A New Survey: Gen-Z is Most Worried About AI Taking Their Jobs

The generation that grew up digital is the most worried about AI taking their jobs. That's not ironic — it's diagnostic.

Randstad's annual Workmonitor report, released this week, surveyed 27,000 workers and 1,225 employers across 35 markets and analyzed more than 3 million job postings. The headline: four in five workers believe AI will impact their daily tasks. Gen Z is the most concerned generation. Baby Boomers are the least worried. And job vacancies requiring "AI agent" skills have surged 1,587% year over year.

Read that last number again before moving on.

The Anxiety Is Rational, Not Performative

The easy narrative here would be to frame Gen Z's concern as anxiety-prone catastrophizing — a generation raised on algorithmic feeds projecting doom onto their career prospects. But the data doesn't support that reading. The concern tracks reality.

Gen Z entered the workforce precisely as generative AI began doing credibly good work in the roles they were hired to fill: writing, research, customer service, data entry, content creation, and basic analysis. These are not abstract threats. They are the actual job descriptions on the offer letters Gen Z has been signing.

Baby Boomers, by contrast, are largely insulated by seniority, relationship capital, and roles that require institutional knowledge AI hasn't absorbed yet. Their confidence isn't wisdom — it may simply be a matter of distance from the problem.

Randstad's CEO Sander van 't Noordende put the underlying dynamic plainly: workers are "enthusiastic about AI, but may also be skeptical in the sense that companies want what companies always want — they want to save costs and increase efficiency." That's not fear-mongering. That's an accurate description of how capital allocates in a downturn.

The 1,587% Number Deserves Its Own Paragraph

The surge in job postings requiring AI agent skills isn't just a curiosity among the workforce. It's a signal about which way the tide is moving. Companies aren't looking for workers who can tolerate AI tools. They're looking for workers who can manage, configure, and deploy AI agents — systems that themselves do the work of the roles being cut.

This creates a bifurcation that's happening faster than most career development models can track. On one side, roles in low-complexity, transactional work are being replaced by automation. On the other: roles managing and building the automation itself. The gap between those two categories is widening, and the workers in the middle — competent, trained, experienced at execution — are the most exposed.

This echoes what PwC's global CEO survey found at Davos this month: only 12% of companies are seeing real AI returns, yet 42% of CEOs cite the pace of technology transformation as their top concern. The investment is running ahead of the strategy, and workers are absorbing the uncertainty while the strategy catches up.

What This Means for Teams and Leaders

For anyone managing people, this data carries a direct responsibility. The workers on your team who are most skilled and most engaged are also — if they're paying attention — the ones most aware of how quickly their role is changing. Ignoring that awareness, or offering platitudes about "AI as a tool not a replacement," without concrete development investment, is a trust erosion risk that will show up in retention before it shows up in performance.

The career path disruption is real. Randstad's report notes that the traditional apprenticeship model — entry-level workers learning through the execution of basic tasks — is being compressed by AI, which automates exactly those tasks. That's not a distant structural shift. It's happening in hiring decisions right now, as companies weigh whether to backfill junior roles or buy software subscriptions instead.

For growth leaders building teams, the answer isn't to avoid AI tools in the name of workforce protection — that just delays the reckoning. It's to build AI literacy and upskill your organization before the gap between your team's capabilities and your tools' capabilities becomes a crisis. The companies that will win the talent competition over the next three years will be those that made AI transition a management priority, not an HR footnote.

Gen Z sees it coming. The question is whether the organizations they're joining are willing to look too.

Winsome Marketing helps growth leaders build teams and strategies ready for the AI transition — not just the AI tools. Let's talk.