A New Harvard Study Reveals Why Some Young Workers Turn AI Into Results—and Others Don’t

When people talk about AI and entry-level jobs, they usually fret about the threat the tech embodies to workers just starting to climb the career ladder. But while these youngsters are noted for being tech-savvy, and are often relied on for their skills as the first “digitally native” generation, many are reportedly deeply skeptical about AI. When you look around your workplace, you’ll see some who are excelling at leveraging it to make their job faster or better, while plenty more are struggling. New research in the Harvard Business Review may help you get a handle on this and bring all your young workers up to the same speed. The new study centered on why some junior staff seem to do so well when using AI to further a company’s goals, and yet others don’t. It turns out the best differentiator between young workers who excel at using AI and those who don’t isn’t the individual AI skills the workers have. Instead it’s more about how each worker tackles their tasks that matters. This runs counter to all sorts of narratives about AI literacy levels and what specialties young workers bring from their higher education. Some young workers, for example, have the AI skills but fail to use them in a way that delivers value for their employer. Others can appear competent, because they know how to rely on AI’s core systems to get to a deliverable answer, but they’re actually hiding their foundational business knowledge weaknesses. Meanwhile, here’s what sets successful young AI users apart: According to the study, the best users combine their “strong domain knowledge, critical thinking, and AI literacy” into every step of using AI to complete a task, including initial queries, shaping the outputs, and then delivering the required product. It’s a holistic skill, rather than a collection of shallow abilities. The business researchers note that it makes perfect sense for business leaders to prioritize hiring entry-level workers for their critical thinking skills and AI literacy. But because their study found “employees with similar levels of foundational skills and knowledge can generate dramatically different outcomes when working with the same AI agent,” savvy companies may rethink this policy. The problem is that being AI-savvy isn’t the same as knowing how to use an AI tool to solve a tricky business problem. Here’s what you can do The study suggests that company leaders keen to get all their young staff using AI in the most productive way possible should worry less about what their workers know, and instead train them in a way that emphasizes “how employees frame problems, interrogate AI outputs, refine results, and integrate insights into decisions.” Essentially, instead of taking it on trust that your Gen-Z and Millennial staff know what they’re doing, you need to actually teach them best practices. This involves leading them step-by-step through prompting an AI with first thoughts, evaluating its replies, tweaking what they’ve asked it, and incorporating the output into meaningful products. Then, when you give them an AI tool to use, it should translate into more meaningful impacts for your company. There’s another piece of advice: The researchers say companies should treat AI learning as “an ongoing development model rather than a one-time training intervention.” This probably holds for training older employees, too. Personalizing this training to plug up an individual’s skills gaps is an even better idea. And to really nail the solution, companies could actually embed AI learning into the tasks and decisions that workers face each day. Why all this matters AI boosters promote AI as being able to save companies time, effort and money—no matter what individual AI tools are designed to do, they all have this overall goal. These promises are why this tech is ubiquitous. But you can’t just “fire and forget” AI, nor can you assume that Gen-Z workers will just immediately master the tech, in the same way you wouldn’t trust them to run your PR office just because they’re already proficient with using TikTok or Instagram for fun. You need to train your young workers on an ongoing basis, ensuring that you work out where they’re strong and weak on knowing how to use AI in an impactful way, and plugging gaps through learning. The same goes for older staff too, especially if you’re hoping that the young Gen-Z whippersnappers will help drag your Gen-X workers into the AI era. BY KIT EATON @KITEATON