For years, the future-of-work conversation was dominated by a fairly predictable set of questions. Would people work from home? What did Gen Z want from employers? How could organisations attract scarce talent? And how much flexibility was too much flexibility? Those questions haven’t disappeared, but they are being overtaken by a more consequential one: what happens when the technology changes at the same time as the workforce using it?
That is the challenge now facing HR and people leaders. AI is moving into recruitment, performance management, training, employee support and everyday workflows. Employers are beginning to expect AI literacy rather than merely encourage it. At the same time, a generation shaped by remote learning, social media, economic uncertainty and very different expectations of work is moving deeper into organisations. The result isn’t simply a new technology cycle or a generational shift. It is both at once.
My sense is that this changes the people agenda in a fundamental way. The organisations that navigate the next few years well won’t be those that automate the most HR processes or bend furthest to every new employee preference. They will be the ones that become much more deliberate about what machines should do, what humans still need to learn to do well, and what good leadership looks like when both are changing.
AI fluency is becoming part of employability
One of the clearest shifts in the research is how quickly AI capability is moving from an optional advantage to an expected workplace skill. The Wall Street Journal reported that Accenture had trained around 70% of its roughly 779,000 employees in generative AI fundamentals, with CEO Julie Sweet saying employees for whom reskilling was not viable would be exited. McKinsey & Company has begun considering how consultants make decisions with AI in performance reviews, KPMG assesses collaboration with AI in wider evaluations, and PwC has introduced AI training for new graduate hires.
That changes the psychology of AI adoption. For the first few years of generative AI, employees could reasonably treat tools such as ChatGPT as an experiment. Increasingly, that is no longer the case. LinkedIn job postings requiring AI literacy skills grew 70% in the 12 months to July 2025, according to data cited by the Journal. The emerging message from employers is not simply that AI may change your job. It is that your willingness and ability to work with AI may increasingly affect whether you get the job, how you are assessed once you have it and which opportunities come your way.
But there is an important trap here. Mandating AI use is much easier than building AI capability. The same Journal reporting noted that more than 40% of US workers who didn’t use AI said the main reason was that they didn’t believe it could help their work. The issue, in other words, isn’t always resistance to change. Sometimes people have been given a tool without a convincing use case.
For people leaders, this means AI literacy can’t be reduced to prompt training. Employees need permission to experiment, examples of where AI genuinely improves work, clarity about where it should not be trusted, and time to redesign workflows rather than simply bolt a chatbot onto the old ones. The skill that matters may be less ‘Can you use AI?’ and more ‘Can you make good decisions about when and how to use it?’
Recruitment is becoming an arms race
Nowhere is the tension clearer than hiring. Candidates are using AI to write CVs, tailor applications, prepare for interviews and, increasingly, assist them during interviews themselves. Recruiters are using AI to screen, rank and communicate with those candidates. In some parts of the market, it can feel as though the bots are applying to be interviewed by other bots.
There are real benefits. Axios reported SHRM data showing that 65% of HR professionals surveyed were using AI at work, compared with 45% of the broader workforce. Among HR professionals using AI, nine in ten were relying on it to generate job descriptions or screen applicants. Australian recruiters interviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald similarly described processes that once took days being completed in minutes.
There is also emerging evidence that AI can sometimes outperform traditional approaches. In research highlighted by The Wharton School professor Ethan Mollick, an experiment involving around 70,000 applicants for customer-service roles in the Philippines found an LLM voice recruiter produced 12% more job offers and 18% more starts, with one-month retention 17% higher. That is significant. But it doesn’t settle the question of whether machines should run recruitment.
The risks run in the opposite direction. Automated screening can struggle with unconventional career paths, transferable skills and people whose experience doesn’t happen to match the language in a job description. Australian reporting has also highlighted concerns about opacity and discrimination in automated hiring. And as candidates use more AI themselves, recruiters face a different problem: a polished application is becoming a weaker signal of actual capability.
That may produce an unexpected outcome. The more automated recruitment becomes, the more valuable genuinely human evidence may become. Employers will need better ways to see how someone thinks, communicates, responds to ambiguity, builds rapport and exercises judgement. The CV may become easier to produce. The human behind it may become harder, and therefore more important, to assess.
The next skills gap may be surprisingly human
This matters because some of the research on younger workers points to a second challenge. A 2026 report on workplace anxiety cited almost half of Gen Z respondents experiencing anxiety around workplace interactions such as meeting new people, making small talk and picking up the phone. A separate Wall Street Journal report described parents becoming involved in adult children’s job searches and workplace issues; in a Zety survey of more than 1,000 Gen Z respondents, 20% said a parent had attended a job interview with them.
