The First AI-Disrupted Generation: Inside Gen Z’s Collision With Automation
When Donald King graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2021, he thought he knew exactly what his career would look like. He had started a hedge fund in college and fully expected to carve out a long future in business or finance. Instead, only a few years later, he found himself on the front lines of a massive transformation he didn’t see coming.
King joined PricewaterhouseCoopers as an associate straight out of school. Within a couple of years, PwC began pouring $1 billion into artificial intelligence — and King saw his chance. He shifted into the company’s new “Global AI Factory,” working with PwC and OpenAI engineers to build autonomous AI systems, or agents, for Fortune 500 clients.
This wasn’t theoretical work. These agents were automating huge chunks of what entire consulting teams once handled. Inventory operations, accounts payable, and backend modernization — the work normally done by thousands of people. King was helping automate it with a handful of models.
He was proud of the innovation. He was also terrified.
“It was awe, shock, fear, and almost disgust,” he says. “Because that’s someone’s job.”
King and his teammates would occasionally stop, look at what they were building, and ask the question no one in Big Tech seems ready to answer: Are we automating away people’s livelihoods?
The Layoff No One Thinks Will Happen to Them
King worked grueling hours — 80 a week — but he enjoyed the prestige and the six-figure salary. He felt especially secure after winning first place in a companywide AI hackathon. He presented his model to 70,000 PwC employees. He thought the exposure would insulate him from layoffs.
Two hours later, he was fired.
PwC’s stated reason: “aligning our workforce to accelerate our business strategy.”
King saw it more clearly. The AI agents he built weren’t just replacing client jobs. They were replacing consultants — including him.
“I was feeding myself into the AI meat grinder.”
The First Statistically Significant Casualties
King’s story isn’t isolated. According to Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab, entry-level coders have already taken the first measurable hit from AI. Employment for young software developers has dropped nearly 20% over the past year.
Executives have openly admitted why:
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Klarna’s CEO says AI helped him cut 40% of staff.
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Salesforce’s leadership pointed to AI agents when justifying 4,000 layoffs.
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Accenture cited AI in an 11,000-person reduction.
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Lufthansa plans to eliminate 4,000 jobs as AI systems ramp up.
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Goldman Sachs is piloting AI that automates major chunks of software engineering.
AI didn’t just enter the workplace — it entered at the bottom rung. And Gen Z was standing right there.
“Should We Even Study This Anymore?”
During late-night conversations, King and his colleagues — many of them engineers — asked some existential questions:
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Should we even study computer science?
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Will our skills exist in 10 years?
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Am I protected from what I’m building?
Across industries, Gen Z is arriving in workplaces that openly question whether entry-level roles should exist at all.
A consultant laid off from Deloitte put it bluntly:
“What I went to school for is now just being automatically populated by AI.”
Even securing an interview requires beating an AI résumé screener using another AI résumé generator. Shopify managers now must justify hiring a human by proving AI can’t do the job.
And once inside the job? Many young workers are expected to adopt AI enthusiastically — even when it threatens them.
Anna, a 2023 liberal arts grad working in advertising, describes being told not to criticize AI.
“It’s so obvious I’m training something to replace me.”
The Disappearing First Rung of the Career Ladder
Even companies that promise “upskilling” rarely specify what happens after the upskilling. Many of the entry-level tasks that once taught workers how an industry functions — drafting, reviewing, formatting, compiling, summarizing — are now handled by AI agents.
Without entry-level roles, who becomes the next generation of managers? Who learns the unwritten rules of industries? Who gains the tacit knowledge that can’t be handed to an LLM?
This is the scenario many economists fear:
A labor market with no “on-ramp.”
“Be Smarter and Be Cheaper”
Some CEOs are blunt about what comes next. One founder, who stopped hiring junior coders altogether, told me:
“Our economy has a decent percentage of fake jobs that barely had a reason to exist. Why hire young employees who take up time and space? Be smarter around the new stuff — and be cheaper.”
Others echo Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s warning:
“You won’t lose your job to AI — you’ll lose your job to someone who uses AI.”
But that raises an uncomfortable question:
What happens when everyone uses AI, and the AI becomes the performer?
Robots Aren’t a Distant Threat Anymore
It’s not only white-collar work that’s transforming. Unitree — a robotics company now outpacing Boston Dynamics — is selling humanoid robots on Amazon. Other companies are racing to build humanoids for construction, mining, welding, and manufacturing work.
Amazon already deploys over a million warehouse robots and plans to double its output without adding workers — eliminating the equivalent of 600,000 future jobs.
The word “robots” has even been internally banned at Amazon. Instead, executives call them “cobots.”
The branding may soften the optics. The outcome doesn’t.
Gen Z’s Diverging Response
Interestingly, not every young worker sees automation as a crisis. Some have embraced the chaos with a kind of zen detachment.
As one laid-off engineer put it:
“I don’t want a career — that’s an identity. I just want a job so I can eat.”
After losing his tech job, he started washing dishes at Whole Foods and found more time for music.
But even that may not be safe forever.
When asked if Amazon could automate dishwashing, he shrugged.
“I’d just pivot again.”
What Happens If Entry-Level Work Vanishes?
This is the question policymakers and economists now consider the heart of the issue. If young people can’t get hired, they can’t gain experience. If they can’t gain experience, they will never become experts.
And an economy without experts eventually collapses.
Some propose solutions:
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Universal basic income
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Profit sharing
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Employee-owned companies
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Mandatory retraining
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Taxing companies for automated labor
But AI is moving far faster than policy.
As one economist told me:
“Gen Z is first where all of us are going to have to go.”
The Uncomfortable Truth
AI may not eliminate all jobs — but it’s already eliminating the beginning of many careers. The first rung on the ladder is cracking. And without it, the promise of upward mobility becomes a historical artifact.
Gen Z is the first white-collar generation forced to confront a new reality:
You can’t plan for a future that’s being automated as quickly as you train for it.