How to navigate the Gen Z and Gen AI collision on your team

There is a battle brewing in the workplace that if we don’t get ahead of it, it might turn out in a direction that we really didn’t want it to. What is this battle? Gen Z versus Gen AI. Now, I don’t know if these things realize that they’re at odds, but think about it. Okay. Gen Z is entering in the workforce. It’s going to soon represent the largest number of people in the workforce over the coming years.

But these folks really came up through the ranks during COVID. They maybe graduated school during COVID. They started their first jobs. Remotely. And they, they are wrestling with having so many entry-level jobs now being replaced by Gen I. So now on the other side, right, we have Gen I that’s being integrated into companies, industries far and wide, really kind of every industry is facing right now, how they make sense of Gen AI, what is their strategy and, and really entry-level tasks.

And some of the kind of ground level tasks are being replaced at alarming rates, or at least companies are looking at that. So you have this new technology or this technology that’s been brewing for a while, but that’s really at the forefront. That’s replacing a lot of these early jobs. And then you have folks that are early in their careers thinking, well, wait a second, if that computer is going to do my job, what’s left for me?

Now, but I don’t just see this to come down to, you know, jobs being replaced by AI. It’s, it’s actually manifesting in three different ways. And that’s what I’m gonna talk about today, both how this is showing up and where this battle is really coming to a head for you as a manager or a business owner. And of course, as always, what to do about it. So you’re going to want to stay till the end to get those solutions.

I’m Leah Garvin, and this is the new manager playbook podcast where I’m on a mission to make managing your team the easiest part of your job, because dealing with people is hard enough and now we’re dealing with robots too. Yay, fun. So we want to make managing easier. And one of the biggest challenges I think I’m hearing right now is how do I make sense of AI? How do I know where to incorporate it thoughtfully? And then also that’s kind of coming into head.

This is why I’m talking about this battle at how do I deal with young talent? How do I make sure folks are focusing on the right things? How do I deploy them in the most impactful way? Folks maybe are entering in there, you know, they have a different relationship with work with time. You know, as we talked about a few weeks ago on the show, when I, when I brought grace on, you know, there’s just like a different level of investment that Gen Z has in their work.

And so we’re in their jobs. And so it’s an interesting moment, right? It might seem really attractive. Like, well, using the automations, they don’t have, it doesn’t have any of the kind of like interpersonal like sort of stressfully things of dealing with people and figuring out really how to kind of weave Gen Z in the right way. But that is not the answer. And I am begging you to not replace dealing with how to actually, you know, understand our talent and how to, you know, kind of fit them in the right places.

We don’t want to avoid that because it’s a little bit hard. It’s a little bit complex by just saying, well, automation is a lot easier. It’s a lot less messy. No, I’m asking you not to do that because there are ways to deal with it. So I mentioned, I want to talk about three sort of areas that this battle is coming to a head. Now, first, as I’ve mentioned, it’s that a lot of entry level functions, a lot of administrative work, a lot of different clerical things are being replaced or are being kind of the first target for automation.

Now, as I talked about in the episode with Grace, you know, this is creating the situation of, you know, folks looking fresh out of school, looking for a job and entry level jobs, having thousands of applicants. And so you’re thinking, well, gosh, like I might have a degree from a great school. How am I, you know, I thought I would be kind of set up. And so there’s a little bit of a disillusionment that even the kind of entry level starter jobs are having so much competition.

And there’s, there’s, you know, there’s more competition and there’s fewer of these jobs because folks are looking to automate them. And this is a big challenge that I think is pushing Gen Z into wanting to be more in the gig economy, into doing contractor work, into doing part-time because they’re finding that like, Hey, I might have to do a series of small jobs to make up what would be a full income. They also, you know, data shows they’re really more interested in flexibility.

And so this allows folks to travel and kind of work during, you know, certain periods when they want to, certain periods when they not and kind of like balance their whole job around that. Now, why is this a challenge? Well, I think we haven’t quite figured out right. Big picture, how to deal with, you know, having talent that’s, you know, starting in these more junior levels in our, in our companies, we haven’t quite figured out like, how do we bring folks in the right way?

