Experience alone used to be enough. Learn your craft. Do the work. Repeat.

That world no longer exists. Now, the stand that is not neutral – it falls behind.

Artificial intelligence makes reality impossible to ignore. AI is already changing how we write, analyze, plan and make decisions. Tasks that used to take hours now take minutes. Insights that required days of manual effort can appear instantly. Entire workflows have been reimagined.

We’re putting AI into our business — from strengthening our R&D engine and automating manufacturing to improving customer service and modernizing sales — but technology alone doesn’t deliver. People who know how to use it.

This is not a distant future. This is happening today, within every industry. And the gap between people who use AI and people who don’t is widening every day.

The risk is not that AI replaces humans. These people who don’t use AI will be replaced by people who do.

At Bausch + Lomb, we decided early on that we didn’t want our teams to watch this transition from the sidelines. We want them to lead it. So we partnered Coursera to launch the Bausch + Lomb AI Academy, offering foundational generative AI courses to our company’s nearly 8,000 knowledge workers.

The results are immediate. Teams began automating reports, speeding up research, drafting communications faster and freeing up time to focus on customers and patients instead of repetitive tasks. Small improvements in efficiency turn out to have a significant impact.

But we also see reluctance.

Some people feel that AI is not suitable for their role. Some believe they are too early in their career – or too far along – to need it, or believe it doesn’t make much of a difference. That thinking is understandable, because change rarely feels urgent until it’s sudden. But when technology changes so quickly, opting out doesn’t stay where you are. It works backwards.

So we made a clear decision: basic AI learning is now a must. If employees do not complete, they are not eligible for their bonus.

And we never stopped completing. We ask employees to demonstrate how they apply what they’ve learned by sharing real examples of how AI helps solve everyday challenges, improve workflows or create better outcomes for customers and patients.

It’s not about checking a box. It’s about changing how work gets done.

AI literacy is now a core business skill, just like financial acumen or customer focus. And we’ve expanded the Academy so employees can go as far as they want, applying the capabilities directly to their day-to-day work.

Our goal is not to create AI experts. This is to create AI-enabled professionals. Because the future does not belong to the people who know best – it belongs to the people who learn the fastest.

The most encouraging is the leaning one. Some of the most powerful use cases come from experienced professionals combining decades of expertise with new AI tools. That combination isn’t redundancy – it’s an advantage.

For leaders, this means modeling curiosity. We cannot delegate learning.

For employees, this means treating AI like a career investment, not a compliance exercise. As I emphasize in global town hall meetings, start small. Automate a task. Experiment with a tool. Save an hour. Those gains add up quickly.

AI will continue to evolve, and none of us will feel completely caught up. But staying ahead isn’t about mastering everything – it’s about refusing to stop.

In the age of AI, standing still is not safe. This is the fastest way to become irrelevant.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of luck.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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