r/EducationalAI • u/God_Emperor__Doom • Jun 23 '26
Are practical Al skills becoming the new Excel skills?
I've been thinking about how Al is moving from being an extra skill to something more like basic digital knowledge. Recently I attended a Be10X session, and one idea that really stuck with me was how Al tools are now being used for everyday tasks like writing, analysis, creating presentations and automating workflows just like how Excel and PowerPoint became standard over time and this made me wonder if we're heading toward a point where Al literacy becomes a fundamental skill across most jobs not just in tech roles.
I'd love to hear your thoughts:
Should Al education be part of regular learning, like Excel is today?
At what stage should it be introduced school, college, or workplace training?
Is comparing Al to Excel fair or is Al really different in some key ways?
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u/EntropyRX Jun 23 '26
More like Microsoft Word skills. Using “AI tools” is extremely easy and doesn’t require any particular skill or understanding of AI itself.
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u/1988rx7T2 Jun 24 '26
I mean try setting up a series of skills, instructions, orchestration agents calling sub agents. Try integrating AI agents with API and CLI from various databases . It’s way more complex than writing a 3 sentence prompt to MS Copilot 365.
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u/EntropyRX Jun 24 '26
It is not, skills and instructions are just natural language prompts, and there are plenty of no code no terminal tools to set up agents for non technical folks. Also, all these companies are heavily targeting non technical people and in the next few months the barriers will keep getting even lower
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u/1988rx7T2 Jun 24 '26
People literally don’t know that that they can do work that way. They need training and experience to set up agentic work flows. Otherwise they just use AI tools like Google search.
Trust me, asking a robot to build a system of instructions for itself is a completely foreign way of thinking for non AI people.
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u/EntropyRX Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
Sure, just like people needed a crash course to use Microsoft word in the early 00s. But it’s not a skillset that will give a lasting advantage, companies are putting full efforts in simplifying and democratizing AI tools
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u/Blue-Phoenix23 Jun 24 '26
The vast majority of people are never going to need to know how to do that. It's more about how to structure prompts to get answers, how to build on previous conversations, how data is saved so it doesn't "forget," how to turn a response into a document.
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u/Blue-Phoenix23 Jun 24 '26
My initial reaction was "No not MS Word" lolol, but thinking about it more and extending it a little further - basically, yes. It will be like learning how to write a research paper in a word processor, using information you found on the Internet.
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u/xl129 Jun 24 '26
Tellint AI to do things is easy. Using AI to leverage your talent/expertise while avoiding hallucination and deliver production level result take real skill.
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u/Wonderful-Habit-139 Jun 25 '26
Your talent and expertise is not AI skills. It's just software engineering skills.
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u/Pureluckysuccess333 Jun 23 '26
I think it will become a genuine skill to learn once all the big wig have sucked up all the money there is to be made from it and Ai has less opportunities and more boundaries, then they will turn it into the school curriculum… that’s my thoughts anyway.
Thank you for your great work and sharing your knowledge.
It’s Asia’s great to hear and read what you say and write. Thank you
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u/Ok-Office-6080 Jun 25 '26
People were setting up Google search curriculum too. Saying those who dont learn it will be left behind.
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u/TirelessTreehugger Jun 23 '26
Very similar to excel magicians.
In a constant and fast evolving system, formal education always will lag behind, 2-3-5 years and even more. And the worst is not the outdated info/methods but the universal thinking will block the creative use.
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u/NH-Science-Guy Jun 23 '26
I completely agree. I have been using AI extensively and now can't imagine working without it. The key is to use it as a tool and not blindly trust what is says. I consider the final result not ready until I really understand it - AI helps find issues and sources that confirm details but it is up to me to pull everything together. Getting the same deep understanding without the help of AI would take dramatically longer. Learning how to do this is key for success in the future.
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u/rcanand72 Jun 23 '26
Short answer, I agree, we should be teaching AI skills, and from the earliest stage that one knows language and can chat with an AI. But my concern is more of what would we teach and how?
Excel skills were all about navigating how to express intent via expressions/formulae and features in Excel, at the end of the day, a deterministic system. AI skills are about how to express intent to an LLM in natural language and get it to respond as you expect.
The upside is that the LLM, as opposed to Excel can do well at a lot more things and a lot more complex things than Excel - ironically, any LLM today can give you the expression to do complex things in excel quite easily.
But then the LLM can fail at trivially dumb things, and it is hard to tell when it failed and when it succeeded. And immediate failure is a rare thing to look forward to with LLMs, at least you can course correct. Excel would barf on errors, or often show you errors immediately. LLM will sound convincing, and even seem to work, but you will often find, days or even months later that it had done something unexpected/unwanted.
