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The Applied AI Literacy Earthshot

The Commitment​

Applied AI Society is building the best open-source source material for applied AI literacy in the world, co-created by the most trusted, most experienced applied AI practitioners alive.

Literacy is the activation bar. It is the rung we can actually commit to on behalf of humanity, because the door we open here is the door every subsequent rung starts from.

Literacy is what we can earthshot. Practice is on the individual, and mastery is on the individual plus their community plus years of daily reps. We cannot force anyone to practice. We cannot force anyone into mastery. We can open the door to literacy and hold it open for every human who wants to walk through.

This is a mission, carried by a nonprofit. We are incorporating as a 501(c)(3), and this is what we exist to do.

The Ladder This Sits Inside​

  1. Literacy. Baseline awareness of what AI can do and a first felt, real experience of an AI system operating inside your own work. The activation moment. This is what this Earthshot commits to.
  2. Practice. Daily discipline of wielding AI to advance your will in the world. Embodied, progressive, lifelong. Built by individuals who decide to show up every day. We cannot do this for you, but our source material is the spine you can practice against.
  3. Mastery. Emerges over years from the interaction of individual will, deep community, and daily practice. No organization can earthshot mastery. It is always a personal and communal achievement.

The activation bar is the most leveraged thing an organization like ours can defend. Raise the literacy bar high enough for everyone, and the number of humans who go on to build a real practice (and a handful of them, eventually, a real mastery) goes up sharply.

Why Source Material, Not Just Courses​

Anyone can create a course. What the world lacks is a trusted, open, practitioner-vetted source of truth about applied AI that anyone can build on.

Think of it the way Truth Management works inside an organization: the documented truth is the foundation that every human and every AI agent builds from. Without it, you get scattered assumptions, contradictory advice, and coordination failures. With it, you get aligned action at scale.

Applied AI literacy has the same problem at a global level. There are thousands of AI courses. There is no shared, open, practitioner-co-created foundation that everyone can trust, translate, fork, and build on. That is what we are creating.

The source material will be:

  • Open source. Anyone can read it, use it, fork it, improve it.
  • Co-created by leading practitioners. Built with the people who are doing the work.
  • Version-controlled and living. It evolves as the field evolves. It is built on real experiences. Read why we chose field notes over textbooks →
  • Translated into every language. The literacy gap is global. The source material must be too.
  • Accessible to everyone. No paywalls on the source material itself. Ever.

Why This Is the Greatest Need​

Applied AI literacy is the defining gap of this moment. Most people, most businesses, and most governments have no mental model for what AI can actually do for them, and no felt sense of what it is like to operate with a real system. Universities are behind. Governments are behind. The market is moving faster than any single organization can keep up with.

This is why the source material must be open source. This is why it must be co-created. No single organization, including ours, has the full picture.

Cross everyone over the activation bar, and a meaningful fraction walk on into a real applied AI practice. That is the multiplier.

How It Works​

Open Source, Co-Created​

The source material is being built with leading applied AI practitioners from organizations including OpenTeams, Applied AI Deutschland, and practitioners from the Applied AI Society community around the world.

It is open to feedback, contributions, and pull requests from anyone. If you are a practitioner doing this work, you have something to contribute. If you are an educator, a translator, or a business leader who has applied AI and learned something, we want to hear from you.

The goal is to create the world's foundational source material for applied AI literacy and steward it as a community. Ownership and authority stay distributed across the contributors.

What Derives from the Source Material​

Courses. Practical, project-based instruction built on top of the source material. Operated on a pay-it-forward model: suggested donation, free if you can't afford it, no cap if you want to help us reach more people.

Workshops and events. Chapter leaders and community organizers use the source material to run literacy-focused programming in their cities and campuses. The Supersuit Up workshop is the flagship activation moment: one session, one laptop, one working Personal Agentic OS, the literacy bar cleared.

Tools. Open-source educational technology, assessment tools, and resources that anyone can use, adapt, and improve.

Translations. Every framework, every guide, every resource, translated into as many languages as possible.

Corporate programs. Organizations use the source material to activate their teams into literacy, so a real applied AI practice can take root inside the company.

Pay-It-Forward Model​

Courses and structured instruction built on the source material operate on a suggested donation model.

If you can afford the suggested donation, it helps us reach more people: more translations, more chapters, more events, more tools.

If you cannot afford it, the courses are free. No questions asked. Everyone deserves access to this knowledge.

If you want to donate beyond the suggested amount, every additional dollar goes directly toward expanding access. More translations. More communities reached. More practitioners trained. More open-source tools built.

There is no cap. If an organization wants to fund the activation of a thousand people into applied AI literacy, we will make it happen.

Every Company Can Contribute​

We want every company to want to be a part of this.

Contribute to the source material. Submit improvements, case studies, frameworks, and real-world examples from your organization's applied AI journey.

Sponsor the mission. Fund the creation of courses, translations, and tools that make applied AI literacy accessible worldwide.

Help translate. The source material needs to reach every language and every community. Translation is one of the highest-leverage contributions anyone can make.

Build tools. Open-source products, educational models, and tools that make the source material more accessible and more effective.

The vision is a gravitational center: the most trusted, most foundational source of truth about applied AI. Contributed to by practitioners and companies from every industry and every country. The more people who contribute, the better it gets for everyone.

The Standard​

Whoever defines what applied AI literacy means owns the conversation about who gets to cross the activation bar. We intend to define it by building source material so good, so open, and so well-supported by real practitioners that it becomes the standard because it works. We have no intent to declare ourselves the authority.

This is a living body of work. It will evolve as the field evolves. It will be built on the real experiences of real practitioners.

Further Reading​

The Writing on the Wall: The Rise of 'Applied AI' and the Life-or-Death Choice Every CEO Must Make Now by Ron Roberts and Gary Sheng. The urgency behind the Earthshot: the numbers, the definition of applied AI, and why crossing the literacy bar is the single most leveraged move humanity can make right now.

Get Involved​

This is too big for any one organization. We need practitioners, educators, translators, companies, and community builders.

Raising the literacy bar for every human on earth is the greatest leverage humanity has right now. Let's build it together.