Young people have grown increasingly skeptical of artificial intelligence, even those who use it daily, according to a new Gallup poll of more than 1,500 people aged 14 to 29.
There is no decline in AI use among Gen Zers, but there is also no increase since the same poll was conducted in 2025. The latest poll found that AI use was plateauing among young users, accompanied by rising concern about the technology’s consequences.
The findings are significant because Gen Z is “the generation most likely to enter or grow within the workforce over the next decade,” the report notes, meaning that their adoption could determine the trajectory of broader societal AI adoption. Gen Z has already overtaken Boomers in the workforce. Right now, the AI world is preparing for a massive jump in expected demand, and the top tech and financial companies are investing billions upon billions of dollars into building out the supply. Experts have warned that if demand does not pan out exactly as expected in the short term, then it could have disastrous consequences for the economy.
It doesn’t matter because the companies are mandating their workforce to use it regardless if you like it or not. For personal use, yes interest may be waning, but wanting to use AI is not a factor when you are being forced to use it at work.
Enterprise is really the only option companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have left. They’re drastically underpricing the service for what it costs to provide and users have shown that price hikes don’t fare well.
But enterprises? Well you just made AI a core part of your software development workflow, what are you supposed to do, start manually reviewing bitbucket merge requests? Rewrite your Jenkins pipelines? No, when the price hikes come, businesses will pay, and then downsize to reduce that opex.
I’m thinking that eventually the corporations will all be AI all the way through and control even more than they do now.
Small business and normal people will still do a lot of the work by hand because they will be priced out.
But I also suspect there might be a good market for hand crafted code similar to other hand crafted goods. Some people will prefer it.
If the entire software industry mandated AI, I would either create some kind of startup, or just reeducate myself into some other field, like landscaping or something. Because fuck AI.