AI is the latest Generation at Work...
...And it’s Exposing Everything We’ve Been Avoiding
Avid readers will note the tardiness of this newsletter; do you know when you just can’t produce the thing….. Well, that was me last week.
I’ve spent my career helping audiences understand changing definitions of wealth, work and want. And while generations are useful labels, they are rarely nuanced. I’m more interested in helping people understand how values are shifting, how expectations are evolving and how societal change seeps into all areas of life.
The world is in flux. We are exposed to the new trends more than ever, to chaos narratives more than ever, but change always happens slower than we think. I’ve written a lot about the breakdown of the linear path and the divergence of some professions. I’ve tried to source what career advice I would give my seven year old. I’ve written about how Gen Z are revealing the broken contract at work. I’ve also written about the break between education and employment and wealth, and increasingly more and more on AI in education, work and life.
Right now I have two jobs: one creating this weekly newsletter, writing my new book and developing the associated YouTube show, but the other you may or may not know about, is running my business AllRelative. I spend my days in workshops, in the data and doing the research, helping different sectors from lawyers to civil services to hoteliers to IFAs to food brands, understand these major societal shifts and what it means for their consumers, workers and clients. We are in a time of flux where there is genuine power to be found in understanding societal change, whether you are trying to navigate life, career, parenting, investing and growing a business. I want to help people see around corners, drown out the noise and find clarity.
We have a tiny team of eight. We are working with some major global clients, punching well above our weight, and producing work that is insightful, deals with genuine problems or challenges, and is wholly practical. I describe myself as a reluctant entrepreneur who never saw herself running a business….. I’m learning to delegate, pitch and lead, which brings me to the subject of this piece.
I’ve just come back from a major US trip, where I was speaking at a conference in San Francisco, seeing a major tech client and speaking on the Simon Sinek podcast. Yes, the ‘why guy’. Simon was amazingly generous in giving me space to talk about some of the research and data we’ve seen in the workplace specifically. And that is what I want to share here, because whether you are thinking about your career, switching jobs, running a team or investing in a business, it is now imperative to look ahead and see what is coming…..
Firstly, can we stop labelling Gen Z as impossible to manage, many are nearly 30 and managers themselves. I’m increasingly framing AI as the next generation in the workplace instead. Consider that it behaves like a cocky new intern. It has no work/life balance. It works throughout the night if it is allowed to. It’s deferential, but confident - often too confident. It can do the work on the fly; surface level stuff. And, like any new generation arriving, it’s not just changing how we work…..it’s revealing what was already broken.
Because one of the many positive things about AI, I think, is what it is exposing about work. Across the companies I work with, I see the same patterns repeating. Rising generational tension (that is different values, different economic outlooks and different modes of working), I see disrupted learning or no learning at all. I see the official and unofficial apprenticeship model eroded. I see no time to manage and value people properly. I see cultures in which good communicators, empaths or teachers are not rewarded. And I see a steady erosion of human capability and a sense of worthlessness at work. We’ve spent twenty years dehumanising work, and the fact is that AI is eroding this even more.
Here are five shifts I think every organisation and every employee needs to understand.
1. AI is accelerating the generational gap
It wasn’t that long ago that we talked about AI as a unifying force, something that had the potential to level the playing field. In reality, it is widening existing divides. The FT’s recent research by Focaldata found that it is benefitting older workers.
We now have five generations in the workforce. They don’t just differ in age; they differ in how they communicate, how they learn, and what they expect from work. There’s always been this tension (often made known in the pub on a Friday) but the fact is that the traditional culture of deference suppressed it. No more. In the post-pandemic, hybrid age, work has become more transactional, and the gap between what workers and employers expect from each other has only widened.
But it is now being exacerbated with AI. If you are in your first job, it is most likely that you spent your entire tertiary education using it, and are much more comfortable integrating it into daily workflows than your seniors. You may now defer to an LLM in a way that previous generations would have once asked a senior colleague. We talk a lot about “digital natives” or “AI natives” now, but what I see is something more complicated. Gen Z arrive as native adopters, but not necessarily sophisticated ones. Many have used AI extensively in education, often in ways that prioritise speed over depth. Sorry lecturers, it’s true.
But for those over 35, you are perhaps less inherently wired to defer to AI. You may consider vocal prompts weird and be slower to adopt it, and yet you are often far better at interrogating outputs, spotting errors, and applying context. You are able to bring the judgment (or taste as some are calling it) that inevitably comes with experience. You can sniff out a hallucination or a dodgy sentence a mile off.
But these strengths and weaknesses are not automatically combining and working together. In fact, what is emerging in the workplace is a gap between those who make the policy on AI and those who are actually using it.
