Abigail Carlos was bracing for a busy holiday season as her employer, Warner Bros. Discovery, was gearing up to launch a suite of new shows. A media strategist, Carlos had to assign complex tasks to her team members, and she needed a hand. So she asked ChatGPT and Perplexity to organize it all in emails that sounded both professional and personable.
“AI cuts my workload in half,” she tells me. She’s been using various AI tools for years. In her past roles running social media accounts, she’d use a chatbot to help write posts. Now she uses it to do tedious tasks like drafting emails and double-checking spreadsheets, freeing up time to focus on higher-level creative jobs. “I look at using it as working smarter, not harder,” Carlos says. The 26-year-old now relies on AI for everything from revising her LinkedIn profile to coming up with ideas for the poetry she writes on the side.
A growing Gen Z workforce has embraced AI to free up their time, improve their work-life balance, and, ideally, make their jobs more meaningful by automating drudgeries. When Google last year surveyed more than 1,000 knowledge workers in their 20s and 30s, 93% of those who identified as Gen Zers said they were using two or more AI tools a week. The talent and staffing firm Randstad found in a report last year that Gen Zers generally used AI in the office more frequently than their older counterparts for everything from administrative tasks to problem-solving. This is the generation that “grew up seamlessly intertwined with technology,” Deborah Golden, Deloitte’s US chief innovation officer, says. For them, she says, “engaging with AI feels more intuitive than deliberate.”
The share of Gen Zers in the US workforce recently surpassed that of baby boomers, and Gen Zers are expected to account for more than a quarter of the global workforce this year. Their transformation into a chatbot generation could have a seismic effect on the workplace. As employers look to capitalize on the tech’s productivity gains, AI proficiency is becoming a prerequisite for many jobs, leaving behind those who aren’t as fast in adopting it. Amid anxiety about AI taking away job opportunities, many young people are skilling up to try to stay hirable. But some experts are worried that operating on AI autopilot could come back to bite Gen Z in the long run.
Monique Buksh, a 22-year-old law student and paralegal in Australia, has found AI to be an immense time-saver. She uses Westlaw Edge and Lexis+ to help with doing legal research and unearthing relevant case law and statutes. She also turns to Grammarly to draft official documents and the AI assistant Claude to spot inconsistencies in contracts.
“With AI handling time-consuming work, I’m able to focus more on discussions around strategy, professional development, and problem-solving with my managers,” she says. “Soft skills, like communication and critical thinking, will play an even larger role in the future as AI continues to take over repetitive tasks.”
Many Gen Z workers aren’t comfortable connecting with their managers IRL to have difficult conversations and may find it easier to pose questions to AI.
Josh Schreiber, a 21-year-old HR intern at Coinbase, uses Perplexity and ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas and research subjects. He also uses Otter.ai to record and transcribe conversations, like sales calls and product meetings, allowing him to focus on the discussion rather than frantically taking notes.
He thinks AI adoption is a matter of learning from history. In the early days of personal computing, he says, “those who embraced computers, programming, and utilizing software consistently outperformed those who resisted change.” Today, he argues, “Gen Z workers who choose to embrace AI will outperform all those around them.” Schreiber compared AI to a ski lift: It’s better to take the lift up and enjoy the downhill ride than trudge slowly up the mountain first.
Carlos concurs. “It’s important to learn about the new innovations in technology rather than fight them,” she says.
Gen Zers’ employment of AI is also driven by their fear of AI replacing their jobs. The anxiety isn’t unfounded: An analysis from this past fall found that more than 12,000 jobs were cut in 2024 because of AI. McKinsey and others have forecast that entry-level roles, which Gen Z predominates, will be the first cut back by automation.
A Microsoft and LinkedIn survey of 31,000 knowledge workers conducted last year, for example, suggested that AI could fast-track Gen Zers’ professional trajectory. Among the workers in leadership surveyed, 71% said they’d prefer hiring candidates with AI expertise over those with more conventional experience, and nearly 80% said they’d give AI-savvy staffers greater responsibilities.
Tatiana Becker, who specializes in tech recruiting, says that ultimately, “employers will be more interested in people with AI skills, but at all levels, not just Gen Z workers.”
But some people worry that using AI as a shortcut could hurt Gen Z workers in the long run. In an online survey of Gen Zers who used AI at work by TalentLMS, which provides e-learning software for companies, 40% of respondents indicated they believed AI hindered their growth by doing tasks they could have learned from. Another study suggested that heavy reliance on AI tools was associated with lower measures of critical thinking, especially among younger adults. A recent paper by researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found something similar: the more people used and trusted AI, the less they relied on critical thinking skills.
Even more concerning: About half of Gen Z respondents in a survey by Workplace Intelligence, an industry research agency, and INTOO, a talent development firm, said they turned to AI for guidance instead of their managers. Erica Keswin, an author and workplace strategist, isn’t surprised. Many Gen Zers missed out on critical in-person mentorship in college and in early-career roles because of the pandemic. “Many Gen Z workers aren’t comfortable connecting with their managers IRL to have difficult conversations and may find it easier to pose questions to AI,” she says. AI, unlike managers, is constantly accessible and immediate and provides answers without judgment.
That can have downsides. Golden, of Deloitte, says collaboration and innovation thrive on the messiness of human interaction. “There is a real risk of weakening Gen Z’s ability to navigate ambiguity and build the interpersonal skills that are essential in any workplace,” she says.
It’s one reason Nicholas Portello, a Gen Z professional in New York, is resisting using AI software. He thinks the instant gratification AI provides can harm productivity and creativity. “Some of the best ideas my team and I produced in 2024 can be attributed to brainstorming sessions and environments of open communication as opposed to ChatGPT,” Portello says.
Everyone, from Gen Z entrants to company execs, needs to know when AI is useful and when something needs a human touch.
Kyle Jensen, an English professor and director of writing programs at Arizona State University, thinks it’s an avoidable problem. He says that for AI to supplement rather than replace a young person’s analytical capabilities, they must develop expertise in a field or topic. He tries to encourage his students to reflect on AI tools’ role in problem-solving: What kinds of problems would they be most useful for? When would they be less useful?
Jensen argues that once a person acquires an in-depth understanding of a subject area, they can learn to recognize when a generative AI output is “overly general, unhelpful to the problem they are trying to solve, incorrect, or exclusionary of different ways of knowing or feeling.” This also helps them pose more creative prompts and questions.
AI could be a great leveling force within the workplace, giving younger workers a massive leg up. But the experts I talked to expect that as Gen Z gets a head start in AI, the workplace will be divided between those who use AI and those who don’t. Over time, this could push out older workers.
Companies already perpetuate the problem by tailoring training opportunities to only the youngest staffers. Various surveys have found that Gen Z employees have tended to be given more opportunities to learn how to use AI than older workers. Stephanie Forrest, the CEO of TFD, a London-based marketing agency, warns other employers against counting out older workers. “It shouldn’t be treated as a foregone conclusion that these generations will be less capable — or less willing — to use AI, provided the right support is given,” she says.
Ultimately, the employees and organizations that get ahead will be the ones that can effectively harness their people power — like a manager’s ability to coach, mentor, and motivate or an employee’s ability to persuade a client to stay with their company — because that’s something AI can’t do. Everyone, from Gen Z entrants to company execs, needs to know when AI is useful and when something needs a human touch.
Shubham Agarwal is a freelance technology journalist from Ahmedabad, India, whose work has appeared in Wired, The Verge, Fast Company, and more.
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