There's some new data from Gallup that Gen Z's AI adoption is quite steady right now, but they're becoming a lot more skeptical. And I've actually seen some interesting real life examples of this, which I would love to share. But Connor, I saw you talking a lot about this recently online. I'm curious your take on why you believe Gen Z is so skeptical of AI today. I thought this was a really cool thing because it lines, I love it when research like lines up with what sort of like feels intuitive. And Jaden, you know, my son, Finn is 17 now, junior high school, and he and I do a lot of podcasts together. He and I do a lot of we do keynotes together. He's like taught at like, you know, Harvard and some of that. It's pretty wild. And what we talk about all the time is there's there's this whole sense from the adults in the room, right? That like, oh, Gen Z loves this. Gen Z is great. Gen Z is amazing at this, all that kind of stuff. And so at AI Mindset, one of the things we do is we work because I'm on the board of the SHRM, if you know SHRM Foundation, and we do a lot with like how to hire today. So just to kind of like paint a quick picture here, what we see in HR, a ton of these, we work with like big Fortune 100 companies now, right? And at scale. And what we see is that they have to hire a ton of people. And if they're hiring somebody now with an old job description, that job is going to be out of date in like 18 months or something, right? So what we start talking to them about is you can't just hire somebody with AI skills. That sounds great, but the problem is it's sort of like hiring like an engineer to build out your lemonade stand, right? Your lemonade stand is just like sugar and lemons and water, man, and a card table. Like an engineer is not going to be able to help you. And all these people that they're bringing with quote-unquote AI skills are coming into old processes that haven't changed yet. And you can't just change all your processes overnight either. There has to be this balance. That's what we focus on with big companies or one of the things we focus on with big companies. And, Jane, it kind of goes to what's the viewpoint from the people who are trying to get hired? like the new entry level people. And what we're seeing a lot in this Gallup poll is also sort of really demonstrating, but Jaden, you and I have talked about it as we're both dads, is this idea that Gen Z starts off like excited, right? Because they're like, oh my gosh, I can now like write my paper on Hamlet in 20 minutes and I can, this is helping with calculus and these physics problems are now like, and not that they're cheating. I'm sure some people are, of course, but they're just like learning in a much better way. They're throwing everything. My daughter at 15 throws everything into notebook LM to learn every single night. I just hear her on podcasts that she's created, right? It's absolutely incredible. But here is the thing, Jaden. We are now, let's call it three years in, but like one year of data from Gallup, from one year to the next. They're like, yeah, this is going to be amazing. Yeah, this is awesome. And now they're like, oh no, this is amazing, right? And so what they're seeing now, they're not skeptical of AI because they think AI is bad. They're skeptical because it's good. And so these amazing stats are like 80% of Gen Zers believe AI tools are going to make it harder for them to learn. More now think that AI will hurt critical thinking than help it. These are numbers that are rising over the past year. More think it will hurt their ability to generate ideas than help. 3x are more likely to say that AI's risks outweigh its benefits. Why? Because AI is good, not because it's bad. And they've gone from this mentality of this is helping me in school to wait, who's going to hire me if this thing is getting so good? Jayden, that's the conversation that I think we should be having. I recently teaching a seminary class So I was asked a friend of mine this is what he does and he asked me to just substitute for him one day It basically like a church class where they um they they talking about um the Israelite kids or the Israelite people when Moses goes and he gets the 10 commandments. Um, and all the people start worshiping like a golden cow. Anyways, we're doing the lesson. I'm like, what are like golden cows today? Like, what are things that we shouldn't be doing? Whatever. It was some, some sort of variation of that. Anyways, one of the comments from there's just like 25 kids all giving their, their thoughts on it, all Gen Z students in this range. And one of them said, I would definitely say it's AI, like, I hardly ever use it. And I would recommend nobody ever uses AI, because whatever. Anyways, it was so interesting to me, because I feel like I'm in this like bubble today, where everyone I talk about, I mean, it's so exciting, all of the things that it can do. But you do forget that there are large chunks of the population. And there's a lot of jobs. And there's a lot of places where AI really does have a lot of negative sentiment, even in the general American public. If you look at like research polls, I mean, if you're not working with technology, using AI every day to level up, you feel like you're getting left behind by it. And so I think it's really important in the education piece, helping people understand how this is something you can use to give yourself back more time. I'm the worst person to us to to be an advocate for that in