The AI Fluency Bar Moved. Did You?
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
Ten months ago, Zapier published its first AI Fluency Rubric — a framework for what AI competence should look like across every role in the company. It was one of the first public attempts by a major tech employer to codify AI expectations into hiring, and we covered it at the time because the ambition was genuine: not just “are you using AI?” but “how well, and to what end?”
They just published V2. What was “Capable” ten months ago is now “Unacceptable.”
In the original rubric, a marketer who used AI to draft social posts and then edited them by hand was considered Capable — meeting the minimum bar. In V2, that exact behavior is listed under Unacceptable. The new Capable requires AI embedded into core work, repeatable systems rather than one-off prompts, and a clear, measurable impact on quality or efficiency. Ten months.
For marketing specifically, the new Adoptive tier — one level above the minimum — now includes running AI-driven A/B experiments with measurable results, building content systems that draft, format, and schedule across channels, and having always-on agentic workflows that operate without human involvement.
That was aspirational a year ago. Now it’s the expected trajectory for someone who wants to be seen as more than baseline competent.
If you’re a senior marketer reading this and thinking “we’re doing fine” because your team uses ChatGPT for briefs and Midjourney for mockups, Zapier just told you that’s the floor, not the ceiling. And the floor just moved above your head.
Sales wasn’t even in V1. Now it has its own rubric, and it’s not gentle.
The original framework covered engineering, product, support, marketing, and people/HR. Sales was absent. V2 adds it — along with business ops, corporate development, finance, data, and others — which tells you something about how quickly AI competence has spread from “tech team concern” to “everyone’s problem.”
The headline: if the extent of your AI usage is reading Gong summaries after calls, using AI to help write outreach emails, and using AI to find information for account plans, you are Unacceptable. Not Capable. Not “getting started.” Unacceptable. If you “cannot point to evidence that outreach is more effective, prep is faster, or pipeline has improved as a result,” you don’t meet the bar.
Capable for sales now means having built a personal prospecting workflow that saves significant time and generates pipeline, and being able to position AI transformation strategies with customers. The Adoptive tier requires chaining multiple AI tools into repeatable workflows and proactively teaching teammates what works.
But the most significant change is not even the higher bar. It’s the new fourth dimension: accountability.
V1 measured three things: AI mindset, strategy, and building. V2 adds accountability as a standalone signal. Zapier now explicitly hires for people who define what “good” looks like before they start, evaluate outputs critically, and catch what’s wrong before it ships: “With AI, you can delegate the work, but not the accountability.”
This connects to something we keep saying in this newsletter: AI skills are management skills. Most companies are still hiring for AI usage: do you use the tools, how often, which ones. Zapier is now hiring for AI judgment: do you know what a good output looks like, can you catch a bad one, and do you own the result either way? That’s a fundamentally different question, and it’s one most hiring processes aren’t set up to answer.
They’re also now looking at what they call “slope” — not just where you are on AI fluency, but how you got there and how fast you’re moving. Someone who plateaued eight months ago on the same three tools is a different candidate from someone actively experimenting and building. The signal they want is forward momentum.
You don’t have to adopt Zapier’s rubric wholesale. But you’d be wise to ask yourself: if someone applied this framework to your team today, where would they land? If the answer makes you uncomfortable, that discomfort is the point.
— Torsten and Peter
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