Gen Z Doesn't Hate AI. They Hate Being Treated Like a Cost Center.

The technology was never the question. What you decide to do with your people is. And they can already tell which way you are leaning.

By Lázaro (Laz) Fuentes, Founder & CEO, SQOR.ai

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Forbes ran a piece this week arguing that Gen Z has turned on AI, and that their skepticism is quietly stalling enterprise adoption. I have read a lot of pieces like it now, and they all get this generation wrong in the same way. Here is what I think is actually going on.

Picture the stage. A young woman crosses it to collect the degree she spent four years and a small fortune earning. Behind her, a famous man at a podium is explaining that artificial intelligence (AI) will touch every job she will ever hold.

And she boos him. Not a heckle. Not a stunt. A verdict.

It happened to Eric Schmidt at the University of Arizona this spring. To Gloria Caulfield at the University of Central Florida. To Scott Borchetta at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU). Different stages, different speakers, the same shiny future being sold, and the same room full of graduates who decided they were not going to clap for it.

The press coverage filed it under fear. Gen Z is scared of the robots. Look closer, because that story does not hold.

This is the most AI-fluent generation that has ever lived.

They reach for these tools before they reach for a manager. They use AI more than millennials, more than my generation, more than anyone drawing a paycheck today. You do not boo the thing you use all day because you are afraid of it.

So it was not fear on that stage. It was something colder and more accurate than fear. It was judgment.

Here is the pair of numbers that unlocks the whole thing.

In one enterprise survey this year, 43% of Gen Z came back as AI power users, the highest share of any generation at work. In that same survey, 44% admitted they were quietly sabotaging their own company’s rollout. Feeding the system bad data. Skipping the training on purpose. Turning in work they knew was weak so the tool would look weak wearing it.

Read those two numbers again. Same generation. Same technology. Opposite hands.

The only thing that changed between the 43 and the 44 was the story each of them was told when the tool landed on their desk. One group heard, this is going to make you formidable. The other heard, this is going to make you unnecessary. Both believed it. Both behaved accordingly.

People do not sabotage what makes them stronger. They sabotage what they can feel is aimed at them. And this generation can feel it from a mile off.

They grew up watching their attention sold and their work swept into models nobody asked them about. So when a company rolls something out and calls it progress, they have learned to ask the quieter question first. Progress for whom.

Now stand where nobody in this story thinks to look.

There is a manager in the middle of all of it, probably a millennial, and she is being pressed from both sides at once. Above her, leadership wants proof the AI budget is earning its keep. Below her, her best young people are already halfway out the door. Most of her Gen Z hires will be gone inside a year. A third are quietly planning the exit. She lit neither fire. She just has to stand in the room where they meet and hold her team together with her bare hands.

And the twenty-three-year-old on that team is not imagining the threat. Goldman Sachs went and counted. AI has been erasing a net 16,000 jobs a month, and the deepest cuts land on the entry level, on exactly the jobs that used to teach a young person how a business actually breathes. Someone sawed the bottom rung off the ladder, then wondered aloud why the kids will not climb.

So no. The booing was not a tantrum about technology. It was the right answer to a bad offer.

And here is the part that should stop every leader cold, because it turns a matter of conscience into a matter of money.

The cutting does not even work.

Gartner studied 350 enterprise companies already deep into AI implementation, each of them past a billion dollars in revenue. Eight in ten had already trimmed their workforce. Not one of them showed better returns for it. The ones that cut the hardest performed about the same as the ones that barely cut at all.

The companies pulling ahead were not the ones shrinking. They were the ones empowering their employees with AI.

Which brings me to the only frame that has ever made sense to me.

At the risk of admitting I enjoy a superhero movie more than a man my age probably should, I think about what turns a Tony Stark into an Iron Man all the time given what we’re doing here at SQOR.

On his own, Tony Stark is a brilliant, quick, funny man with a funny-looking goatee. That is the whole of him. Impressive, and bounded, same as the rest of us.

Then enters Jarvis, and the suit that is really just Jarvis made mobile. Same man. Same mind. Everything about him amplified now. Jarvis never replaces Tony Stark. Jarvis does not want his job. Jarvis (the AI) is the thing that makes Tony Stark into Iron Man.

That is the entire choice in front of you, and notice that it is not really a choice about AI at all. It is a choice about people.

You can treat the person on your team as a cost to be removed, and use this technology to remove them. Or you can treat them like a Tony Stark and hand them the thing that turns them into Iron Women / Men. The analyst who waited three weeks for a report gets to just ask the question. The operator who always had to hunt down the one data-fluent colleague finally holds that power in her own two hands. You took no one out of the loop. You raised the ceiling on what they could do inside it.

One of those roads ends with people who would run through a wall for you. The other ends with 44% of them quietly feeding bad data into your expensive new system, and a graduating class booing you off the stage.

The generation everyone keeps calling a problem has already decided which kind of company is worth a life. They are not confused. They are the signal.

So build the company they are trying to tell you to build.

And when you do, think bigger than the size of your headcount. The reflex of the moment is to shrink the pie for one clean quarter. The braver move, and it happens to be the smarter one, is to grow it. That is not a poster on a wall. When Ramp and Revelio Labs studied nearly 22,000 companies, the ones that used AI to expand instead of replace grew their entry-level ranks by 12%. When it gets cheaper to make what you make, the smart money builds more of it. It does not fire the people who know how.

There is one catch nobody warns you about. You cannot grow a pie you cannot see. You cannot stand in front of a board and defend a bet on a feeling. Empowerment is not a mood. It has to show up in the numbers, traceable and out loud, or it is just one more slogan on the way to one more round of cuts.

That is the quiet work we have poured our years into at SQOR. Handing the people you already have the clarity to make a sharper decision today than they could yesterday, every answer tied back to the truth of your own data.

Not to replace your Tony Starks. To give them the suit.

If that is the company you want to lead, whether you are the Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Financial Officer (CFO), or the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) carrying this mandate, or one of the people carrying it for them, come see what sqor.ai looks like inside your own systems.

The graduates on that stage already know which kind of leader is worth clapping for. Be that one.

Data should empower people. Not replace them.

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Lázaro (Laz) Fuentes is the Founder and CEO of SQOR Technologies Inc. He is a three-time founder, a former turnaround specialist for private equity and venture capital portfolio companies, a former investment banker on Jamie Dimon’s team at Salomon Brothers and Smith Barney, and a retired United States Army Infantry Company Commander in the 10th Mountain Division. He takes trains, reads too much, and occasionally writes things longer than they need to be… And is a two-time Gen Z dad and one-time Millennial dad.

Sources:

• Tim Keary, “Generation Z Aren’t Sold On AI, And It’s Limiting Enterprise Adoption,” Forbes, June 22, 2026.
• Gartner, “Autonomous Business and AI Layoffs May Create Budget Room, but Do Not Deliver Returns” (Helen Poitevin), May 5, 2026.
• WRITER, 2026 Enterprise AI Adoption Survey (43% super-users / 44% sabotage).
• Goldman Sachs on AI job displacement (~16,000 net jobs/month, entry-level hardest), Fortune, April 6, 2026.
• Ramp / Revelio Labs on entry-level headcount +12% at high-intensity AI adopters, TechCrunch, June 29, 2026.
• TriNet, 2025 State of the Workplace (1 in 3 Gen Z plan to switch within 6 months).
• Randstad, 2025 Gen Z Report (1 in 3 plan to change within a year).

Originally published on LinkedIn.