What if we don’t want to automate these kinds of things? How do we make sure that we are finding the right talent and how are we really building connections with this younger talent so that we become an attractive company? So that’s really a challenge, right? Number one is that a lot of entry-level jobs and tasks are being replaced with Gen AI or really targeted to. Now, the second challenge that I’m seeing is that, you know, tasks that are being replaced.

So let’s say you start a job, you are a younger employee and you start a job like a lot of the tasks that we actually learn a lot of our work skills, like how to do copywriting, how to do research, how to really, you know, figure out wrestling through a hard problem to like get it wrong and find the more accurate solution. A lot of that learning stuff that’s being replaced by AI anyway. And so even if we land a job, we’re kind of starting to use automation that in ways that’s replacing what I believe, and I think many others would as well, these really important learning lessons, like how to think of how to lay out information, how to think about is this the right way to present this thing, how to form an argument, how to do like really complex problem solving.

And if we type into AI like, Hey, I have this complicated problem, or if we type in a chat GPT or Claude or Gemini or whatever, I have this complicated problem, map out this really detailed strategy for me. And we share it with our manager or stakeholder. It might look like, Oh yeah, this is good, but we didn’t do any of the thinking behind it. That’s a big problem. We can’t have new, you know, younger talent.

We can’t have folks that are learning how to work essentially in corporate America or in small businesses, not actually learn how to work. So that’s problem number two. And frankly, I think that’s one of the biggest ones, right? Is like, we are, we’re getting around some of these, these important moments of development. We also know that, you know, with folks utilizing managers, especially utilizing AI to replace themselves, having to have hard conversations, typing in a chat GPT, Hey, I have to have this hard conversation with an employee.

Give me a script to save for feedback. We are replacing thinking and building relationships and, and, you know, these, these critically important pieces of management, we’re replacing that with AI. So we’re not forming a relationship with our employees. We’re not ready. And I’ve talked about this on the show when we’re not ready, when the other side of the conversation doesn’t go the way that our AI script had planned it to because people they’ll surprise you, they’ll get you.

And so we’re caught off guard. We’re not ready. And so I think replacing foundational tasks that we need in order to have longstanding thriving careers in order to really develop our leadership skills, replacing those with AI and kind of offloading those too quickly without thinking about what those are and when are the appropriate times. That’s a huge risk. And then number three, and I know I’ve talked about this on the show as well is we’re having, we kind of really, it’s happening really in any generation, but more so with younger folks over using AI, using it for every single thing.

So, right, this is building on number two of it, replacing the skills. But I hear from clients every single day, both my clients and small businesses as well in corporate teams saying, you know, I’ll assign someone a task and they just kind of five minutes later send me output from chat GPT or Gemini or Claude. And that wasn’t the point. I wanted them to think through it. I wanted them to bring, you know, complex problem solving.

I wanted them to take that copy that they got out of Claude and actually translate it into our brand voice. I want it to sound like a human wrote it. You know, I don’t want a copy paste. I don’t want to be paying an employee for something that I could myself literally output for free. Like it’s, it’s seemed pretty wild. And so that challenge with the quick uptake of Gen Z in Gen AI. So the fact that they, they’re really utilizing it kind of for everything.

That’s a real challenge as well. Now with that third one, I really, you know, I think back to when I was in high school, Wikipedia had first come out. Okay. I think, I think it was around them and maybe college hopefully. And Wikipedia had first come out and it was freaking teachers out, professors, librarians, everyone because it was seen to be the end of research and integrity of research and folks were just popping open internet explorer, going to Wikipedia and inciting it directly.

Now just as a lot of information that Gen AI is surfacing is not a hundred percent accurate. Neither was Wikipedia when it first came out. And so in copying and pasting directly, you know, where before Wikipedia really kind of built in a lot of their citation functionality, people were copying and pasting it directly and teachers were finding just like they’re finding in universities. Now folks pasting complete paragraphs from Wikipedia, things weren’t cited, you know, they were replacing basically thinking and writing their essays.

Right. And at the time the conversation was very similar. Like let’s get rid of Wikipedia. Don’t allow it. Use, you know, set up programs to detect when people are using Wikipedia, things like that. But as this, the programs get more sophisticated, we have to think about it in a bigger way. We don’t want to stop using Wikipedia. We don’t want to stop using AI. We don’t want to not use it as a tool, but we need to teach our talent, our employees, how to use it thoughtfully.

