Every job is an AI job now. That’s at least how Clara Shih sees it. The former AI exec at Meta and Salesforce, has seen the future of the job market, and it’s a workforce fully enabled by AI.
Shih has worked in AI for 20 years. But the turning point came for her last fall when she saw Meta’s AI agents match and even surpass some of her top employees across multiple tasks.
“In that moment I knew that nothing would ever be the same,” she told Fortune. “You feel radicalized in that moment when you see it working.”
Around the same time, Shih was hearing from the kids of friends and family members—some of whom are Ivy League graduates—about the impossibility of landing a job. That’s why she launched the New Work Foundation, a nonprofit organization, with consumer-facing brand Dear CC, aiming to train Gen Z for a future workplace dominated by AI agents.
“I realized that the only way to help people keep up with the pace of AI was to give them AI tools,” said Shih, who is no longer head of business AI at Meta but is currently an adviser there. “Because if you use the traditional ways…it’s just not fast enough to keep pace with how quickly AI is advancing.”
AI has progressed at a breakneck pace, quickly transforming from a fun gadget used to draft emails and generate cat memes into a sophisticated tool that now threatens to displace a sizable chunk of white-collar workers.
As a result of that swift development, Gen Zers today find themselves in a bind. The threat of AI-related layoffs, combined with a slowdown in entry-level job openings, has many rethinking their career choices. According to a recent ZipRecruiter report, many are exploring alternatives to the corporate ladder, including entrepreneurship, gig work, and trade school. Still, Shih believes there is a way forward for recent graduates.
“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 said.
How Gen Z can use AI to get hired, promoted, and future-proof their career
That sentiment echoes what’s already playing out in the office. A recent survey from AI enterprise platform Writer found that employees actively using AI in their day-to-day tasks are more likely to earn a promotion or a raise than compared to employees refusing to adopt the tech.
To help Gen Z develop and prepare for the workforce in the AI age, the New Work Foundation just launched several AI-enabled tools. One of them is called Field Report, which offers job seekers a glimpse into the state of their preferred career path.
Looking into a career in law, for example, shows there are 31,500 open roles in the U.S., but while competition is low, the AI automation risk is very high.
The foundation also has an AI agent called JobClaw to help job seekers find roles based on their strengths and interests, no résumé required. All you have to do is fill out a five-question intake form about who you are and what you actually want out of a career.
As AI evolves, so too will the labor market. Some business leaders, like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believe the technology will disrupt half of the white-collar workforce. But others, like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang foresee the technology working alongside human workers, even enabling more hiring.
Whether or not Gen Z chooses to adopt AI, Shih said the future of work is moving ahead without them.
But as adoption grows, many Gen Zers have soured on the technology. A recent Gallup poll found that Gen Z’s sentiment toward AI has grown significantly more negative compared to a year ago. But Shih said those who are rejecting the technology are actually some of the people most critical to its 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,” she said.