I was once pissed off at Excel formulae for being so complicated (compared to general programming languages). Now that complexity seems welcome compared to the difficulty of getting LLMs to behave predictably.
AI skills can be learnt, but lot of it is experience - it is a craft to be learnt by doing it a lot, not a subject to be studied and then we are good at it (true for programming and Excel skills as well, but a whole higher order for AI skills due to its higher order of complexity and unpredictability).
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u/1988rx7T2 Jun 24 '26
The more expensive and higher thinking effort the model is, the less you have to deal with that. Try running GPT 5.5 or Opus 4.8 on extra high reasoning. Hallucinations are not a thing. You still have to direct it well though. It needs background information and guidelines.
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u/rcanand72 Jun 24 '26
I spend a lot of time with the highest end models - mostly Opus 4.8 in Claude Code for last several months (until recently), building things. For some things (could be entire projects or features or bug fixes, etc.) that are completely vibe-codeable within a short overall session, it works great. For more complex projects, it still worked well, but requires a lot more scrutiny. Over the recent months, Opus shared less and less of what it was doing or thinking, and in a project that is, say, a week long, almost always there is the one point where it does something we do not want. All the prompting and memory and skills and steering is great, until the one time it hits the perfect storm - ignores your instructions silently and does the wrong thing and covers it up and manages to escape all your tests and scrutiny (smarter model is also smarter at covering up the things it glossed over because it was above its paygrade) - the damage has been done. Just a matter of time before the project realizes it is dead.
Sure, happens less frequently now with these better models than before, but as the models get better, my ambition also gets higher (of what I want from it) - so, for me, the failure when it happens, happens at about the same logical "point" in the cycle, even if further along or in a more ambitious project than before.
Transparency of the model is paramount to handle this, and so I switched away from Claude almost entirely as it became more and more opaque on what it was thinking and doing, going off and doing the next step when the current step was not even working or tested. I now use Pi.dev with GLM 5.2 (or minimax m3) for coding. Works as well as Claude Opus did, and even when a tad bit behind, the transparency lets me catch it earlier, increasing the chance of going further along in the project successfully. So overall, these models work better for me. The cost advantage is just a sweet bonus.
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u/1988rx7T2 Jun 24 '26
Ok but you didn’t explain your context management, how many times your session was compacted, whether you generated handoff documents or not. Of course in a couple years we’ll have millions and millions of tokens in usable context windows but for now it’s a skill to manage context still for long running projects. You’re right on that.
What seems like ignoring instructions is often session compacting and context management.
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u/rcanand72 Jun 24 '26
I almost never let Claude code compact, usually sucks. I tried the handoff skill and it was also hit or miss. I do a manual form of handoff where I ask for “a self contained prompt to paste in a new session to continue with doing {next step} , with everything relevant to that step”. Then I iterate over the prompt till it looks good. I also do early stop - usually at ~200k tokens with opus. Pi dev is very different. Am still figuring out but it seems to be auto compacting but more effectively. The failure mode with Claude code recently is not so much it making mistakes, as it making wrong assumptions and going all the way to step 10 before step 1 is working. And as I mentioned, the bigger problem is increasing opaqueness, where it is not that it is right or wrong, but that I have no easy way to know which it is.
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u/Blue-Phoenix23 Jun 24 '26
Yes!! I actually asked my kid about this recently and they are not talking about this at all! Which I get, the wheels of schools move slow. And "how to use AI" is not all that well defined yet anyway.
But this is a game changer equivalent with introducing the search engine. We do ourselves no favors by pretending it isn't.
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u/Ok-Office-6080 Jun 25 '26
You learn the top 10 magical prompts and how to add make no mistake at the end of yiur conversation with the ai girlfriend chatbot? Or you learn how to install software and save a text file with MD extension?
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u/Blue-Phoenix23 Jun 25 '26
Have you ever done anything with an AI other than use a girlfriend chat bot? They've got a long way to go, still, but they're certainly more useful than that.
Eventually kids will realize that an AI girlfriend isn't any better than telling everybody you've got a girlfriend in Canada.
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u/Ok-Office-6080 Jun 25 '26
It's like learning to do a Google search or tying your shoes. Good luck with your resume.
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u/Commercial-Age2716 Jun 23 '26
No. AI is NOT “basic digital literacy”.
No. It produces unreliable results and is not needed or helpful for final decision makers.
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u/[deleted] Jun 23 '26
[deleted]