It would be easy to turn those findings into another round of Gen Z bashing. That would miss the more useful point. Many younger workers spent formative years studying remotely, interviewing over Zoom and entering workplaces where face-to-face interaction was less frequent. At the same time, digital communication has made it possible to avoid many of the uncomfortable interpersonal moments through which previous generations developed confidence.
If that is even partly true, employers face a choice. They can interpret a lack of confidence as a character flaw, or they can recognise that some capabilities now need to be developed more deliberately. Giving difficult feedback. Handling disagreement. Speaking to a stranger. Reading a room. Asking for help. Recovering after an awkward conversation. These have always been workplace skills, but we rarely called them skills because people acquired so much practice almost by accident.
AI raises the stakes further. If a machine can draft the email, prepare the presentation, summarise the meeting and suggest the answer, employees may get fewer repetitions of the very tasks through which judgement is built. The leadership challenge is therefore not simply to make people more productive. It is to ensure productivity gains don’t quietly remove the experiences people need in order to become capable.
The office argument is becoming less binary
The same nuance is needed in the debate about where people work. The old argument tended to divide people into pro-office and pro-remote camps. The evidence is becoming messier. Employers are increasing pressure for attendance, sometimes through what the Wall Street Journal calls ‘hybrid creep’: linking visibility to advancement, improving attendance tracking and allowing unwritten expectations to do some of the work of formal mandates.
At the same time, younger workers aren’t uniformly demanding full-time remote work. Other research in the source material suggests Gen Z can place considerable value on being around colleagues, even while wanting flexibility and strong boundaries. That makes sense. The office can be inconvenient and socially demanding, but it is also where a great deal of tacit learning happens: overhearing how an experienced colleague handles a client, watching a manager navigate conflict, or being pulled into a conversation you didn’t know you needed.
The more useful question for leaders is therefore not ‘How many days should people be in?’ It is ‘What is worth coming in for?’ If the office simply recreates a day of individual video calls at a different desk, attendance will feel performative. If it provides access to coaching, collaboration, social connection, visibility and learning that are genuinely harder to reproduce remotely, its value becomes easier to understand.
Employee experience is becoming observable data
Another shift deserves more attention: AI isn’t only helping employees do their jobs. It is increasingly watching, interpreting and coaching how those jobs are done.
Burger King, for example, has been developing an AI assistant called Patty that sits inside employee headsets. It can answer operational questions, draw on information across restaurant systems and assess whether customer interactions include markers of ‘friendliness’, such as saying please and thank you. The company describes it as a coaching tool. Meanwhile, Axios reported on HR platforms capable of joining meetings, taking notes, drawing on workplace data and nudging managers about goals and performance.
There is obvious potential here. A manager can’t observe every customer interaction or remember every commitment made in every meeting. AI can surface patterns that humans miss. But the line between coaching and surveillance can become thin very quickly. If employees know every interaction may become a data point, leaders need to be exceptionally clear about what is being collected, why it is being collected, who can see it and what decisions it can influence.
This may become one of HR’s defining governance responsibilities. The technical question is whether an AI system can measure something. The leadership question is whether it should.
Gen Z is also changing what employees can contribute
There is a tendency in conversations about younger workers to focus on what they lack. The research also points to capabilities organisations can use more intelligently.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Starbucks, Delta Air Lines and other employers are recruiting staff to create social-media content about life at work. Starbucks selected 53 baristas for its Green Apron Creators program, while Delta brought a group of frontline employees to its Atlanta headquarters to develop employee-generated content. What was once the kind of behaviour employers worried about is, in some organisations, becoming a recognised capability.
That is an instructive shift. Younger employees don’t merely arrive with different expectations. They arrive with different native skills, networks and cultural instincts. The challenge for leaders is to distinguish between behaviours that need development and capabilities that should be harnessed. Good people leadership has always involved both.
The bargain between employee and employer is being renegotiated
This brings us to perhaps the most important change. The psychological contract around work is shifting.
Deloitte’s 2025 global Gen Z and Millennial Survey found that long working hours and inadequate recognition were among the strongest contributors to workplace stress for younger employees. Randstad research in the source material found 44% of Gen Z workers said their current role didn’t align with their dream career, 37% regretted their sector choice and 54% regularly browsed for new roles. At the same time, three in five said they would take a job that didn’t align with their personal values if the pay and benefits were strong.
That last finding is worth noticing because it complicates the stereotype of Gen Z as purely purpose-driven. Economic pressure matters. Career opportunity matters. Recognition matters. Flexibility matters. Values matter too, but not in isolation. Younger workers are making trade-offs just as every generation has, only under a different set of economic and technological conditions.
