AI adept Gen Z colleagues leading workplace mentoring says EY tech boss

They are decades younger and less experienced, but Gen Z’s quick take-up of AI means they will be ‘reverse mentoring’ more senior leaders...and maybe even taking over the top jobs.

Gen Z’s quick uptake of AI is having a major influence on the workplace. Picture: iStock

Generation Z are changing the way work is done across the country through their quick adoption of AI, leaving their boomer bosses and colleagues behind.

Those born between the years 1996 and 2012 are adapting to the technology faster than any other cohort, according to the EY Future Consumer Index Report on AI.

EY’s chief technology officer Katherine Boiciuc said the generational shift, which many tech experts have long forecasted, was now becoming a reality.

“What we’re noticing in our data is that there is actually a proficiency gap between generations, and so it’s no longer something that we hypothesise about – it’s now fact,” she told The Australian.

“We have four generations in the workforce, two generations are really using AI and feel very confident with it, yet the people that are able to influence decisions, investment, prioritisation and breaking through by making strategic choices on AI are potentially not actually using it.”

Gen Z’s quick uptake would begin to change the way the older generations worked, as younger more technology-proficient workers influence new AI systems and tools.

“I think that we will start to see a large reverse mentoring or intergenerational mentoring programs,” Ms Boiciuc said.

“We’ll start to see Gen Alpha and Gen Z team members reverse mentoring more senior leaders in the organisation on how they are using AI to transform the way they work.”

Ms Boiciuc was commenting on the back of EY’s index which found that Gen Z’s AI comprehension had more than doubled over the past 12 months, from 14 per cent to 33 per cent.

Part of the growing divide in the adoption of AI could be put down to the speed at which the technology was developing. Picture: iStock.

Millennials were not closely following their young counterparts, with a comprehension rate of just 18 per cent while Gen X and Baby Boomers had 10 per cent and 6 per cent comprehension, respectively.

Baby Boomers appeared to be the least interested in improving their skills, with their comprehension rate not rising at all over the past year.

“The reason why I think this data is important is because it shows that most of the decision makers in this country are probably of those two generations and those generations have remained flat in the last 12 months,” she said.

Across workplaces more broadly, about 71 per cent of respondents claimed to have some understanding of AI, up from 67 per cent in October last year. That finding could relate to the slower or lack of adoption from Baby Boomers, as not all of the Gen Z cohort are of working age – with the youngest just 12 years old.

Part of the growing divide in the adoption of AI could be put down to the speed at which the technology was developing and the vast difference in digital environments.

“I think we all know that Gen Z and Gen Alpha were born into a digital generation so they start with the tech and work backwards and then consider the implications of what they can do,” Ms Boiciuc said.

“They’re much more comfortable being messy with the tech and learning through failing and through attempting whereas the older cohorts are much more likely to wait for advice.”

The issue was much broader than just the adoption by employees. Ms Boiciuc said Australia’s AI economy risked falling behind other countries.

“We know that chief executives and boards that don’t look at AI strategies risk falling behind those that do,” she said.

“I think it actually comes back to the environment that we have with technology in Australia and AI. We have 544 AI start-ups in this country but there’s an investment gap. Across the Australia landscape we have invested roughly $500m. The US market has invested $67bn.”

EY’s own AI tool, called EYQ, was a knowledge database that was accessible by all staff members. Gen Z employees who had become quick adopters of the database were now influencing how everyone accessed it.

Those with successful prompts were having theirs published in an internal library and sometimes engineers were adjusting EYQ to provide responses to those prompts, Ms Boiciuc said.