AI vs. Gen Z: Why Young Workers Fear Automation the Most

The rise of AI is sparking debate about the future of work with many younger employees expressing concerns about job security and automation. Joining us now to break it all down is Gene Marks, columnist at Forbes. Thank you so much for being with us today. — Hi Justine. — Hi. It's so nice to have you and talk about this topic that pretty much everyone is talking about these days. So, um, let's get into it. Based on all of your reporting, how prevalent is this anxiety among Gen Z workers about AI replacing their jobs? We're hearing this all the time. How prevalent is this really? — I know for Well, you know, I do cover this a lot for Forbes, Justine. I have to say everybody is um everybody's got to calm down about AI uh replacing them anytime soon with jobs. There's no question that [clears throat] AI is going to have its impact uh on employment. But you know what all technology does, you know, like, you know, in the 19th century there were people that climbed up on lamp posts in London and put out the street lights every day and turn them on, you know. Um there were people that knocked on windows in Paris in the 1800s to wake people up in the morning because there were no alarm clocks, you know. So um there's lots of jobs that are always there and then there were jobs that um come up because of technology and I think that um particularly younger people need to calm down a little about this. Um, I wrote, you know, I have a book coming out called the AI business playbook, and I wrote it, um, and partnered with Cox Business, um, to put this together. And I address some of those fears in the book. and uh Justine and then I'll let you ask more questions, but I just want you to know there I have a list of like 50 job titles that didn't even exist 20 years ago, let alone today, you know, and um I can assure you that AI is going to expand a lot of opportunities for younger people, not take them away. And I think the smarter people in Gen Z and uh younger people that are millennials um will take advantage of those opportunities and um [snorts] really benefit from AI. And so why do you think these younger employees then are feeling this anxiety? Um, you know, you're talking about all these other jobs that can be created with AI instead of shying away from it. So why do you think that all of these younger people are so worried about it? — First of all, I think I'm saying this as a 16 or one year old guy, you know, with kids in their 20s. Younger people are anxious just in general. I mean, I was when I was that age. I mean, you are uh you are concerned about your own job security. You're concerned about building a family. you're concerned about the world around you. It is not, you know, unnatural to have just overall concerns about life. So, when you hear that AI is going to come in and like take away all these different jobs, you can understand, you know, why people would have those kinds of concerns. But, you know, as I as I write in my book, um, you know, I mean, there are certain industries that are going to be way less affected. Uh, contracting is one of them. I mean in construction, I mean I truly predict that there will be a boom in contracting. I mean AI and even robotics cannot put in pipes or do plumbing or hang drywall and won't be able to do that for the foreseeable future. And I think Justin that you know that provides a lot of opportunities for younger people to get into the contracting field and be electricians and skilled tradesmen and make good money and also have the ability to run their own businesses if they want to do that. Um, and I'll give you another example. Um, you know, the arts. I mean, there are platforms like Google's VO and, uh, you know, Open AI's, uh, Sora where you can create videos in minutes, you know, I mean, incredible realistic videos. I mean, we see them on social media all the time. There is there are countless young artists out there right now. I'm in Philadelphia at the Tyler School of Art, a temple. um they can tell their stories and create content, music, videos, even written content. They would never have gotten the funding to do this kind of stuff on their own. Now they can do this stuff really inexpensively. And I think we're going to be seeing just an inundation of incredible content and great stories being told by younger people as well. Those are just two examples of where I think there's going to be a lot of opportunity for younger generations. — Yeah, I think those are two great examples and there are so many kind of skills-based trade jobs that people can go into. So again, all of these creative things definitely make so much sense. But what about for those jobs that are maybe more office worker centric or you know companies more corporate jobs where people are saying well if AI comes in and does all the entry level jobs which is great you know that frees up all of the kind of more complex thinking roles for people you know other people in the company great but it kind of takes away those entry level jobs. So, how does a person with no experience who maybe could have started out as kind of the lowest person maybe inputting data or doing um summarizing calls or something that AI could might and honestly has been already replacing? How would those people get those entry-level jobs when AI is kind of getting in the way of those? — That's easy. So, first of all, I'm an employer myself, Justine. I

