The Gen Z AI Doom Loop And The New Boomers
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI-Ready CMO
For the last decade, millennials have had a favorite villain: boomers. They bought houses when houses were affordable, locked in pensions that no longer exist, and are still occupying the senior roles the next generations were told they'd eventually inherit. Hogging the ladder, pulling it up behind them.
That is about to flip in the most ironic way.
The next generation getting accused of hogging the resources and blocking the people below them is going to be millennials themselves — still in their jobs, still in the promotions, just AI-fluent enough to stay put. And before you file this under "HR problem," note that the younger generation being squeezed out is also your future buyers and your future hires. How they feel about AI at work is how they'll feel about AI in your marketing, and your marketing department.
You can see this in two reports published last week, and they make much more sense read together. Gallup’s new Voices of Gen Z study surveyed more than 1,500 14-29-year-olds and found Gen Z’s relationship with AI souring fast. Excitement and hope are down sharply year over year. Anger is up. Nearly half of employed Gen Zers now say the risks of AI at work outweigh the benefits. And this isn’t skepticism that fades with exposure. Even daily users feel less positive than they did twelve months ago.
Writer’s AI Adoption in the Enterprise report, surveying 2,400 executives and employees, shows the view from the other end of the org chart. 60% of companies plan to lay off employees who can’t or won’t use AI. The reaction is that 44% of Gen Z employees actively sabotage their company’s AI rollout. Not just passively resisting but feeding proprietary data into unapproved tools, tampering with outputs to make AI look ineffective, or even refusing to use the tech on principle.
Executives see AI as leverage for headcount cuts. Workers see AI as a job threat and either disengage or sabotage the rollout. Executives take the sabotage as proof the workforce needs restructuring. Repeat. The resistance is accelerating the exact outcome that sparked it.
Which is how millennials end up as the unlikely winners here, not through enthusiasm, but through position. They’ve aged out of the entry-level roles getting automated first, aged into enough seniority that companies hesitate to cut them wholesale, and have just enough patience with the tools to clear the bar.
Survivorship is how you become the next generation everyone quietly resents.
But back to the marketing angle: Gen Z isn’t just your entering workforce, they’re your next decade of buyers. Gallup found they trust work produced without AI more than twice as much as AI-assisted work. Every AI-generated ad, every chatbot, every personalized email sequence is being received by an audience that is, on average, getting more suspicious of the category, not less. The assumption that exposure breeds acceptance looks shaky at best.
Which leaves an awkward question on the table for us building AI-forward marketing functions: are we building leverage, or are we building the thing our customers will eventually resent us for? The honest answer is that we don't know yet.
Just maybe, AI in marketing is about to become what outsourced call centers were in 2005 — a cost-saving move that quietly damaged the brands that overused it and quietly advantaged the ones that held the line. The winners of the last cost-cutting wave weren't the companies that outsourced best.
They were the ones that didn't.
— Torsten and Peter
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