Gen Z, and younger generations, are getting a bad rap. The rise of ChatGPT and other AI tools have brought on complaints that students and young employees rely too much on AI to do everything from completing homework to writing emails.
Yet Kiara Nirghin, a Stanford technologist and Gen Z entrepreneur, sees Gen-Z’s comfort with AI as an asset. “The younger generation isn’t adopting AI, we’re growing up fluent in AI,” she said at Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Nirghin, who co-founded Chima, a U.S.-based applied AI research lab, explained that young entrepreneurs see coding as something to be done alongside AI agents, rather than done alone and from scratch.
AI “fundamentally changes how you write, how you take tests, [and] how you apply to jobs or different applications—because it’s not from the ground up. It’s actually being able to do that with different models or agents, side by side,” Nirghin said. AI fluency sets Gen Z individuals apart from their older peers, allowing them to pioneer use cases and applications of AI that have yet to be unlocked, she explained.
Some experts have argued that AI has eroded our critical thinking abilities. A 2025 study by researchers from MIT’s Media Lab found that users of ChatGPT “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.”
But Nirghin argued that this isn’t always true.“ The biggest misconception is that young people are using AI to not think things through, [but] I think that really intelligent Gen Z individuals are using it to think even deeper,” she said.
The entrepreneur pointed to how running complex research reports through AI could generate insights they may not have thought of otherwise—hence allowing users to get a fresh perspective.
Moving with the AI models
AI isn’t just for the young, however, and Nirghin stressed the technology’s ability to help workers at all levels of their careers. “We’re [only] at the beginning. It is only going to get faster, more advanced and more intelligent each and every model from here on out,” said Nirghin.
She likened AI anxiety to climate anxiety—in that it stems from humanity’s fear of not moving fast enough to stay ahead of the game.
“In the past couple of weeks, [there’s] been two model releases that have engulfed the benchmarks in such an enormous way that pretty much everything you’ve ever used AI for can now just be 10x-ed,” Nirghin explained.
And to avoid being left behind, workers can familiarize themselves with “main model players” like ChatGPT and Gemini, and learn to use them as co-pilots and tools in everyday life. By continuously using the newest AI models, users will be more comfortable with the new technology, and thus lose their anxiety, she said.
“The models right now are as dumb as they are ever going to be, [and] a couple months down the line, we are going to be in a very different landscape. Being able to be really comfortable with that, and having your core tools that you use and get comfortable with is really important.”