have 10 employees in my company. Okay. I run a small business. uh you know I my my audience are mostly small and mid-size businesses. Um nobody's getting rid of employees anytime soon. I mean there are millions of job openings in this country right now and many industries themselves. You talk to any business owner uh regardless of a slowing economy they are you know they're all looking for talent. smart people. So when it comes to skills, please just remember if you are younger and you are going into the workforce, employers like me, we aren't necessarily looking for skills. We are looking for attitude and we're looking for productivity people that are going to take responsibility and get work done and fix problems. Your job is to make sure that you've got the tools and you understand the tools to do just that. So, it's no longer being the ability to hire an entry- level person. It's somebody out of college who it steps over that entry level. It doesn't exist anymore that entry level. Somebody that comes out of college and says, "Hey, uh, you want to hire me say for your accounting firm? I am already familiar with these AI tools to build financial statements, to analyze tax returns, to um help our clients with uh your financial decisions. I know these tools. I study these AI tools. So when you hire me, I'm not just going to be learning them over the next few years as an entry- level person. You're hiring me as a way more experienced person because I've got AI tools to back me up. So my advice to you know people that are in college, people that are just starting out, um you really whatever profession you're going into, zero in on the AI technologies that are being built for that pro, you know, that profession. you know, go to the industry associations, look at the applications that are in that area, look at the vertical applications specifically for that industry. Um, and learn where AI is impacting and understand that because it will give you a leg up not only on your competition who might be looking for jobs, but on a lot of existing employees who aren't paying attention to this stuff and ignoring it at their peril. That's what I would advise people to do when they're just starting out. Yeah, that's so interesting to think about kind of reshaping that entire way that you're going into even looking for jobs. Do you think that would have a trickle down effect into universities and into other schooling so that now there's going to be classes that are basically geared on teaching AI that people will then use when they go into the workforce. — You know what I think, Justine? I think that um we've been hearing a lot in the narrative about, you know, uh how liberal arts programs, for example, at universities have been going away because people want more technical training. My prediction is just the opposite. Um I believe that in the next decade we are going to see a resurgence of liberal arts programs. And the reason why is because uh employers and companies um will more you know gravitate towards employees that are more rounded that have a better understanding of human nature and the world around them and have again show a good work ethic as well. Somebody that could be an English major, a history major, an arts major. um it's not as important for them to know a lot of technical skills that the average entry-level person needs because a lot of AI tools will take care of those kinds of tasks. What we're looking for are people that are more well-rounded, who can communicate more to others around them, tell their stories, market better, speak to us, have better productivity. So, I do think that a lot of liberal arts programs are going to be coming back into popularity because that's the kinds of stuff that those liberal arts programs teach. They teach people to have a context of history, to write better, to communicate that much better. I think those are going to be the most important skills as AI takes over a lot of the mundane stuff. I'll give you an example. you know, um, if you're, you know, you I don't know how a car operates because it just does, you know, but there are drivers of cars who make their living driving around cars without even knowing how they operate because they don't need to know technology is taking care of that. I think a lot of jobs are going to be viewed in the same way. — That's so interesting. So it's a combination then of learning the AI tools to work at a company but also having the kind of liberal arts education to uh think outside the box in those kind of creative ways. That's so interesting. Um and when you think about AI taking over and replacing some roles obviously there are some roles that it will replace. What tasks or what types of roles do you think that would be that AI actually would be replacing versus others where human workers would be more essential? — Well I can tell you this much. Anthropic, the guys that make cla, they just came out with a really good graphic just this past week. It's been going around virally online. That's it's basically showing the jobs that will be most affected by AI and least affected by AI. And this is by a company that provides a very popular AI platform. You know, anything that touches a computer, you know, anything that's done digitally right now, they're really going to be the first to be changed. you know, um

accounting, finance, I think the legal profession is in for a major disruption, my opinion, uh, because I think a lot of the work that lawyers are doing and us accountants are doing, uh, will be impacted. Clients can just ask Chat GPT or Claude for answers and they'll become more and more reliable. Um, what what I think that won't be affected though are people that work with their hands and people that are also managing relationships with other people because you can't have a bot do that. So, speaking from I'm an accountant, Justine, right? So, you know, my clients don't want to pay my hourly fee for me to uh give tax advice or to research tax advice. They want answers and they want to communicate it to them in a way they can understand and they want it from a human. You know, I can lean into chat GPT to give me answers and I can interpret it and validate it, but then it's my job to go to my clients and give them, you know, communicate to them what's best for them. People will want to hear that from other people. I'm going to be leaning on these tools to make sure I can do that faster so I can provide that much of a higher level value of service to more clients. That's where I think AI is really going to benefit all of us in the professions. Yeah, it's interesting hearing you say that with your own um business because it seems like sometimes there's a disconnect between employee fears and then employer intentions. So tell us a little bit more about how companies are using AI as an augmentation um instead of really a replacement. — So I think one of the biggest um lacking of the biggest mistakes a lot of companies