particular, because now that I have AI to vibe code for me, I now spend 16 hours a day vibe coding instead of instead of much less. But it honestly can automate so many elements of your job function, and so many things that you do. So there are so many benefits, but you have to learn how to leverage it properly and make that mindset shift to actually get the most value out of it. It was funny, because I mean, in that particular comment from the person, I was like, well, I don't know if I should tell him that like this whole lesson I have planned, I use Claude to help me like plan the whole thing. And this question that we're all asking, Claude came up with this idea. So I don't want to pop your bubble too much. But I do think it is really important. And as far as what it takes to get that mindset shift and to get the most value out of AI and to feel like you're not being left behind, especially inside of an organization, which is where a lot of our listeners are coming from. The number one way I would recommend you do that is to go check out Connor's AI mindset course on all of his curriculum that he has on his AI mindset website. There's a link in the description. Connor has some incredible contracts underway that I can't talk about publicly. But guys, oh my gosh, there are some companies that are seeing just such insane value. And I think especially with your report that you, you know, your partnership you did with the research with Microsoft, seeing how your course was able to double the quality of the outputs from people using AI after taking your course. This is something I'd recommend everyone take. But also most importantly, share with people around you that you would like to level up, whether that's your kids or whether that's people inside of your organization. I would just highly recommend people take this AI mindset course. And from your opinion, Connor, what are some of the things that need to shift or change for us to reverse these kind of pessimistic trends about AI? You know, you and I were just talking about this offline, Jaden, but and we were talking, we're sort of like brainstorming a little bit about, you know, how Jaden is partnering with this big organization. And what we what I've sort of seen from working with like these really big because and thanks for that plug, Jaden, but like, you know, we're starting to work with organizations that are, you know, 30,000, 40,000 people with a course that we roll out and platform that we roll out to everybody. And what we've seen is the biggest hurdle is obviously like not whether people are technical or not What we started to find over the last year is that your sort of like biggest enemies are like inside the organization So Jayden we think of it as like 20 60 20 right Like 20 of people are off and running Like they just, they see it, they get it. They're like, oh my gosh, 60% of people are what we call like the strollers or the walkers. They're like, they sort of like are like the stat patterns in the organization. They're the ones where when they say, hey, our organization has 80% usage. These are the people, right? Because they're using it like five times a week. Imagine, Jayden, if you could only use AI five times a week, right? It's like saying you can only use electricity five times a week. So choose wisely, right? Like that's not AI. That's a better search engine. So people are like, they're not really using AI. They just are using ChatGPT to figure out the weather in Chicago because they're going this weekend, right? So that's not really AI. So that's the 60% who are coming along, but they kind of get it. They're sort of like, all right, let's figure this out. And then you have 20% cheat. And 20% are the intransigent. We call them just the sitters. They're like, no, thank you. No interest in this. They wish AI never existed. every story that comes up that's anti-AI. They spread it around the office. They highlight all the things that AI has gotten wrong, how embarrassing it is, all that kind of stuff. So when we think about how we move people, this Gallup poll is showing that drift, right? It's showing people saying, not only is AI not becoming more popular as people realize, it's getting less popular and didn't start from a popular standpoint, right? So if you watch Bill Maher or something, I saw a little clip from him. He's like, oh, Anthropics is going to destroy the world. What Like that's how people are talking about it. So when we think about like when we're watching this data falling in Gen Z, who should be the most enthusiastic, that's scary. So what we do, Jayden, like we have a whole thing that we would leadership, right? From like Walmart on down. We've like worked with like the biggest leadership teams in the whole wide world, right? From Fortune 1s on down. And what we say, the number one thing, we have like four mandates of leadership, but number one is messaging. And the number one part of messaging, messaging has like three different components to it. But the number one thing is you have to address the fear in the room right away. If you start with, hey, everybody, we got to use AI, we're going to fall behind. That 20% will never start with AI. They'll never get off. They're just going to become more and more terrified. And we work with a big, a big private bank. In fact, we're now working with two big private banks in the year, like two of the biggest in the world. Sorry, I keep saying in the world, but they just are. And one of the things that we're