The risk is that organisations that run according to outputs, and that mistake faster processes on a spreadsheet for real capability, will confuse AI adoption with AI competence. This is difficult when the work becomes invisible, a collaboration between employee and LLM rather than a group of employees. It’s difficult when it comes to sensing whether that person is right for promotion. It’s difficult when it comes to assessing capability.
My advice is you need both. If you are under 30 align yourself closely as you can with the analogue, more experienced workers in the business. Get them to teach you, and you teach them.
2. The path to mastery is being dismantled
We see the headlines on the graduate labour market and, whether or not it is quite as true as some say, we suspect that entry-level jobs are being contracted. Add in the shitshow that is AI-driven recruitment culture, it is no wonder that many graduates feel despondent.
But one of the most profound shifts happening right now is also one of the least discussed: the path to mastery is being disrupted. Traditionally, careers were built through progression, and much of that progression relied on what we might call “grunt work”. Repetition. Observation. Trial and error. Who has time to fail at work these days? Moreover, that work wasn’t glamorous, or often fun, but it was foundational. Now, AI is automating it. That’s great but something is getting lost in all this.
53% of organisations report a decline in mentorship and apprenticeship structures
At the same time, routine tasks - those tasks that used to train junior employees - are disappearing
In law firms, and most professional roles, for example, I hear the same debate repeatedly: should junior still be doing the document checking and fact verification that AI can now complete in seconds? Yes, but the answer isn’t straightforward. Because while automation increases efficiency, it also removes the very experiences through which people learn. Moreover, your juniors may have been automating this since university so they will already be used to delegating this to tech and may push back on doing the basics. One of the major problems they have in law schools right now is juniors not reading the cases, just the summaries.
So the question we must ask ourselves, and possibly for our kids too, is this: what work must remain human, not because AI can’t do it, but because humans need it to learn?
Without that, we risk creating a generation of workers who are highly efficient but underdeveloped. And that is a long-term risk that productivity metrics won’t capture, and will be hard to catch up on at 30.
3. The rise of “shadow AI” is a warning sign
One of the most revealing trends I see in organisations is what I call shadow use of AI. Most companies don’t want to admit it, and neither do we as employees. It’s the secret vocal or written prompting we do on our phones or private devices, away from the ‘official systems’. It’s a way of subverting the surveillance system. It’s a way of doing the work maybe quicker and speedier, and maybe you just prefer ChatGPT or Claude.
But interestingly much of the shadow use isn’t about technical tasks. People are using it to ask really basic human questions.
How do I ask my boss for time off?
How do I write this email without sounding rude?
How do I respond to criticism?
This has NOTHING to do with productivity, but to do with relationships in the workplace and the fact that we are all now much more comfortable with talking to an LLM than we are our line manager. We’ve all, not just Gen Z, become really bad at having uncomfortable conversations at work. But these are the very interactions that build confidence, judgment, and professional identity, and they are being outsourced. If people are turning to AI for these moments, it suggests something deeper: they don’t feel able to ask those questions in real life. Likewise, the use of Chat GPT as therapy, but that’s an entirely different post.
4. We have dehumanised work; and now we need those human skills back
For the last 30 years, we have systematically stripped the human out of work. We’ve prioritised efficiency over social, human interaction. We have focused on output over observation or learning. External facilitated workshops (or worse, webinars) over actual teaching and observation on the job. Emails over conversations. We’ve even convinced ourselves that clearing an inbox is productivity when, in fact it’s like Japanese knotweed: it just creates more and more. We’ve also maddeningly fallen for the propaganda that somehow all this dehumanised, unrewarded grind can become your identity?! My work goal over the next six months is to stop answering emails… it’s hard but I just hate the idea that that is work. It’s not.
Anyway, I digress. The point is that the more we’ve digitised work, the more we’ve lost the informal, observational learning that once defined it. And now, just as AI takes over more cognitive tasks, we find ourselves needing those human capabilities again.
91% of executives believe human skills like communication and empathy are more important than ever
Yet Gen Z consistently report lower confidence in these areas
This is the paradox. The very moment we need human skills most is the moment they are weakest. Business, at its most basic, is about trust. Like a bank note. I entrust you to do the thing, and you trust me that I will pay for it, whether that’s as an employee, client, customer or investor... But that trust can only, I would argue, be generated, built and manifested through human connection.
AI cannot manifest a handshake. It cannot replicate eye contact. It cannot build relationships in the way humans do. And yet, we have built workplaces where those skills are underdeveloped. And yes, they are especially lacking in younger generations, not only because they are digital natives, but because we haven’t created an environment where those low-stakes moments and conversations happen anymore: in restaurants, in dating, in the workplace. Being as human as possible, having as much humour, character, personality as possible, is probably the best way to future proof your career. If you find yourself regurgitating the corporate word salad - free yourself now!
