I told a room of high school leaders this summer that they would often be the most AI-literate person in the room, including rooms full of adults.
It is true, and it's a strange thing to be true. Usually expertise accumulates with age and the young are the ones catching up.
Not here. Right now the person who best understands the tool reshaping how work gets done is frequently twenty-two, or seventeen, and everyone else in the meeting is guessing.
What you do with that is worth deciding in advance, because it will arrive before you have thought about it.
Two ways this goes badly
You use it to feel superior. This is easy and it's corrosive. Knowing something other people don't know produces a small pleasure, and the temptation is to protect the gap rather than close it. You become the person who is faintly amused by how the older staff work. Everyone can tell, and you have converted a genuine advantage into a reputation problem.
You stay quiet. More common in my experience, and also a failure. You are new, or young, or not senior enough, and correcting people feels presumptuous. So you watch a decision get made on a misunderstanding and say nothing.
That is not humility. Humility is having an accurate view of yourself. If you actually know something the room needs and you withhold it to stay comfortable, you have prioritized your own ease over the outcome. That has a name and it's not modesty.
The version that works
Serve with it.
That phrase does a lot of work and I want to unpack it, because it's easy to nod at and hard to do.
Offer, don't correct. "I could take a look at that" lands very differently from "that isn't how it works." Same information, entirely different reception. The goal is the room getting it right, not you being seen to be right.
Translate down, not up. The most valuable thing you can do is explain something complicated in a way that does not make the listener feel stupid. That is a real skill and it's rarer than technical ability.
Make other people capable, not dependent. If your value comes from being the only one who can do it, you have built yourself a cage and made the organization fragile. Teach it away. You will learn more from explaining it than from hoarding it.
Stay correctable. You know the tool. You very likely do not know the business, the client history, or why the thing that looks stupid is actually load-bearing. The senior person who seems slow about AI may be slow for a reason you have not been told yet.
What experience is still for
Something I've had to learn, sometimes uncomfortably.
Being the most AI-literate person in the room doesn't make you the most useful person in the room. It makes you the most useful person about one thing.
The people who have been doing the work for twenty years know which mistakes are recoverable. They know which client will forgive a delay and which won't. They know why the process has a redundant step in it, and it's usually because something went badly wrong a decade ago and nobody wrote down why.
None of that is retrievable from a model. It is only available from people, and only if you ask in a way that suggests you actually want to know.
The best position in that room is not the one who knows the most. It is the one who can connect the new capability to the old judgment. That requires both, and you can only supply half of it.
Why this matters more than it looks
You are being handed real influence early, before you have built the character to hold it well. That isn't a criticism, it's just the timing. Most people get authority slowly enough to grow into it.
The habits you form in the first year of having it are the ones you keep. Whether you use knowledge to serve or to elevate yourself isn't a decision you'll make once, dramatically. It gets made in dozens of small moments where nobody is watching and either response is available.
You will be the most AI-literate person in a lot of rooms over the next few years.
The question is what those rooms will be like because you were in them.