How executives can develop AI literacy

The Institute of Digital Innovation (IDIA) and AI’s Jon Whittle share how leaders can develop an AI mindset to set their organisations up for success.

“You don’t need a PhD in AI but you do need to be able to call bulls**t,” Professorial Fellow Jon Whittle says.

Whittle has been at the forefront of AI for 30 years, is a former technical lead at NASA, former director of CSIRO’s AI capability and the founder of Australia’s National AI Centre.

Now he’s helping businesses and leaders navigate the AI transition at the new Institute of Digital Innovation and AI (IDIA).

With AI reshaping every function across an enterprise from finance and operations to HR and strategy, Whittle says AI literacy is an essential capability for executives.

“If you're an exec, whether you’re Chief People Officer or Chief Operations Officer, you're going to be facing AI challenges and AI questions every day because your teams are going to be using it. So, you need to engage with it and lean in.”

The leaders he meets are overwhelmed by the rapid pace of change and sheer information about AI, and he says many are approaching AI the wrong way.

“The key thing that comes through the research is that this is not a technology challenge. It's a human challenge and that requires shifting your mindset.”

Here are his tips to develop an AI mindset.

1. View AI as an organisational change problem to solve

Whittle says there’s been a big shift in 2026 from experimentation to ‘how can we apply and adopt AI at scale across an entire enterprise to get value.’

“There's a lot of really good studies that have come out where they've actually studied enterprise adoption at scale, what works and what doesn't,” Whittle says.

The key thing that emerges from research is that it’s not a technology challenge but a human challenge. 

And therefore, the most important skills are leadership skills, such as change management, culture, and governance (non-technical things).

By viewing AI as an organisational change problem, leaders can lean into skills they already have. 

"The good thing is leaders know these things. It’s about clearly articulating a vision and a strategy and creating what I would call an AI-ready culture,” Whittle says.

"You're actually thinking about how your people are responding to this and how you're going to take them along for a journey, having good governance structures in place so that you can manage the risks of AI, and also reap the benefits.”

2. Build a culture of experimentation over perfection

Whittle says many leaders are so focused on finding the right tools and mastering skills like prompt engineering that they are overcomplicating things in the process.

He encourages executives to build a mindset of curiosity and experimentation. 

“You just need to have a conversation with the tool and iterate,” Whittle says.

His advice is to treat AI platforms like a human and give it feedback along the way.

“It might not give you exactly what you want immediately but that’s okay just give it some feedback. I think that’s a much more effective way of using the tools than trying to upfront engineer the perfect prompt.”

He says if you want to get the most out of AI, you need to invest time trying things out.

“Bring the mindset of experimentation. If it doesn’t work, you’ve probably still learned something.”

3. View AI as more than just an efficiency tool 

Many organisations are using AI to boost productivity and automate routine tasks.

However, Whittle says viewing AI only through this lens as purely an efficiency tool is limiting. 

"It means that you'll just do the same things that you're doing now, you'll just do them faster,” he says. 

And while there is value in that, AI could actually allow you to do new things that help organisations deliver on their purpose. 

“It could open up new revenue streams, new business models, new customers and new markets.”

He recommends executives go back to their purpose and why they exist as an organisation.

“What are the barriers that are stopping you from achieving your purpose? And ask if AI can help you deliver on those,” Whittle says.

“You need to know why you're applying AI, which, strangely enough, you'll find a lot of organisations don't ask that question. They do it because of FOMO (fear of missing out). Everyone else is doing it. We've got to apply it, just apply it somewhere.”

“I think it's worth stepping back, reflecting and thinking, ‘What is our ambition here? What are we trying to achieve?’”

4. Start thinking about the security risks

One of the biggest risks Whittle says organisations are struggling with is security, particularly as organisations adopt and build agents at scale. 

“I don’t think agents necessarily bring new security problems, but they expose the security problems you already have.”

A simple example might be a human coming across a document they’re not supposed to have access to on a file sharing server. 

“In a human world that’s not necessarily a big problem because we’re not very efficient at searching for information, so the likelihood of coming across things we shouldn’t is fairly small,” he says.

“But if you replace those humans with agents, they are very efficient at finding information and they will find those things you’re not supposed to see straight away and suddenly you’ve got a security problem.”

Thinking about these risks and putting proper governance processes in place is important.

5. Learn from the history books

To develop AI literacy, Whittle recommends learning from the history books on AI and how the tools have developed, for a better understanding of how they can be used.

“Some of the core issues that we struggle with in AI nowadays, like ethics, for example, have been studied and considered from the very, early days of AI. So, there's a lot of knowledge out there already. We don't need to reinvent the wheel.”

Even things like AI agents, which people think are new, go back to the 1970s.

He recommends reading some of the earlier literature rather than being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of headlines today that can be conflicting. 

“If you take AI agents, for example, there's like a very good book that Michael Wooldridge wrote that’s one of the first books on the topic.”

“When you go back to the original source, it’s often clearer. That’s why history is important because some really smart people came up with these things and explained it very clearly.”

Jon Whittle is Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Digital Innovation and AI (IDIA) and is one of Australia’s leading voices on AI for business. He is a former technical lead at NASA, former director of CSIRO’s AI capability and founder of Australia’s National AI Centre. He is also the author of ‘AI for Business: A Guide to AI Adoption."