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đŻ What 88% of Gen Z and Millennials are doing with AI at work
+ the skill AI canât fake (yet) and how you can become AI-first in 2026.
Max Haining
December 14, 2025
Thereâs a strange feeling people (myself included) seem to be having lately. A mix of panic and excitement watching something you used to do..get done.
Earlier this week, a friend tagged me in this tweet. It captures something a lot of AI education organisations struggle with:
An education company that does itâs job literally creates new human capital in the form of inventors, designers, musicians, engineers, doctors, founders.
Learning alone isnât the outcome people are actually looking for anymore. A lot of what we call âlearningâ right now is optimized for exposure like reading, watching, summarizing, and staying up to date. But thatâs not the same thing as becoming capable.
You can understand a tool and still hesitate to use it. You can finish courses and still not trust your own judgment when something actually matters.
AI has made that gap much more visible.
Window into the future đŽ
What actually changed at work
A recent WARC piece pulled together research from Google, BCG, and others to explain that AIâs biggest impact at work isnât speed as many of us might think.
A huge percentage of people, 88% of Gen-Z and Millennial managers, use AI to overcome task paralysis. While most organisations are still treating AI like a future project and debating roadmaps, employees are increasingly using it as a way to start, often on their own. BCG data shows more than half of professionals would use AI at work even without official support.
Creation got cheap. Judgment didnât.
Anthropicâs own research shows that even inside AI-native companies, most people still delegate only 0â20% of their work to LLMs. And thatâs not because AI canât do more but because knowing whatâs good is still hard to outsource.
A lot of code now looks right and docs look polished but figuring out what âlooks rightâ and âwhat is rightâ is where the work went. And that gap is not showing up in demos but later when someone has to clean stuff up. So basically everyone's using AI, but most of it is just vibes. Itâs vibe strategy. Vibe marketing. Vibe decision-making.
Last week, I wrote about why so many professionals hide their AI use at work. I also talked about taste: knowing when to use AI, when not to, and how to evaluate what comes out. This week feels like the other half of that conversation.
When creation is cheap and judgment is scarce, confidence doesnât come from tools but from practice. If you missed that issue, we also broke it down into a short LinkedIn carousel.
What this looks like in practice đ ď¸
One of the clearest examples inside 100 School is Harold. He walked into my first cohort as a paying non-technical student four years ago. He didn't think he could build anything. He now leads our bootcamps.
This year he ran 22 cohorts. 600 students. 186 live sessions.
That's the loop. You walk in one person. You walk out another. And eventually, youâre helping others do the same.
The one session I'd send to anyone who wants to close this year out with a real plan for 2026 âď¸
Harold and Ciara are hosting the last Lightning Lesson of the year this week. Itâs a free live session they designed to help you see what it looks like to go from using AI to becoming someone who builds with it.
Things to read/ try this week â
Before you go âď¸
2025 was the year everyone started using AI.
2026 is the year we find out who actually became something because of it. Let's make sure you're in the second group.
Cheers!
Max đ
P.S. Want to make your team & company AI-first? Let us help here.
