AI is making hiring tougher. Former Meta and Salesforce executive Clara Shih says AI has created the worst entry-level job market in 37 years. New graduates are entering a workforce where every job is an AI job. Shih has launched a non-profit, the New Work Foundation, to help Gen Z for a future dominated by AI agents.
Why is Gen Z struggling to find jobs?
Shih is not new to AI. In fact, she has been in the industry for almost 20 years, but the turning point for her came last year, after seeing Meta’s AI agents match and even surpass some of her top employees across multiple tasks, as per a report by Fortune on 26 April.
“In that moment I knew that nothing would ever be the same,” she told Fortune. “You feel radicalised in that moment when you see it working.”
At the same time, she noticed that the children of friends and family, including Ivy League graduates, were finding it “practically impossible” to land jobs.
Shih believes the only way forward is to arm the incoming workforce with the exact technology threatening to replace them.
“If you want to find a job and if you want to keep your job, you need to learn how to get really good at using AI agents,” she told Fortune.
How Shih is working to help Gen Z find jobs
To help Gen Z prepare for the AI-driven workforce, the New Work Foundation has launched several AI-enabled tools under a consumer-facing brand called Dear CC.
One of the tools launched is called Field Report. It offers job seekers a look at the current state of their preferred career path. For example, a user looking into a career in law will see that while there are 31,500 open roles in the US with low competition, the risk of AI automation in that specific field is very high.
Another tool launched by the foundation is called JobClaw. The AI agent is designed to help job seekers find roles based solely on their strengths and interests. The tool requires no résumé, and users can simply fill out a five-question intake form detailing who they are and what they actually want from a career.
A Gallup survey found that Gen Z’s excitement and hope around AI have plummeted, while anger around the technology has risen. The poll found that while excitement around the technology dropped from 36% to 22% over the last year, anger rose from 22% to 31%, while anxiety around it remains at 42%.
However, Shih believes that the very people rejecting the technology are the ones who are most critical to its safe evolution.
“The people who have moral objections to AI, those are actually the people that I want involved, making sure that we steer these systems in the right direction,” Shih said.
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