Here's what the research tells us about AI in the workplace right now. Two thirds of people trust AI-generated outputs without verifying them. More than half have made errors they attribute to AI use. Staff routinely choose free public tools over employer-approved ones. Your data governance policies are technically in place - they just don't work if people lack the capability to follow them.

None of that is unique to higher education. But it's not really us either.

CQUniversity over the last month saw 150 AI tools in active use across the university. That number was the moment we stopped treating literacy as a nice-to-have. Technology investment alone was never going to deliver the value - or manage the risk.

The real lever was people.

This session tells the story of how we responded. We built a role-based framework covering seven distinct personas - from Council and senior leaders through to frontline staff and students - and used baseline maturity assessments to identify genuine gaps before designing any solutions. We'll share what the baseline told us, how we're translating that evidence into a targeted uplift program, and why culture change has turned out to be significantly harder - and more important - than anything we've done with the technology itself.

If your institution is somewhere on the journey from "we have AI tools" to "we actually know how to use them well," this session is for you. The technology is the foundation. The people are the point.