Okay. So these are the three big challenges in this Gen Z versus Gen AI battle, as I called it. Number one, entry-level jobs being actually replaced by AI. Two, is jobs is once folks get a job, a lot of these tasks that they’d be learning some of their really professional leadership skills being replaced by AI. And three, Gen Z being a little, a little overeager to utilize AI with even the most basic tasks or with critical tasks within their jobs.

Those are the three challenges that I’m seeing every day. I’m hearing firsthand from my clients and I’m experiencing, I’m just watching firsthand as I’m working with Gen Z and getting to know kind of the space. So that’s the challenge area. Now, I said to stay to the end because I always love to offer a solution. What is our solution? It’s training people. Okay. We’ve got to make space for training the humans. We cannot just say, okay, like, you know, figure it out, work with this.

Can I like, you know, dive in, go, go ahead and run with things. I think right now what I’m seeing more and more is we’re moving really, really quickly. We’re hiring folks without onboarding. We’re hiring folks without training. We’re saying, Hey, this is a pretty basic job, figure it out. And people don’t actually know how to solve it. They don’t know how to read your mind. And so starting with thinking, okay, when I am hiring for a role or when I’m bringing someone in or when I’m changing someone’s role or when I’m asking them to do something, what is the training that they need to be successful?

What are the expectations that I need to set for them to be successful? What are the places that it really makes sense to utilize AI? And if I’m not versed in it, ask your team member to ask them to tell me, say, Hey, you know, I want you to, you know, utilize all the tools at your disposal, but let me know how do you plan to incorporate Gen AI into your workflow so that we don’t lose the human element of it.

So that you do still learn how to solve this kind of problem. Okay. Another thing I remember is back in my, in my senior year in high school, I remember the AP calculus. I was not in this class, but there was this huge upset because AP calculus folks were typing in all the formulas into their TI-83 calculators. And this was people that had applications out to like Harvard and Stanford and big, big schools. And it was like one of those upsets that all the kids that were really busting their butts and trying so hard, they felt like they couldn’t take it anymore.

And so they typed in all the formulas in their TI-83 calculators and the class got caught. And it was this huge thing. And I was like, well, we set up to deal with that. That’s the, that’s the beauty of not being an AP calculus. And the example comes up for me because I think one of the reasons folks are utilizing the third one, right, where Gen Z is utilizing AI, you know, so, so much is it’s, it’s a really hard time right now.

They want to move fast. They want to prove their value. They want to be able to get ahead. They want to be able to show, you know, Hey, like, you know, I can take on more. And so they’re using these tools that allow them to have a higher output, allow them to demonstrate, Hey, I can form a strategy for this. But what they’re not understanding is that that’s not actually the full picture. That’s where the training comes in.

Because I, you don’t just learn, like you don’t know how to make a team strategy or figure out like an operational plan or, you know, a hiring program or a product roadmap. The point of it isn’t just having the document finished. It’s the thinking that went into it. And we’re skipping that part. And to be honest, that’s the biggest battle of all that we are not understanding that when we just ask for something to spit out a plan and we just kind of start marching down the like the path into implementing it, we have not done any of the thinking.

The whole point was the thinking. And that’s what the librarian said when it came to Wikipedia, right? It wasn’t about finding a quote and putting it in your essay. It was about doing the research and making the connections and actually thinking, Oh, this makes sense for this. And this forwards my argument. So we’ve got to teach that part. That’s the training. That is where you will become your team’s most valuable asset as a leader. And your Gen Z talent can win this battle against, you know, Gen AI.

And it’s not an either, or I shouldn’t even say against. It’s they will be your most valuable asset in embracing Gen AI because they are hungry to use it. They are hungry to learn and they are tech savvy. So why would we create this battle where there doesn’t have to be one? Okay. So that is my, that is what I am encouraging you to do. I’m asking you to not make it be a battle. Let’s have it be a place where we can show our team members how to learn, how to think critically, and then ask them, carve a plan out, chart the course, utilize these tools in all the ways you can, but do not do that at the expense of critical thinking.

All right. See you next time.