As Gen Z asserts itself in the workplace, the writing is on the wall for app providers who don’t give them what they want.
Just ask Spenser Skates. “They just won’t use something if it’s not the way they expect,” says the cofounder and CEO of digital analytics platform Amplitude.
His company sees that clash firsthand as its younger employees grapple with training on Salesforce, an early B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) product. “It’s getting long in the tooth in terms of its usability,” says Skates, whose clients include Ford, NBC, and Walmart.
For Salesforce, Oracle, and other legacy B2B SaaS players, times are changing—fast.
“I’m a millennial, and so it’s like, ‘Okay, you’re expected to read the manual,’” Skates tells me from San Francisco. Gen Z? Forget it. “You’ve got a few seconds to go do the thing, or that’s it and they’re out.”
There’s an obvious explanation for Gen Z’s behavior. “They’ve grown up with [smart]phones and tablets, and this is the expectation that software is easy to use and being trained on all of these consumer-side apps,” Skates says. “And so now that they’re entering the workforce for the first time, it’s like, ‘Hey, that better be the experience as well.’”
One consumer app has shaped that mindset more than others. “TikTok, in particular, has absolutely nailed where they allow you get to what you want super quickly,” Skates says. “You don’t even think about having to learn it, or set it up, or anything else. You just start using it.”
Skates points to Slack, collaborative design tool Figma (which rival Adobe tried to buy for $20 billion), and connected workspace Notion as examples of “modern” workplace apps with the same sensibility. Amplitude, which helps clients use customer data to improve their products and services, recently launched an easy-to-use version of its analytics tool.
“If you don’t build software this way, you’re going to be dead,” Skates predicts. “It’s all about, how do you create a great user experience?”
For app developers seeking to build trust with Gen Z workers, Skates shares a few pointers on delivering such an experience.
First, don’t overwhelm users with too much content and too many options, he says. “You’ve got to put the most important thing front and center.”
Increasingly, that emphasis on simplicity sees workplace apps conceal bells and whistles. “It’s hidden behind menus and other stuff so that the default experience isn’t like that,” Skates says.
The app should be fast too. “Switching between content, the stuff better happen quickly and you don’t have to have a lot of clicks to get to your content.”
Native collaboration is another key feature. “Being able to have something where you can interact with a coworker live on a web app like that, that’s a really big one,” Skates says.
And be sure to sweat the design details. For example, over the past five years, navigation menus for web apps have moved from the top to the left, Skates notes. “That actually makes it easier to navigate through.”
The good news? None of this is rocket science.
“If you just take a bunch of these principles that these great consumer apps have done, you’re already ahead of 90% of the rest of the industry,” Skates says.
But when it comes to Gen Z, app developers must still do their homework.
“Go talk to them, watch them use the software,” Skates urges. “You’re gonna find all sorts of crazy things about what they think or what their intuition is.” Yet Skates still sees companies build software in a vacuum rather than get people to use it during development. “If you don’t,” he warns, “you’re cooked, you’re done, you’re left out.”
Skates’ No. 1 piece of advice for business leaders who want to win Gen Z’s trust? Download TikTok, which offers a window into their “different” mentality.
“Authenticity is really, really important,” Skates says. “A lot of the corporate formality, they just hate.”
At ease.
Nick Rockel
nick.rockel@consultant.fortune.com
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Storm warning
It’s a tragic wakeup call for any business that doesn’t trust employees to use their own best judgment. After Johnny Peterson and several colleagues at Impact Plastics perished in the flooding caused by Hurricane Helene, his family filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the company. It alleges that workers in the small Tennessee town of Erwin were forced to stay on the job—even when managers knew they faced danger. Impact’s excuse for making staff show up that stormy day, according to the suit: It “wanted to meet order deadlines.” Enough said.
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In tariffs Donald Trump trusts. During a recent appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago, the Republican presidential candidate stumped for slapping them bigly on foreign goods. In Trump’s view, tariffs would not only fill government coffers, they’d also shield U.S. companies from overseas rivals and prompt foreign companies to open factories in America. Many economists disagree, calling tariffs a tax on consumers that would fuel inflation. That won’t sway Trump, who could soon get a chance to put his plan in motion.
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TRUST EXERCISE
“Utter the word ‘regulation’ in certain tech industry circles, and you’ll feel an immediate chilling effect. Fears about stifled innovation, burdensome costs, and curtailed growth are typical responses from skeptics concerned about government overreach.
However, the EU, keen to position itself at the vanguard of tech regulation and as a champion of individual rights and consumer protection, pays little attention to such concerns.
The implementation of the EU’s AI Act is the most recent in a series of laws emanating from Brussels that have divided opinion, hot on the heels of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) which came into force in 2018 and 2023 respectively.
As expected, the AI Act is receiving a lot of attention and, once again, there are concerns. Will promising European AI startups be able to shoulder the costs of the new regime? Will overregulation put EU businesses at a disadvantage to American and Chinese competitors? Will Europeans be deprived of new AI services from abroad, as international businesses opt against rolling out their new AI services because compliance costs are deemed too high?”
Great questions, Bob Goodson. But as it turns out, the founder and president of QUID comes to praise AI regulation, not to bury it. That’s hardly an obvious reaction from the leader of an AI-powered consumer and market intelligence firm. What gives?
In a nutshell, regulation is working. Goodson should know, having scaled a company through implementing the GDPR and the DMA. With its emphasis on transparency, the AI Act does much more good than harm, he argues. After all, AI won’t get far unless people trust it. And the EU legislation isn’t asking for the moon. Does anyone really object to disclosing that content was AI-generated—or designing AI models to stop them from generating illegal material?
To protect people’s rights and safety, Goodson calls for a risk-based approach to deploying AI. Where AI systems in health care need tough testing and checks, for instance, those in video games would face far lower hurdles.
Goodson also makes the case for “regulatory sandboxes” that would let companies try out innovative new tech in a controlled environment. He’d like to see governments create policy and regulation that play to their countries’ AI strengths too. Finally, to build trust, Goodson urges better public education on AI’s benefits, uses, and impact. Some intelligent suggestions.
