The 56% AI-skill wage premium reported by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (May 2025, drawing on Lightcast job-posting data through 2024) describes a real labour-market signal at scale, but materially overstates what the typical mid-career worker should expect from a generic AI-literacy program: the premium attaches to specific technical skills surfacing in 1.62% of all 2024 job postings, and the BCG 14%-vs-44% gap in AI upskilling access between frontline workers and leaders is the operational variable that decides which cohort captures the premium and which sees credential inflation without the wage signal.

Claim created at publish; review on 60-day cadence. Anchor data: Atlanta Fed Workforce Currents (21 May 2025) 'By Degrees' methodology; Lightcast job-posting time series 2018-2024; BCG October 2024 'Five must-haves for AI upskilling' (n=11,000+ employees, 50+ countries) including the 14% frontline vs 44% leader upskilling-access gap; St. Louis Fed (Feb 2025) aggregate-productivity 1.1% from generative AI. Sister claims: AM-010 (CIO playbook five operational characteristics, training-over-hiring posture), AM-022 (change-management variable in deployment success), AM-029 (Stanford 12/88 distribution), AM-030 (McKinsey 23% scaling cohort). Trigger conditions to revisit before next cadence: (a) subsequent Atlanta Fed wave compressing or expanding the 56% premium against a different methodology baseline; (b) BCG, McKinsey, or Lightcast publishing data showing the 14/44 access gap closing without compression of the wage premium; (c) major US, UK, EU, or Singapore policy intervention on workforce AI access (right-to-train, sectoral retraining mandate) substantively reshaping the access variable.