AI literacy is no longer a competitive advantage. It is the baseline. Organizations that treat it as optional are not simply falling behind; they are making a leadership decision that will show up in their results before they recognize it as a decision at all. Erica Salm Rench, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Sidecar and a marketing and automation leader with two decades of experience, has spent her career at the intersection of emerging technology and organizational adoption. Her conviction about where leaders are getting this wrong is direct. “If you’re not educating your team on AI, it’s essentially leadership malpractice,” Rench states. “You have to lift up your people in order to lift up your organization.”
AI Literacy Is the New Baseline
The technology is advancing so quickly that a one-time training session becomes strategically irrelevant before it is even complete. At Sidecar, Rench and her team describe themselves as eating, sleeping, and breathing AI updates, and even they find it difficult to keep up with the pace of change. The organizations that are navigating this well are not the ones that deployed a learning module six months ago. They are the ones that have made continuous AI learning part of how the organization operates.
For associations specifically, the responsibility compounds. Members look to their associations as authoritative sources in their professional domains. As AI simultaneously reshapes every industry, that expectation does not disappear; it intensifies. An association that cannot speak credibly about how AI affects its members’ work is failing a core part of its value proposition, regardless of how strong everything else looks.
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Culture Carries Further Than Conten
Rench’s most effective clients are treating AI education less like a training program and more like a book club. Staff, and in some cases members and volunteers, consume learning resources regularly, discuss what they are absorbing, and develop a shared language around AI that makes adoption across the organization possible rather than accidental. That shared language is the mechanism. Without it, individual employees may develop capability while the organization as a whole remains fragmented in how it thinks about and uses AI.
The failure mode Rench consistently observes is making resources available without requiring engagement. Putting content in front of people and hoping a meaningful percentage will engage produces exactly the results the approach deserves. AI adoption requires a cultural shift, one in which learning is built into the rhythm of work rather than offered as an optional supplement.
“You have to make it a cultural shift that changes the way people operate,” she insists. The organizations that understand this are not just better prepared for AI. They are building the kind of organizational agility that will matter far beyond any single technology cycle. The question for leadership is not whether AI education is worth the investment. It is whether the organization can afford the compounding cost of not making it one.
Follow Erica Salm Rench on LinkedIn for more insights on AI literacy, organizational adoption, and building the learning cultures that keep teams ahead of technological change.