saying is like what they find, like, because people keep saying, oh, if they don't use AI, they're out. Dude, do you realize like in a private wealth management firm, think of the biggest private wealth management firm in the world, ultra high net worth individuals. You can't even get in the door with less than 10 million to $100 million, right? You're going to tell those relationship managers of those places like, sorry, you're fired. You don't use it. They're bringing in billions. You can't just say if you don't use AI, you can't do it. So the number one thing is you have to bring those people along. And that has to come from messaging and it has to come from vulnerability. We say this all, it's very Brene Brown, but it has to come from you saying, hey, listen, guys, not you have to use AI, but more we're figuring this out together. AI is scary. I get it. Let's talk about this. It's that kind of approach, which I think is gonna be super powerful. I love that. And I think just the final thing I'll touch on is inside of an organization, what I think is absolutely key from a leadership side is how you're approaching AI and how you're rolling it out makes a massive difference to the sentiment inside of your organization But like you mentioned the sentiment and the enthusiasm gap leads to actually using it and action And so if you have an organization, right, let's say you have like a soccer team, and they're like a really pro soccer team, and you put in a new player. Soccer is probably bad because it's a team sport. And so intrinsically, when the team does better, everyone does better. This is a bad example. Let's say you have a marketing team, and everyone's really crushing it, or a sales team, even better. A sales team in your organization, everyone's really crushing it. You bring in an absolute rockstar sales guy that smokes everybody. He can 10x everybody else's sales. And while that's really cool because the whole sale department is technically selling more, the way the incentive structure in a sales department works is if he's outperforming everyone by so much, it kind of makes everybody else look bad. Is he going to be a popular person or an unpopular person? Unpopular with the salespeople, right? Now, what could he do? He could turn around and train everyone on how to be better and level up with him. All of a sudden, he would become more popular, right? He's bringing everyone up with him. And I think with AI, so often people kind of wave it like a magical hammer where it's like, this AI is better than all of you analysts. Right. Whack. It's going to take your job. No one, everyone feels like very, like they don't like that. They don't like the direction. They don't want to touch that hammer. They don't want to use that hammer because it's replacing them. Now, if you say all of you guys get this magical hammer, you're going to become 30%, 40%, 50% more efficient in what you do. It's making them look better. they're thrilled by it and your whole organization as a result grows from it. So hopefully that analogy was a good depiction. But I think you absolutely have to make sure that people feel empowered by this tool and not threatened by the tool. And if they feel empowered instead of threatened, your whole organization is going to see massive productivity gains. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It really is in the messaging, guys. Remember, if you know how to use it and other people don't, you can't just shout at them to use it. I can't tell you how critical it is. it's that curse of knowledge thing where you understand something and other people don't, and you can't understand why they don't. AI is the absolute pinnacle of that because it's so easy to use. It's like saying like, just eat healthier, just grab the salad instead of the cheeseburger. And yet here I am grabbing the cheeseburger every time. It's easy, but it's also hard. That is AI. And here's the thing, guys, like just remember when you are sort of like thinking about like, okay, so how do we do this in our organization? Or how do we do this? Even like, if you're trying to bring other people along, start with that vulnerability. Think about it like Brene Brown does like just like hey listen you know what i was struggling too like let's try this together let's start super super small never show people like this giant dashboard i built like just be like yeah let's kind of try to figure out a problem it's an exciting world when you can bring people along there's really nothing better uh guys listen um first of all jayden shouting out uh his seminary teacher just kind of shouted this out listen this is not gonna be for everybody not gonna be for everybody but we have a podcast me and jayden that we do for fun called ai and faith where we uh address like the big issues. Jaden, I've gotten more emails about this podcast that we do. And again, if that's not your thing, ignore everything I'm saying right now. But it's just a fun thing. There's no sponsorships or anything like that. We just like it's just important to both of us. So check it out, Jaden. I think we're trying to crack 10 reviews on that. We're trying to get people over there. But guys, over here on AI Applied, we love having you. If you would be open to leave a rating and review, it really does mean the world to us. It just, it helps it sort of like appear to more people on, on Apple and Spotify and everything else. So it means a lot to us. Thank you again for joining us and we'll see you next time.
