Gen Z is booing commencement speakers across the country, and it gives me just a teensy bit of faith in humanity. Graduation speeches are meant to impart wisdom and inspire the hopeful young professionals entering the workforce to go out and change the world. Instead, speakers are lecturing on how AI is the future of work. It’s almost like they all used the same AI model to write their talking points. If they had done any homework on their audience, they would’ve flagged that Gen Z is resisting and outright rejecting AI. Eight out of ten Gen Z students surveyed by Gallup believe using AI tools may complicate their educational experiences. Fewer than 30% of Gen Z workers say they trust AI-assisted work tasks—with almost none trusting work completed solely by AI.
Business leaders are so fixated on AI; it dominates every conversation, LinkedIn post, blog, and now, commencements – yay. Gen Z is already grappling with a brutal job market, and you’re gonna tell them to embrace the robots they see as competition? The very same robots companies are prematurely replacing living, breathing humans with.
The adults in charge want to hand over a power tool without any training, safety protocols, guardrails, or even a basic understanding of the implications. All while Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now calling for a global pause on AI development, claiming the technology is nearing a point where it can spiral out of human control. Cue the doomsday soundtrack.
We’re already seeing the repercussions of the over-reliance on AI. Early-career professionals are struggling with the very things our economy needs for survival – problem-solving, conflict resolution, communication…eye contact, anyone?
If you are not actively using these skills, you lose them. When you rely on iRobot to do your writing, researching, strategizing and more; it’s cognitive offloading; which is basically a fancy way of saying you’re rotting your brain.
People, not Bots
We are investing in technology at nearly nine times the rate we do the people who are supposed to use it. Yet, we wonder why work is getting sloppier, why critical thinking feels like a lost art and why early-career professionals are flailing while our turnover rates skyrocket.
Gen Z doesn’t know life without technology and instead of limiting or monitoring, we’ve incorporated digital whiteboards and tablets into every classroom and eliminated Shop and Home Ec. Instead of working with our hands, writing things down or having conversations we are outsourcing to Claude or ChatGPT.
AI is not Innovation
AI looks backward, it is built on knowledge that already exists. In other words, it’s things that have already happened and things that have already been written. It cannot innovate, it cannot feel and it doesn’t register human emotion.
What it can do is hallucinate, lie, make things up and make you so angry you swear at it and tell it to jump off a bridge (or maybe that’s just me). It presents wrong information with complete confidence, it fabricates citations and produces polished crap in such a way you just accept it as fact.
The liability here is real and it’s terrifying.
Be the Adult in the Room
How ‘bout we pump the brakes and focus on the human, not the artificial intelligence.
Hold tech free meetings where everyone brings a notebook and pen. Fun fact: writing things down is proven to increase comprehension. Limit AI usage to certain tasks, put a policy in place with constraints and for the love of all that is holy train your people on how and how not to use it.
Leadership in the next decade is going to require agility – a genuine, practiced ability to process new tools, threats and information at a pace that won’t leave your people behind.
The organizations who will come out ahead will not be the ones who adopt the fastest; they will be the ones with the judgment, processes and people development in place to do it smartly.
Listen to the Young People
The graduates who booed the commencement speakers weren’t rejecting the future, they were rejecting the idea that the future doesn’t include them, their minds, or human connection.
AI is not a replacement for actual intelligence; the more we outsource our thinking, the worse we get at all the stuff that makes us human – connection, empathy, and emotion.
I just hope big tech, policymakers and the 1% get a clue before we lose all sense of humanity (and before Will Smith has to save us from the robots).
Kim Bode is the owner of 8THIRTYFOUR, a communications and learning company and is the program director for the Women’s Entrepreneurial Fellowship, the Women’s Owners Network and a Small Business Association of Michigan board member.
