Most conversations about AI literacy focus on AI skill: knowing which tools exist, how to prompt them, and how to fit them into your work. That skill matters. But on its own, it’s the top of a pyramid with nothing underneath it.

The AI Literacy Framework describes three levels, each built on the one below it. The Faithful Automation framework is the middle level.

Foundational human competency

The base of the pyramid is everything a person knows and can do without AI (e.g., reading closely, writing clearly, solving a math problem, debugging a program, recognizing a bad diagnosis). It’s built the slow way, through study, practice, struggle, and experience.

This level comes first because every other level depends on it. You can’t anchor truth in a field you don’t understand. AI sounds just as confident when it’s wrong, and its tendency to agree with you is most dangerous when you’re out of your depth. Expertise is what lets you notice.

It’s also the level AI most easily erodes. In one study of nearly 1,000 high school math students, those with unrestricted access to GPT-4 did much better on practice problems but scored 17% worse on exams than students who never had it. When the goal is knowledge and skill without dependence on AI, using AI can defeat the purpose of the task.

Note that students, by definition, are often still building this level. That’s a big part of why AI in education deserves so much care.

Wisdom and discernment

The middle of the pyramid is the ability to decide well whether and how to use AI. In practice, that means being able to:

• examine your intent in using AI for a task,
• anchor truth, knowing AI is neither transparent nor inherently trustworthy,
• steward your own thinking, time, and gifts, recognizing that the work forms you,
• and direct all of your work toward the service of others.

This is what the Faithful Automation framework is for. Its four questions (Intent, Truth, Stewardship, and Connection) are meant to build these habits of discernment one task at a time.

Wisdom isn’t something we produce on our own. As the framework puts it, we rely on Christ’s faithfulness and wisdom, and when we lack wisdom, we ask God, who gives generously (James 1:5). We also grow wise by walking with the wise (Proverbs 13:20). For teachers, that means our own wisdom with AI shapes our students far more than any policy does.

AI skill

The top of the pyramid is the ability to use AI technologies to solve problems within our vocations while minimizing the risks that come with them. That includes understanding what AI is and how it produces answers, knowing how it tends to behave and how we tend to behave when we use it, and having real experience using it.

This level is valuable. AI can help with a huge range of work, and pretending otherwise does students and colleagues no favors. But AI skill without the levels below it is risky. A person who’s fluent with AI but lacks expertise can’t tell when it’s wrong, and a person without discernment may hand off the very work that would have formed them.

Why the order matters

The pyramid is built from the bottom up. Human competency gives discernment something to stand on, and discernment is what keeps AI skill pointed in the right direction.

This matches what researchers are finding. After consulting more than 500 people across 50 countries and reviewing more than 400 studies, the Brookings Center for Universal Education concluded in 2026 that the risks of AI in education currently outweigh its benefits. The main reason, in their view, is that the risks undermine children’s foundational development. In the terms of this framework, AI tends to threaten the bottom of the pyramid.

None of this means waiting until the lower levels are “finished” before touching AI. They’re never finished. Rather, it means giving the most attention to whichever level is weakest, and recognizing that AI skill built on a weak foundation is fragile.

Questions to consider

• Which level of the pyramid is strongest for you right now? Which is weakest?
• If you teach, which level are your learning objectives actually aimed at? Does your use of AI (and your students’ use) support that level or undercut it?
• Do you agree with this view of AI literacy? What would you add, remove, or reorder?

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