are making right now and hopefully they'll change that is they're not investing in training. You know, I mean, Justine, whenever I talk to businesses, they say like, "Oh, we need to be using AI. Everybody's telling us about AI. If we don't use AI, we're going to be we're going to go out of business. It's, you know, it's a disaster. What do we do? " So, you know, one big thing is, you know, every company I go to, they're either using Microsoft Office, Justine, or they're using Google Workspace, you know, and just within Office and Workspace, you know, most companies are using like 10 to 20% of what these platforms do, you know. I mean, I'm guilty of that as well. They are of Microsoft has co-pilot, Google has Gemini. You know, your employees don't realize all the things that co-pilot and Gemini could be doing for them to make them more productive and to make them do a better job. For example, uh both products have the ability to create presentations in PowerPoint or present just by giving it instructions like automatically create 10, 20, 30 slide presentations that would normally take a user hours to do. They can search through folders on your One Drive system or your Google Drive system or Dropbox and then give you answers to questions that you have about your own business. They can do that right out of the box. They can translate conversations. If if you were speaking Spanish and I was speaking English, you and I could be having the same meeting over Teams or over Google Meet and it would be real time translation. So I could have that communication, you know, for suppliers around the world or customers that are in South America. All of that stuff is out of the box. So what I've been advising my clients and what I've been writing about in the AI business playbook is you need to invest in training. Like cough up a few bucks, hire a Microsoft consultant or a Google consultant. Get your employees completely up to speed on the office platforms that you already own so that they can be way more productive with it. And most importantly, they can become less terrified about AI. They will understand what it does and what it doesn't do and how it can make them that much better at their jobs. And they will be better at their jobs and feeling better about themselves once they sort of get over that plateau. So businesses should be investing in training. It'll make a big deal for employees this year. — Yeah, that's so interesting. And obviously, you know, every company, every sector, and every company is obviously different. But are there any trends that you're seeing in the way that small businesses are adopting AI differently than enterprise organizations? — So, right now, small businesses are super tentative when it comes to AI. You know, this is the I saw this with the cloud. mobile applications. I mean, Justine, if I told you, you know, I remember when the cloud came out and all my clients were like, "We're not saving our data there. Are you kidding me? or we're not going to uh you know run our payroll in the cloud. I mean my god now of course everybody does it you know so small businesses tend to be more tentative and that you know you and a lot of reasons is because we're cynical people you know we're very protective for our money and our assets you know um so right now all I'm seeing is small businesses like using chat GBT and generative AI platforms to help them you know create emails get answers to questions do research create policies that is all that's Great. But the next stage that I'm already seeing, particularly among very small businesses, is that they're not necessarily developing their own AI applications, but they're talking to their software vendors about what they've got coming out. And then there's going to be a third stage, Justine, and

and I want to be you were probably reporting on this a few weeks ago, how all the these big software makers, Adobe and Salesforce um suffered huge hits in their valuation because Anthropic and uh you know, and OpenAI released certain you know, developer code versions of their AI chat bots that really gives the ability to almost write your own applications and replace what those software companies are Justine that is the future you know like my company besides doing accounting services we sell software I don't know if I'm going to be selling software you know 5 years from now I think I'll be going to clients and they'll be like hey Jean we need an order entry software that does this and this and I will turn to claude or chat GPT or whatever is available at that time and we'll we're going to v code it. I'm going to just give it natural language instructions. we need an order entry system that includes this, and this, and it will build it for me rather than having to go out and buy an existing piece of software. I think that's the future, and I think a lot of businesses will be doing that. And you talk about younger people looking for opportunities. Roofers and landscapers are not going to be vibe coding and building their own systems. They're going to need people to do that for them. And that's another opportunity if you're looking for a skill. learn how to build code using these AI platforms because we're going to see a lot of businesses particularly the 30 million small businesses in this country go through a big you know a big uh renaissance of changing out their software systems and a lot of it is going to go towards AI based vibecoded systems that maybe you can create for them. — Wow, that's incredible to think about. Thank you so much for being here Jean. talking through all of this with us and can't wait to see what happens in the future. Thank you. — Thanks. Can I give a shout out? If anybody's interested in downloading my book, you can get it for free now. I'm going to sell it on Amazon uh later this summer, but if you go to cox. comx. comi-playbook, uh you'll be able to download a full version of it for free right now. You won't have to buy it, so maybe that'll save a few bucks. — That's amazing. Yeah, that's really incredible and I'm sure has so much information just like what we talked about here and so much more. So, thank you so much. We really appreciate it. — Thanks, Justine. Thank you.