AI literacy will decide the geopolitical future – but nations are currently on diverging tracks.
The lack of alignment on how to measure AI literacy is hindering leaders and policy-makers.
Nations that lag on AI literacy will be subject to a brain drain that will further disadvantage them.
세계경제포럼, 2025년 10월 15일 게시
Amit Sevak
Chief Executive Officer, ETS
AI has already begun to redraw the boundaries of human capability and collaboration. Yet for all its power, the defining question is not what AI can do, but what people can do with AI. The measure of a nation’s future will be its AI literacy. Everything else – innovation, opportunity and even leadership – will rise or fall on this foundation.
AI literacy is the new global divide.In the 20th century, nations rose or fell based on whether their citizens could read and write. In the 21st century, fluency in AI will be a defining factor in how countries and their people thrive in civic and economic life.
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Yet nations are charting very different paths. China is racing ahead, aiming for AI fluency in their children before high school. The United States is advancing unevenly, state by state without a clear mandate for how to measure. Finland has embraced a participatory model; South Korea has slowed after an early surge; and Canada is fostering pilots but lacks national coordination. The result is not a level playing field, but a staggered starting line – one that may shape the balance of global talent for decades to come.
The deeper challenge is not only how quickly countries adopt AI in education, but how they define what it means to be truly AI literate.Without a shared definition of AI literacy, we risk not only unequal starting points, but unequal futures.To navigate this moment wisely, there are three hard truths that every leader must reckon with:
1. Measurement is the missing link
Right now, there’s no consistent measure of AI literacy across schools, industries or nations. For leaders and policy-makers, this fragmentation creates three major barriers:
- Lack of comparability: success in one context may not easily be replicated elsewhere.
- Signalling failure: employers and governments cannot trust or verify skills, reducing the value of credentials and creating confusion in labour markets.
- Limited scalability: without common measures, efforts remain trapped in silos rather than building towards comprehensive national or global capabilities.
Today we also face an alphabet soup of AI literacy frameworks: UNESCO, OECD, aiEDU and more. All great frameworks – but what’s needed isn’t another set of definitions. Rather, we need alignment on how we measure and compare what truly counts.
We all know that the stakes are high. The World Economic Forum predicts that 44% of workers’ skills will be disrupted by 2027, yet most countries have no systems to track which skills are being gained and which populations are being left behind. The 2025 ETS Human Progress Report, HR Edition also reveals that 82% of HR leaders are now prioritizing AI literacy, underscoring how urgent this need has become.
Without question, measurement is power. Those who prioritize a way to measure and develop AI literacy will gain a critical advantage in preparing their populations for the intelligent age.
2. AI readiness is more than technical skills
Too often, AI readiness is confused with the ability to use AI, whether that’s via varying levels of coding or the cleverness of a prompt. In reality, readiness for an AI-driven future requires three interconnected skills:
- Foundational skills (literacy, numeracy digital fluency)
- Human-centric skills (critical thinking, collaboration, etc.)
- Adaptability (the ability to assess proper application, adapt and pivot with changes)
Simply put, technology may power the future, but uniquely human, durable skills will be needed to govern it.
3. Delay in action comes with compounding costs
The longer nations wait to act on AI literacy, the harder it becomes to catch up. The exponential pace of AI development means that delays compound quickly, creating gaps that become increasingly difficult to bridge over time. Consider that by 2030, countries without AI-ready workforces may find themselves exporting raw talent rather than innovation, as their brightest minds migrate to nations that can offer AI-enhanced opportunities.
This brain drain will fuel global inequality, concentrating innovation and prosperity in countries that acted early, while leaving others behind. The social consequences will be equally stark. AI literacy gaps will harden into lasting class divides. And perhaps most concerning is the geopolitical dimension. Decision-making power in an AI-powered future will consolidate among nations whose populations can fully participate in AI-driven governance, innovation and economic activity.
The time is now. AI literacy may be new, but we don’t have to start from scratch to measure it. We’ve tackled challenges like this before, moving beyond check-the-box tests in digital literacy to capture deeper, real-world skills. Building on those lessons will help define and measure this next evolution of 21st-century skills.
We at ETS have begun building a foundation of AI literacy inside our own walls through AIgnite, a programme that equips ETS employees with practical, job-relevant AI skills and learning opportunities across the organization. Already, 65% of our staff worldwide have already reached AI literacy proficiency, and more than 1,100 employees across 17 countries have participated in this initiative. These programmes of course are not the end state, but proof of what is possible. With intentional investment and shared measures, the gap between technology and human readiness can be closed.
All of this said, the measure of a nation’s future will not be taken by the power of its algorithms alone, but by the literacy of its people. To prepare for an AI-driven future, defining and measuring AI literacy must be a priority. Without measurement, we risk building the future on assumptions, not readiness. The window for action is narrowing. The future belongs to those who prepare for it now.
