You improve your AI literacy by using AI tools on real tasks every week and checking their output carefully, because reading about AI builds awareness while practice builds skill.
Three habits carry most of the progress. Use one tool weekly on a genuine task: draft an email, summarise a long document, plan a week, or research a supplier. Repetition on your own work is what creates fluency. Check the output before you use it, verifying names, numbers and facts against a source you trust, because this checking habit is where most AI mistakes get caught and it is the true centre of literacy. And learn a few terms properly: a prompt is the instruction you give the tool, a model is the AI system behind it, and a hallucination is an error the tool states with confidence. With those three words you can follow almost any workplace conversation about AI.
Talking about what you learn doubles the value, because explaining one technique to a colleague exposes what you understood and what you missed.
If you want structure, our Thinking With AI course at EddyLabs teaches a five step prompting method and the basics of agentic AI, which is AI that plans and completes a series of steps with limited supervision. It runs about six and a half hours, needs no coding, and costs KSh 6,500. Free alternatives cover similar ground at a slower pace. For the fuller picture of what literacy means in this market, read our guide to AI literacy in Kenya.