Gen Z founder on ‘AI anxiety’ and being pigeonholed as generation shortcut: ‘biggest misconception’

While older generations view AI as a tool to be adopted, Generation Z views it as a native language, said Stanford computer science graduate and fellow Peter Thiel. However, this fluency comes with a unique burden: “AI anxiety” about keeping up with technology that is currently considered the “worst” of all.

Speaking at Fortune Brainstorm AI in San Francisco, Nergen addressed the tension between Generation Z’s perception and their reality as builders. “The reality is that the younger generation is not embracing AI,” she said. “We have grown and mastered artificial intelligence.” This distinction is crucial in the workplace. While a manager might see an employee using an AI agent as a tool to get things done, Nergen said she sees a shift in the structure of the work itself.

“We don’t think about programming from scratch,” she explained. “We’re thinking about programming with a side-by-side cryptographic agent.” She said that Generation Z is not just a short generation, they are pioneers.

“This fundamentally changes the way you write, how you take tests, and how you apply to different jobs or applications, because it’s not starting from the ground up,” Nergen said of working alongside an agent. “I think what that really means is that this broad level of use cases and applications that we’re seeing is actually being pioneered by the younger generation.”

The “lazy” versus deep thinking myth

One of the most widespread criticisms of digital natives is that reliance on large language models (LLMs) erodes critical thinking skills. Nergin strongly rejects this. “I think the biggest misconception is that young people are using AI so they don’t think things through, and that they’re using it as a shortcut,” she said.

Instead, Nergen said, savvy users take advantage of these tools to offload cognitive work so they can explore complex topics more intensively. It’s not as simple as handing over the “cognitive load” to an AI model, she said, but rather about thinking “differently… and even “deeper” about a specific topic, because the agent is taking hours of menial work off your hands.

For example, she points to conducting in-depth research reports on financial markets that could take hours to prepare manually. By automating this work, she said the user is free to analyze the effects rather than just collect data. “What does it unlock for you?” she asked the audience, urging them to think about how much they could do with these tools at their “fingertips.”

Anxiety about endless improvement

Nergin said that her generation faces a terrible reality that people do not appreciate: the relentless speed of obsolescence, and their awareness of this fact. Concerns about artificial intelligence have some similarities to “climate anxiety,” she said. Noting that some of her early research was on climate change, she explained climate anxiety as the idea that “there’s a climate change movement coming and we don’t really know what to do but we know it’s coming and no one is moving that fast to solve the problem.”

It is linked to the realization that current technology, as impressive as it may seem, is primitive compared to what will come next. “Models today are as stupid as they will ever be,” Nergen warned. “It will become faster, more advanced and smarter, in every model from now on.”

This creates a pressure environment for Gen Z workers, where staying ahead of the curve is a daily requirement, she said. Nergen noted that recent model releases have “swept up standards in a massive way” as previous capacities can now be increased “10x” overnight – imagine coming to work tomorrow, and being able to produce 10 times what you were yesterday. If a worker isn’t keeping up with these updates, “you’re kind of falling behind.” The fear is not in taking too many shortcuts, but in not knowing every path and every update to get to that 10x number.

Taste like the new IQ

If intelligence is turned into a commodity through exponentially improving models, what is the new measure of human value? According to Nergin, it is “taste.”

Nergen, whose background includes working in human-centered AI labs at Stanford University, argued that standards around accuracy no longer capture what makes a product successful. She cited the example of programming agents who, without human guidance, might uncontrollably add “flashing emojis” to the front-end user interface because they “like” certain design tropes.

“You know something is being coded if you’ve ever worked with a coding agent,” she joked. The difference for the future workforce will not be the ability to create code or text, but human-centered judgment to determine what users actually want to see. “As models, use cases and efficiencies change, the main difference is taste,” Nergen said.

Nergin’s advice extends beyond her peers to the older generations she currently manages. “AI fluency is just as important for people already in the workforce,” she stressed, urging them to arm themselves with tools like ChatGPT or Gemini to be daily “co-pilots.”

Ultimately, Nergen said she views the rapid development of artificial intelligence not as a threat to employment, but rather as an adaptation challenge. Whether it’s automating back-office processes or launching “deep search agents,” the economic “lift” these models provide is truly incredible, even if they never get better again. But persistence anxiety is the new price of admission to the future of work.