sammut said, everyone from the CEO down needed to “get hands-on-keyboard with these new tools and technologies.”

The leader-modeled, hands-on strategy is working. In December 2025, Zapier reported 97% AI adoption and has continued to track measurable results: AI has cut customer support response times by more than 40% and saved revenue operations over 200 hours a month through auto-routing leads. Indeed has seen a similar transformation, with 75% of employees using AI on at least a weekly basis, and 80% of them reporting that it adds value to their day.

Many companies focus on mere adoption. But maximizing AI’s value requires developing a plan to move beyond basic uses like answering coding questions, summarizing documents or polishing emails. AI fluency is a step on the journey to meaningfully and measurably improving core business outcomes. To ensure that happens, it’s important to measure AI fluency both in existing staff and in new hires. 

Here’s a look at how Zapier, Indeed and Salesforce assess AI skills to drive performance — and how other employers can help their teams become more AI-fluent.

What Causes AI Efforts to Fall Short? 

MIT researchers recently found that 95% of enterprise AI implementations yielded no return on investment. “That is a sobering statistic,” Hannah Calhoon, VP of AI for Indeed, said at the FutureWorks event. 

One big problem, she argued, is that companies rush to adopt AI without a coherent plan. Too often, she said, they take a one-size-fits-all approach to rolling out AI, without first mapping out how the tools relate to specific jobs. 

At Indeed, Calhoon said the company has taken a function-specific approach. “We don’t go in and say AI is generically good everywhere,” Calhoon said. Instead, her team starts with a defined role, like sales or marketing, and asks for specific pain points AI might fix.  

“You get business impact faster because you’ve gone in to fix an actual problem that you understand,” she said. “It’s tailored to exactly the task that they’re doing on a daily basis.” 

How Do You Define AI Fluency for Different Roles? 

AI fluency isn’t one-size-fits-all. What it looks like depends on the role and the outcomes teams are trying to improve.

Zapier, for example, has created a hiring framework that breaks down AI skills and mindsets by job function. It groups candidates into four categories: unacceptable, capable, adoptive and transformative. 

A job candidate for Zapier’s people team, for instance, may be assessed as “unacceptable” (meaning they wouldn’t get the job) if they dogmatically distrust all AI hiring tools. They’d be considered “capable” if they save two hours a week using ChatGPT to draft interview guides. But “transformative” candidates might use AI to streamline the recruiting process and reduce time to hire by 50% while boosting offer-to-accept rates by 10%.

How Can Interviewers Assess Job Candidates’ AI Skills?

Zapier now uses its framework to assess AI skills in 100% of candidates. That doesn’t mean giving every potential hire a technical assessment. But it does mean, say, asking a marketer how they use AI to generate content, or asking a prospective talent leader about hiring processes they’ve rebuilt using AI.

Zapier is looking for candidates with some degree of AI fluency, Sammut said. “If we’re hiring someone who’s coming to Zapier to help us reimagine how a certain type of work gets done with AI at the core, I really hope we’re hiring them at that transformational level,” he said. “Yet for some jobs, we’ll also hire folks with less AI experience who have self-taught to some degree and have a deep understanding of where AI can help—even if they can’t rebuild those practices with AI by themselves quite yet.” 

Should AI Abilities Factor Into Performance Reviews?

Evaluating AI fluency among current employees can be tricky, since managers often see skill development as their responsibility. In Indeed’s 2026 report “Smarter Hiring Insights: Solving the 7 Disconnects that Make Hiring Harder,” roughly half of employers said managers are responsible for reskilling and upskilling their teams. Given this, experts say it would be premature to penalize AI-wary employees.

Ruth Hickin, VP of Workforce Innovation at Salesforce, said it’s too early to tie AI skills to performance reviews, though the company uses self-assessments and manager reviews to gauge fluency. As AI increasingly boosts productivity, she added, that may change.

If an employee opts out of using Cursor, the AI-powered code editor, “it’s probably impossible for them to code at the same speed as a colleague,” Hickin said at FutureWorks. “We’re going to have to make decisions around whether or not that becomes a performance issue, but we’re not there yet.”

At Zapier, Sammut said the company sets goals around AI fluency and adjusts performance expectations if those goals prove feasible. On the customer support team, Zapier tested whether AI could cut response times in half over a year. 

When the team met that goal without sacrificing customer satisfaction or employee engagement, they incorporated this type of AI usage into performance expectations. “It really invited the team into experimentation,” Sammut said, noting that employee engagement scores during this period actually ticked up by 20-30 points on a scale of 100 during the implementation period. 

How Can Companies Keep AI Skills Up to Date Over Time?

AI fluency, of course, is not a destination. As technology evolves, so will AI skills. 

Indeed has taken a layered approach to training, says Calhoon. The company offers AI 101 training to all employees, as well as group-based training for specific roles and peer-led training taught by “power users” at the company. 

“No matter how many times I or any other leader at Indeed tells folks to use AI tools, the people they're actually going to believe are their colleagues." 

Hannah Calhoon, VP of AI at Indeed

At Salesforce, Hickin said the company requires all employees to take a certain level of AI training. Those courses can double as benchmarks, measuring where employees’ AI skills stand across the company. 

For instance, on Trailhead, Salesforce’s online learning platform, employees can take a course on building AI agents and progress through levels from “champion” to “innovator” to “legend.” In 2025, Hickin said every employee was required to reach at least champion status. 

As AI reshapes work, the challenge for many companies isn’t merely encouraging adoption, but encouraging AI fluency. Using AI occasionally is not the same as knowing how to use it to redesign processes and set new expectations. The organizations that figure out that distinction early will be better positioned to keep pace as the technology evolves.

Indeed provides this information as a courtesy to users of this site. Please note that we are not your recruiting or legal advisor, we are not responsible for the content of your job descriptions, and none of the information provided herein guarantees performance.
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