Why “AI skills” is not a skill.

Every job ad now asks for AI skills, and almost none of them can say what that means. Ask a hiring manager to describe the capability behind the phrase and you get a shrug, or a list of tool names. Neither tells you whether the person can be trusted with the work.

The confusion is not really about AI. It is an old problem wearing a new label: we have always struggled to separate access to a resource from competence in using it. A search engine did not make everyone a researcher. A calculator did not make everyone a mathematician. A capable model does not make everyone capable — it just makes the gap between the two harder to see.

"If the tool does the work, what exactly is being hired? Our answer is judgement. Not the ability to produce an answer, but the ability to explain how you got it, to verify it against something the model did not tell you, and to be the person who is answerable if it turns out to be wrong.

That is a narrower, less flattering definition than \"AI skills\" — and a much more useful one. It is also the definition every AIQQA qualification is built around.