AI Literacies for Adults in a GenAI Intensive Workforce: A Thematic Literature Review (2022–2026)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is rapidly reconfiguring professional practice, everyday decision making, and adult learning across virtually every sector. This thematic literature review synthesizes research published between 2022 and 2026 on the skills and understandings adults need in order to work purposefully, critically, and ethically with GenAI, taking established scholarship on digital, information, media, and critical literacies as its grounding. The review adopts a sociocultural orientation in which literacy denotes situated practices of making and interrogating meaning with texts. The review argues that competence with GenAI is not a narrow technical capacity but a situated form of agency encompassing purposeful use, contextual judgment, critical evaluation, ethical awareness, adaptive learning, and the capacity to preserve human thinking alongside automated systems. It examines the prompt as a communicative competency, the scrutiny of outputs for bias, inaccuracy, hallucination, and intellectual appropriation, the critical AI literacy scholarship that questions the framing itself, the contested evidence on productivity, and the shifting skill demands of AI enabled workplaces, closing with a cross‐sector set of AI learning principles.