This is why simplistic generational labels are such a poor management tool. Leaders need to understand cohort-level patterns without turning them into assumptions about individuals. A 24-year-old employee may want flexibility and more face-to-face mentoring. They may care about purpose and still take the better-paid job. They may be highly capable with AI and deeply uncomfortable making an unexpected phone call. Contradictions aren’t evidence that the research is wrong. They are evidence that people are complicated.
The job of HR is moving upstream
Taken together, these trends suggest that HR is becoming less about administering employment and more about designing the conditions in which humans and machines work together well.
Recruitment becomes a question of how to combine algorithmic efficiency with human judgement. Learning becomes a question of building AI capability without outsourcing thinking. Hybrid work becomes a question of designing environments where people actually learn and connect. Performance management becomes a question of deciding which new data is useful and which is intrusive. Generational leadership becomes less about accommodating preferences and more about developing capability while recognising that the workforce has changed.
None of this makes the human side of leadership less important. I suspect the opposite is true. As more of the mechanics of work become automated, the quality of judgement around those mechanics becomes more consequential. Leaders will need to be clearer about expectations, better at coaching, more thoughtful about development and more transparent about how technology is being used.
For a long time, HR technology promised to make people management more efficient. AI can certainly do that. But efficiency is only part of the brief. The bigger opportunity is to use this moment to become more intentional about the capabilities, experiences and relationships that make people valuable in the first place.
The workplace of the future won’t be built by choosing between technology and humanity. It will be built by getting much better at knowing where each belongs.
Michael McQueen is a globally recognised trend forecaster, change strategist and keynote speaker.
A bestselling author of 10 books, Michael’s latest release was named by Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant as one of the top five must-read new leadership books. He is a sought-after media commentator, with his insights regularly featured in Forbes, The Guardian, and CNN.
To find out more about Michael and his work, click here.
NOTES
Lindsay Ellis, “The Boss Has a Message: Use AI or You’re Fired,” The Wall Street Journal, November 8, 2025. Reporting on Accenture, IgniteTech, McKinsey, KPMG, PwC, Concentrix, Multiverse and LinkedIn AI-literacy hiring data.
Ashley Gold, “How AI Is Changing the World of HR,” Axios, December 5, 2025. Includes Society for Human Resource Management data on HR adoption of AI and discussion of human oversight for consequential employment decisions.
Konrad Marshall, “AI Recruitment in Australia: How Automated Hiring Is Changing Job Hunting,” The Sydney Morning Herald, August 29, 2026. Reporting on automated screening, recruiter use of AI, applicant authenticity and discrimination risks.
Ethan Mollick, LinkedIn post discussing the study “Voice AI in Firms: A Natural Field Experiment on Automated Job Interviews,” August 19, 2025. The post reports an experiment involving roughly 70,000 applicants and outcomes for offers, starts, retention, gender discrimination and applicant satisfaction.
Ella Nunn, “Gen Z Has ‘Workplace Anxiety’. Here’s What Employers Need to Do,” The Sydney Morning Herald / The Telegraph, March 7, 2026. Reporting on anxiety around workplace interactions, remote work, resilience and interpersonal development.
Callum Borchers, “The Stealth Tactic Bosses Are Using to Get You Back to the Office,” The Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2025. Reporting on ‘hybrid creep,’ attendance tracking, visibility and office-attendance trends.
Allison Pohle, “The New, In-Demand Job Skill: Being a TikTok Influencer for Your Company,” The Wall Street Journal, December 2, 2025. Reporting on employee-creator programs at Starbucks, Delta Air Lines, Portillo’s and other employers.
Emma Roth, “Burger King Will Use AI to Check if Employees Say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank You’,” The Verge, February 27, 2026. Reporting on Burger King’s AI-enabled BK Assistant and employee coaching functionality.
Deloitte, 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, 2025. Global research on workplace stress, recognition, growth opportunities, leadership and well-being among Gen Z and millennial employees.
Randstad, The Gen Z Workplace Blueprint: Future Focused, Fast Moving, 2025/2026. Research on Gen Z career alignment, engagement, job search behaviour, values, AI and retention.
The Wall Street Journal, “Helicopter Parents Are Co-Piloting Their Adult Children’s Careers,” August 3, 2026. Includes a Zety survey of more than 1,000 Gen Z respondents and reporting from HR professionals on parental involvement in hiring and employment.
Sydney Lake, “Suzy Welch Uncovered the Reason Gen Z Seems Unhireable: Their Workplace Values Don’t Match Their Gen X and Millennial Bosses,” Fortune, September 2025, syndicated by MSN. Used cautiously as an example of debate around intergenerational workplace values rather than as a general characterisation of Gen Z.
