Worried about EU AI Act compliance? Invest in AI literacy

The EU AI Act aims to regulate AI and ensure safe, transparent use of AI systems. Naturally, the legislation emphasizes risk management and governance. 

But the real measure of AI success doesn’t come down to policies or even your technology. It relies on your people.

Learn how to foster AI literacy in your organization and uncover the skills your people need to use, build, and deploy AI securely and responsibly. 

• Turn EU AI Act readiness into a competitive advantage

• The EU AI Act: What businesses need to know

The EU AI Act describes AI literacy as the “skills, knowledge and understanding that allow providers, deployers and affected persons, taking into account their respective rights and obligations in the context of this Regulation, to make an informed deployment of AI systems, as well as to gain awareness about the opportunities and risks of AI and possible harm it can cause.”

In other words, AI literacy means people have the skills and knowledge needed to use and make informed decisions about AI systems.

Under Article 4 of the EU AI Act, providers and deployers of AI systems are expected to ensure their employees are AI literate. 

It’s an important part of readiness, but it also empowers your people to engage more thoughtfully with AI and make informed decisions.

According to one study, employees with high AI literacy “were far more likely to expect positive outcomes from AI, and far less likely to feel fear, distress, or apprehension. They were also more likely to express nuanced, mature views on how AI use should (or shouldn't) influence workplace decisions like promotion and compensation.”

Everyone needs basic AI literacy skills like understanding what AI is, how it works, and how their organization uses it. 

However, the exact skills and knowledge someone needs to be considered AI literate depends on their role and responsibilities. For example, people who build AI systems will need to understand AI security risks and how to integrate AI into workflows. 

When developing AI literacy training for technical roles, ask yourself: 

• Do these employees have the knowledge needed to work safely and effectively with your organization's AI systems? 

• Are they aware of potential risks and mitigation strategies? 

• What additional knowledge might these employees need (e.g. legal and ethical or  governance considerations)?

The skills people need to be AI literate vary by role and organization. This list doesn’t guarantee compliance with Article 4 of the EU AI Act, but it should give you a starting point as you build artificial intelligence literacy programs for your teams.

Everyone, regardless of role, should understand AI basics: what it is, how it works at a high level, and why it matters. Foundational AI skills are particularly important for business professionals and those who use AI tools but don’t build AI systems or make AI-related business decisions. 

These courses can help you build employees’ foundational AI literacy skills:

• AI Foundations

• Generative AI for Business Professionals

• Generative AI Foundations: Getting Started

• Generative AI Foundations: Prompt Engineering

Business leaders often make big budget decisions about AI adoption. AI literacy helps them make strategic, informed choices that can support innovation and efficiency. 

Build their skills with these courses:

• Generative AI for Leaders

• Enterprise Strategy for Generative AI Adoption

• Getting Started with Artificial Intelligence for Business

• Measuring and Evaluating AI Performance

A solid grasp on AI ethics helps teams reduce the risk of developing harmful AI systems. 

Ensure responsible AI use with AI ethics skills:

• AI Ethics

• AI Ethics and Bias Explained

• Ethics, Issues, and Limitations of Generative AI

• Strategies for Effective AI Governance

AI introduces new cybersecurity risks like prompt injection and data poisoning. Cybersecurity professionals need a deep understanding of these AI-specific risks and how to mitigate and respond to them.

These courses can help them boost their AI security skills:

• Generative AI for Security Professionals

• Security for Generative AI Integrations

• Generative AI Techniques for Cyber Defense

• Generative AI Techniques for Social Engineering

For developers, AI literacy is critical to fixing bugs, accelerating delivery, and optimizing workflows.

Boost AI literacy for developers:

• Generative AI Data Privacy and Safe Use for Developers

• Advanced AI-assisted Development

• Agentic AI for Developers

• Advanced: Generative AI for Developers Learning Path

AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on. Data scientists, data engineers, AI engineers, and other roles need data skills to use and build AI systems effectively. 

Build AI skills for data professionals:

• Generative AI for Data Professionals

• Generative AI for Data Science

• Preparing Data with Generative AI

• Automating Data Science Tasks with Generative AI

AI relies on strong cloud foundations. AI literacy gives cloud professionals the skills to integrate AI services and automate cloud operations.

Build AI literacy for cloud with these learning paths and courses: 

• Generative AI for Cloud Engineers

• Introduction to AI and Machine Learning on Google Cloud

• Azure AI Fundamentals

• AWS Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Fundamentals

Regardless of the exact skills your people need, there are a few things you can do to roll out AI upskilling and build an AI-literate workforce.

First, develop a policy for AI use and development if you don’t already have one. This is a centralized framework that explains how, when, where, and why employees can use AI. 

Once you have these policies in place, allow employees opportunities to safely experiment with AI in low-risk scenarios. This might include low-risk activities like using AI to draft non confidential internal emails or summarize meeting notes. 

AI labs and sandboxes in isolated environments can also give employees hands-on practice building AI applications or debugging code—without adding unnecessary risk to your live environments.

Tailor role-specific structured learning paths and upskilling programs for AI literacy. The key is to make learning relevant to each role. The skills a marketing professional needs to be AI literate will be vastly different from the skills a cloud engineer, data scientist, or cybersecurity professional needs.

In general, you’ll want to: 

• Assess each team’s skills and skills gaps

• Create role-specific learning paths and upskilling initiatives to fill those gaps

• Provide a mix of video courses, hands-on labs, and practical projects to reinforce learning

• Provide time to learn and enable managers for upskilling 

Learn more about how to build structured upskilling for AI literacy in your organization.

When someone studies on their own, they retain about 28% of what they’ve learned. But when they use what they’ve learned, answer questions, and interact with others, they remember 69%. 

Lean on the power of collaborative learning to reinforce AI knowledge and help employees retain and apply new skills. You can: 

• Encourage cross-functional knowledge sharing 

• Develop mentorship programs to help less experienced employees adopt AI

• Create AI literacy learning cohorts for different roles

• Provide peer learning opportunities for colleagues to ask questions and learn from each other

Learn how to set up cohort-based artificial intelligence training—download the free Tech Upskilling Playbook.

Organizations often approach AI as a tech problem. Are they using the right models? Do they have the right tools? 

And while those questions are important, long-term AI success—and readiness under the EU AI Act—doesn’t only hinge on your tech stack. It comes down to your people and their skills. 

An AI-empowered workforce can make informed decisions, identify and solve AI-related problems, and deliver critical business outcomes. 

Ready to build your organization’s AI literacy and support readiness under the EU AI Act? Pluralsight AI Academy offers structured, scalable AI skill development programs designed to help organizations build and measure AI skills at scale.

Pluralsight AI Academy offers:

• AI skill assessments to provide visibility of literacy levels, replacing assumed AI competence with objective insight

• 12 months of access to AI courses and labs to help skills keep pace with rapidly evolving AI capabilities and training, extending learning beyond a one-time event

• A structured curriculum spanning AI Literacy, Practical AI Application, AI Productivity, AI Strategy, and Agentic AI provides role-based training across multiple teams’ responsibilities

• Live virtual seminars and code-along workshops to give teams practice applying AI skills to organizational use cases

Learn more about Pluralsight AI Academy and take your organization from AI literacy to agentic excellence.