What I’m advocating is that the future worker will be praised for doing the things that actually can’t be counted, and you can’t see on the spreadsheet; human stuff that AI can’t do. Teach, care, connect, build trust. The unquantifiable in life.
5. Middle managers are carrying the strain, and we’re not listening
At work, we focus on the young and the leaders. No one really thinks about the middle. There’s no money for the middle, unless you are deemed as having ‘future leadership potential’. There’s no consideration for them, and yet, if AI is exposing structural weaknesses, nowhere is that more visible than in the middle. Middle managers are the pressure point of hybrid working (they are managing up and down), if you are mid-career you are quite often going through big life stuff: early parenthood, ageing parents, career fluctuations or transitions, homeownership. So it’s perhaps no surprise that, within organisations, they are frequently the most frustrated group. They are also the ones most likely to receive what I would describe as “AI-generated slop”, outputs that look polished but require significant reworking. So what happens? They redo the work themselves. Which means AI isn’t increasing productivity; from what I can tell, it’s pushing work upwards. Workplaces talk a lot about transformation at the top and AI adoption at the bottom, but few consider or design for the reality in the middle, where the real implementation, teaching, refining is happening.
Where this leaves us
So the question is not whether to adopt AI. That is already happening. Businesses have been shopping; individuals are building their own systems and preferences on their personal devices. I think a more interesting question is whether workplaces and individuals are rebuilding the human systems in response to it.
Just look at the Anthropic data. It tells you something that most social media companies, which also have access to our personal data, have long understood, something that companies don’t account for and that we humans, across all generations, rarely admit: we as a species are awkward, irrational beings. Often lazy, on the surface compliant, but also secretly deviant, wired to believe in the collective but to also prioritise self interest.
The organisations that succeed will not be the ones that automate the fastest. They will be the ones that understand something more fundamental, something that great innovation has always been about: technology changes quickly. Human development does not, so the closer you align tech in the workplace with how humans actually operate, the easier it will be to integrate.
AI may be the newest “generation” in the workplace. But like every generation before it, its real impact will be defined by how the others respond.
The Reading Room
Young men are turning back to religion
After decades of decline, religiosity is rising again….. We’ve been hearing about this spirituality trend and religious trend for a while now amongst young people. New Gallup data shows 42 per cent of men aged 18 to 29 now say religion is “very important” in their lives, up 14 percentage points since 2023 and close to early 2000s levels. Among young women, the figure has fallen to 29 per cent, creating a 13 point gender gap. This marks a reversal of historical norms, where women consistently reported higher religiosity. I think part of the appeal is that it offers connection and status outside the usual places we look for it now. Work feels less secure, social media is exhausting, and traditional markers of success are harder to attain, especially for younger men whose earning power has stalled or declined. In that context, finding identity, community and recognition through the church actually makes a lot of sense. It offers a sense of belonging and purpose at a moment when many of the old routes to status feel increasingly out of reach.
Neil Howe and Christian Ford, A New Religious Divide: Young Men vs. Young Women, Demography Unplugged with Neil Howe, 26 April 2026
Hybrid work was meant to help, but for many mothers, it’s doing the opposite
Is hybrid working creating better work-life balance. It has in my household for sure, but then new research suggests it may be reinforcing old inequalities. A Nuffield Foundation study led by the University of York finds mothers are more likely than fathers to experience higher stress, reduced wellbeing and career strain under hybrid models. Women are more likely to combine paid work with childcare during the day, often at the expense of sleep and leisure; so combining with motherhood is working, so is the economics, but the personal burden has increased. While fathers report improved wellbeing, mothers are more likely to stretch themselves across both roles.
Banker by day, influencer by night
I thought we had reached the peak of the personal brand years? Apparently not, a new generation of finance workers is testing the boundaries between professional identity and personal brand. On TikTok, “day in the life” corporate content is surging, with more than 60,000 videos offering a glimpse into an industry traditionally defined by discretion. For some, like Allison Sheehan, the blend of corporate career and creative side hustle has proved difficult to sustain. Despite building a successful cake business alongside her role, her online presence was flagged as a reputational risk…errr yep.
Eve Upton-Clark, Make Way for the Investment Bank Influencers, The New York Times, 25 April 2026
Delayed adulthood is reshaping how young people think about insurance
Dunno about you but life insurance was something that only made sense when I had kids. But I had kids nearly a decade later than when my mother had them…. and this is a growing trend. All this means that there is a lower and therefore later uptake of life insurance amongst millennials. As life stages shift, financial products are struggling to keep up.
Thanks for reading,
Eliza