Gen Z, Alpha, and Beta - What's Next

A creative director I know was told to figure out how to incorporate AI into her work.

The people who gave her the mandate had no idea what her work required.

She figured it out anyway. She always does.

65% of Gen Z and Millennial workers find their personal tools faster and easier than the ones their company provides. So they use those instead. Their own subscriptions, their own accounts, on their own time.

The company rollout is happening in one window. The actual work is happening in another.

Nearly half of Gen Z workers feel their managers don't understand the benefits of the tools they're already using. That number makes more sense when you realize the employees figured out the tools first.

There's a creative somewhere in a comment thread right now watching the economics of her field shift in ways her employer hasn't modeled yet. She can tell you exactly why churning out a widget in four hours instead of four days doesn't save the business. It resets what anyone will pay for it. You don't need fewer clients because you're faster. You need ten times more clients to make the same money. Made by someone who wasn't in the room when the pricing decision got made.

She also knows that the work feeding the model wasn't offered. It was taken. And that the people who created it aren't getting a seat at the table where the revenue from it gets distributed. She's watched her skill — something that took years to develop — get described as a problem that AI can solve.

She's right to be frustrated. The economics don't hold and she can see it clearly.

My niece is 32 and knows the rollout isn't working. Not because she's resistant. Because she's paying attention. The tools were deployed under pressure, on a timeline that had nothing to do with whether they were ready, by people who needed to say they were doing something.

Roughly one in five Gen Z workers believe AI will replace them within two years. Over 60% of both Gen Z and Millennials worry it will make entry-level jobs harder to get. They're running the numbers. They see what's coming. They're upskilling on their own because they don't trust the company training to get there first.

The whole series started with a simple observation. A 26-year-old who uses ChatGPT constantly but can't tell you whether what came back was any good. The concern was never that the younger generation doesn't use AI. It was that nobody taught them to evaluate it.

The people who could teach that are already doing it. On their own. Without being asked.

Somewhere there's a meeting happening right now about AI adoption. The agenda was set by people who haven't done the work in years. The person who knows what's actually breaking is sitting two levels below the room.

She's already solved half of it. Nobody's called her yet.