There's a way of talking about AI that has become almost its own genre. You know the pitch: we are at an inflection point, a civilizational shift, and companies that merely tinker around the edges – automating this, optimizing that – are going to be blindsided by the ones willing to reimagine everything from scratch.

It's the "invent, don't adopt" school of thought, and right now it is everywhere in boardrooms, consulting decks and executive LinkedIn feeds.

It's not wrong. But it is a view from a particular altitude – and from where the younger generation is standing, the terrain looks quite different.

The people most enthusiastic about AI's transformative potential tend to be those with the most to gain from transformation and the least to personally lose from disruption: senior leaders, investors, strategists.

The people most uneasy about it tend to be younger – the ones just entering a workforce being actively reshaped beneath their feet – just as they’re walking across the stage to accept their diplomas and degrees.

According to a 2025 Deloitte survey, 76 percent of Gen Zers have used standalone generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude – the highest rate of any generation. They are not resistant to the technology. They use it constantly – for school, for work, for creative projects, for navigating a job market that increasingly feels designed to screen them out.

But usage and enthusiasm are not the same thing. A 2026 Gallup survey conducted with the Walton Family Foundation found that excitement about AI dropped 14 percentage points, to 22 percent, among Gen Z compared to the previous year. Nearly half of Gen Z workers (48 percent) now believe the risks of AI in the workforce outweigh its benefits, a significant 11-point increase over the prior year.

Older generations, it turns out, aren't uniformly enamoured, either – nearly half of Boomers (49 percent) say they are skeptical of AI, but their skepticism tends to be more personal and less existential. The executive class is a different slice: optimistic, strategic and largely insulated from the sharpest edge of AI disruption.

 The paradox of the digital native

There's a painful irony at the centre of this divide. The people most anxious about AI are the same people using it most.

A Wharton-led survey of nearly 2,500 U.S. adults aged 18-28, completed in October 2025, found 79 percent believed AI “makes people lazier,” and 62 percent said they had concerns it “makes people less smart.” Yet the same cohort continues to use it – not out of enthusiasm, but because in a competitive labour market, opting out feels like unilateral disarmament.

The pressure is real and structural. Almost 60 percent of hiring managers use AI as an excuse for layoffs or hiring freezes because it plays better with stakeholders.

Gen Z is entering a workforce where nearly a third of young workers (32 percent) are already considering retraining specifically because of concerns about AI replacing their current role –  not because they see opportunity, but because they see a threat closing in.

Among Gen Z, nearly half (49 percent) report feeling curious about AI, but that curiosity is closely followed by anxiety (42 percent) and anger (31 percent), with fewer expressing excitement (22 percent) or hope (18 percent), according to a survey from the Walton Family Foundation, GSV Ventures, and Gallup.

This is not the emotional profile of a generation simply being left behind by technology it doesn't understand. It is the profile of a generation that understands it very well – and has watched it reshape the world they were supposed to enter.

The view from the other side of the disruption

The "invent everything from scratch" argument has a blind spot. It is told entirely from the perspective of the people doing the inventing: those with capital, institutional credibility and the job security to ask bold questions without personally bearing the consequences of the answers.

What it tends to gloss over is that every business model being "reimagined" is also someone's livelihood. The gate agents, the junior analysts, the recent graduates who find the entry-level roles they'd spent four years working toward suddenly consolidated or eliminated – they are not abstract casualties of progress.

They're peers to many, new graduates who were excited to enter the workforce and are now being told that their years of education were all for naught.

They’re young computer scientists who are losing their jobs in software development because lines of code are able to conjure up better solutions than they were taught. Creatives who are now unable to find work because ChatGPT can generate images – advertisements, product mockups, logos – all in less than a minute, and for a fraction of the cost of a junior graphic designer.

The excitement about building the company "that puts your existing business out of business" sounds different when you're not the founder of that company. It sounds like someone else deciding your job is the inefficiency that needs to be solved.

This isn't an argument against ambition or innovation. It's an observation about who gets to sit at the table when these conversations happen. The employees most exposed to AI-driven disruption – younger, earlier in their careers, with less accumulated institutional capital – are rarely the ones shaping the strategies that determine their futures.

The need for a more complete conversation

The strategic argument for thinking big about AI is sound. Gen X and Boomers are primarily reaching for AI as a workplace efficiency tool, and there is something to the concern that narrow, process-level framing risks missing the larger moment. Companies that only bolt AI onto existing structures may well find themselves overtaken by ones willing to rebuild from first principles.

But the conversation about what AI should become is not complete if it is held primarily by those with the most to gain and the least to lose. Gen Z's sentiment toward AI has become significantly more negative over the past year – not because younger people are technophobic, but because the relationship between AI's benefits and its costs has not been distributed equitably. The optimism flows upward; the anxiety flows down.

If the right question for business leaders is, "Would we build this company the same way if AI already existed?" – then perhaps the question the rest of us should be asking is: “Who gets to participate in designing what comes next?”

The transformation is coming. That much seems clear. The more important question is whether the people most affected by it have any say in where it's going.

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