04-03-2025
Gen Z Is More Worried About AI Taking Their Jobs Than You Might Think, According to New Study
It turns out that Gen Z is often just as anxious about artificial intelligence booting them from a job as many other people.
One of the most common assumptions made in corporate America over the last quarter century is that "digital natives"-a term coined by educator Marc Prensky in 2001-are inherently comfortable with digital technology. It's a logical inference. Almost any discipline one grows up with is easier to master than one learned in adulthood, which gives a natural edge to millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012).
But just because young people might be comfortable with technology doesn't mean they don't worry about it-especially when it comes to the growing influence of AI.
"Gen Z: Redefining the Future of Work,' a white paper from Netherlands-based Top Employers Institute, draws its insights from interviews with 1,700 people aged 18-17 who live in nine countries on four continents. And while some of its analysis confirms common assumptions about Gen Z's workplace attitudes (83% of them said employers are responsible for their workers' mental health, for example), one finding is something of a needle scratch.
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For example, while 77% of Gen Zers hoped that AI would "allow them to learn new skills" and 72% said they felt prepared to take advantage of the technology, only 60% thought that AI would have a positive effect on their individual careers. Indeed, a fifth of the young respondents disagreed-somewhat or strongly-that AI would benefit their professional lives.
That disgruntlement was even more pronounced when it came to young workers in media and advertising jobs. Only 50% of them thought that AI "will create new work opportunities for me," a chilly retort to the common narrative that AI will create new jobs even as it eliminates others.
"What we found in our research was a much more muted outlook," the paper's authors state. "This generation recognizes that AI is here to stay, and has some short-term benefits, but [Gen-Z employees] also have some anxiety about how it may impact their lives, and the lives of other employees, in the long-term."
In a notable wrinkle, Gen-Z wariness over AI was predominantly a western-world phenomenon. Only about half of respondents in the U.K. and the U.S. (50% and 54%, respectively) believed that AI would have a positive effect on their careers. By contrast, in China and India, those figures were 73% and 80%, respectively.
The bifurcated feeling that AI could be a force for good in the workplace even as it threatens individual workers also appeared in a Deloitte paper published last year.
In that study, while 79% of Gen-Z workers who frequently used AI believed in AI's ability to "improve the way they work" in the future, 78% admitted that AI would eventually force them to "look for job opportunities that are less vulnerable to automation."
