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The AI natives are coming

ARTICLE | November 1, 2024

The AI natives are coming 

Companies must prepare for the AI-native generation graduating from college and expecting AI and other advanced tech to be an everyday part of their jobs

By Evan Ramzipoor, Workflow contributor

While employers are thinking about what they can automate to get the most out of the technology, many should also be thinking about how to capitalize on the skills that today’s students and tomorrow’s workers—a burgeoning generation of AI natives—will bring to the world of work, says Andrew Maynard, a senior global futures scholar and professor at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University.

In contrast with older analog and digital natives, AI natives will know how to take advantage of collaborative technologies such as generative AI (GenAI) and be comfortable operating in mixed-reality (virtual reality and augmented reality) environments, says Maynard. The pressing need now is for business leaders—i.e., those older analog and digital natives—to figure out how to make use of these skills and the people who will have them in the years to come.

At the same time, Maynard stresses that human creativity will be increasingly important as technology advances. “What is clear to me is the ability to think and adapt and creatively use tools as they change is about to become very important for the workplace,” he says.

AI and similar tools are changing the way we work faster than ever before, and the tools themselves are changing. As a result, AI natives will need to have the flexibility to adapt and use these tools with resourcefulness, skepticism, and an open mind. “We’ve got to give them the ability to think on their feet, to change direction, and even to play,” says Maynard.

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While AI natives are about to transform the workplace, they’re already changing the classroom. Since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the world in November 2022 and teachers soon afterward predicted it would herald the end of education, educators have come to realize it’s a bit more nuanced, says Matthew Glasser, a professor and communications director at Arizona State University who serves as a member of the Los Angeles County Office of Education AI Task Force. “Educational decision-makers know they need to train their students and staff and faculty on it,” he says. “But they’re not sure what that means yet.”


In fact, there is a split in the way educators are approaching this training, says ASU’s Maynard. Some educators are being forced by administrators to shoehorn ChatGPT, or other chatbots, into their lesson plans with zero training or guidance, or to come up with policies on the fly to deal with students using ChatGPT to complete their assignments. Others are focusing on the students rather than the tools, training them to use any technology—including GenAI—with a healthy attitude about its limitations. The result will be a generation of AI natives who are similarly split, warns Maynard. Some will know how to creatively collaborate and take advantage of these latest technologies, whereas others won’t be able to leverage these tools beyond their simplest uses and won’t have the healthy skepticism of them that they deserve.

One out of three college seniors—and more than half of tech majors—plans to use GenAI in their career.

Instead of shying away from the challenge by forbidding students from using AI, a host of colleges—including Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—now offer classes on GenAI. These classes represent an attempt to tip the balance in the direction of creativity and skepticism. Maynard, who taught one of the earliest college courses focused entirely on how to use ChatGPT, says these courses are crucial for preparing the next generation to get the most out of this technology while using it ethically. Maynard’s syllabus for his Introduction to Basic Prompt Engineering using ChatGPT includes exercises designed to help students engage with the tools effectively and responsibly, by asking good questions and thinking critically about what the system produces.

There are early signs that this strategy—helping students engage with GenAI rather than asking them to avoid it—seems to be working. Sam Baker, an undergraduate student at Indiana University in Bloomington, first encountered ChatGPT in a media studies class. “AI was a recurring theme,” she says. Her professor led students in a discussion about how to use it responsibly, and they experimented with ChatGPT to see what kinds of outputs they got back based on specific prompts. “AI doesn’t always get it right,” says Baker. Seeing the potential for errors made her more skeptical about using it for her coursework.

This emerging AI native group understands the limitations but also expects these technologies to fundamentally change the way work gets done. Half of college students set to graduate this year say they will develop new skills because of the emergence of GenAI, according to a survey of 1,148 class of 2024 college students by student-focused jobs site Handshake.

The report also reveals that one out of three college seniors—and more than half of tech majors—plans to use GenAI in their career, while 20% indicated they’d be more likely to take a job where they could experiment with GenAI.

Some are already doing just that. When Madison DaValle joined ServiceNow as a public relations intern during college in 2021, she never expected to use AI and low-code development tools to build apps. But then DaValle saw how her team fielded a steady stream of press release requests via Word docs, emails, Teams, and Zoom calls. To streamline the intake process, she built an app using AI-augmented, low-code tools. “We saw a business need for it, and it was really easy and cool to do,” she says. “There was a big push around being a citizen developer, so I was able to access the training I needed to get it done.”

Giving employees the chance to experiment with technologies in the workplace is hugely important both for their own development and for the business. Looking forward, employers should foster opportunities to help their employees become “internal entrepreneurs,” who can take big, bold ideas and make them profitable and effective using technology, says ASU’s Maynard. As technological innovation accelerates, more employers will seek workers with such an entrepreneurial spirit.


To make the most of these entrepreneurial workers—and to attract AI-native talent—employers should create better employee experiences immediately, says Kim Thomson, product and solution marketing lead for HR Service Delivery at ServiceNow. To that end, employers must acknowledge that their employees might know more about what it takes to create a great experience using the latest technological tools than they do. “This new generation is intuitively going to know best practices for GenAI, better than many of us who have been in the workplace longer,” she says.

That means asking what tools workers need to get things done and making sure they have them. Such feedback and flexibility will prove increasingly important in the years ahead. “ChatGPT hasn’t yet changed everything because we haven’t thought of everything,” Thomson says. “But the next generation will.”

Employers should foster opportunities to help their employees become ‘internal entrepreneurs,’ who can take big, bold ideas and make them profitable and effective using technology. — Kim Thomson

To keep up with these advances, workers will need support from their employers to constantly retrain and upskill. Fortunately, employers are starting to prioritize this. The share of job descriptions that mention professional development support, such as learning stipends, has more than doubled in recent years, according to the Handshake report. And half of this year’s college grads report being more likely to apply for a job that provides such resources, the report found.

“It’s hard to stay on the cutting edge, because the cutting edge is moving so rapidly,” says Maria Ott, professor of education at the University of Southern California. “But I don’t think we should be afraid of that, or throw up our hands and say, ‘We can’t do it.’” Instead, schools and workplaces should be bringing people together to discuss paths forward and how best to serve the AI natives who stand to benefit from these new tools.

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Author

Evan Ramzipoor is a writer based in California.

Articles by Evan Ramzipoor