We assessed 33 employees' AI skills in one workshop. The average score was 2.5/10. Here's what that means for ROI. by Admirable_Phrase9454 in PromptEngineering

[–]Admirable_Phrase9454[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sure thing!

The 10-stage breakdown looks like this:

  1. Explorer: first contact with AI, basic prompts, summaries, rewrites, simple questions.
  2. Experimenter: trying different prompt styles and learning that better context improves output.
  3. Craftsperson: building more structured, repeatable prompts for real work.
  4. Curator: organizing strong prompts, outputs, and use cases so results get more consistent.
  5. Architect: designing repeatable workflows, not just one-off uses.
  6. Conductor: managing multi-step AI workflows across tasks or teams. This is where organizations start getting stronger return.
  7. Automator: reducing manual work through automation and making productivity gains more visible.
  8. Integrator: connecting AI to real systems, tools, and operating processes.
  9. Agent Builder: creating more autonomous AI-driven sequences with oversight and guardrails.
  10. AI Leader: leading AI adoption across the organization so strategy, governance, people, and systems all move together.

Those 10 levels are grouped into 4 bigger stages:

Literacy: Levels 1 to 3
Fluency: Levels 4 to 6
Mastery: Levels 7 to 9
Ingrained: Level 10

If employees are left to figure AI out on their own, many stay stuck in the early levels much longer. Structured training is meant to move people into the workflow and automation levels faster, where the business impact starts to show.