Jennifer Noel, Assistant Director, Media Relations and Social Media, Ernst & Young LLP, looks at how Gen Z relates to AI and the role it will play in future business.
Businesses and academia risk assuming that Gen Z students and employees (born 1997 – 2012) are ‘AI natives’ and must be mindful of Gen Z over-confidence in relation to artificial intelligence (AI) literacy. That is according to a new EY report developed with support from Microsoft and TeachAI, How can we upskill Gen Z as fast as we train AI?, which uses quiz-style questions to provide insight into the AI aptitude of more than 5,000 Gen Z respondents across 16 countries. The report also reveals that while Gen Z understands which products and tasks benefit from AI, their ability to critically assess the technology falls short.
In terms of AI adoption, the survey finds that the majority of Gen Z are using AI (61% are ‘varied’ users, verses 15% ‘super’ users and 24% ‘stragglers’). When it comes to aptitude, Gen Z respondents score best on questions about understanding AI, such as selecting which tasks and products commonly use AI (69% out of 100). But they are less confident in relation to questions that cover how to write the best prompts for AI (56% out of 100), and they score most poorly on critically assessing and identifying shortfalls, such as whether AI systems can invent facts (44% out of 100).
More reassuringly, scores show that respondents recognise the importance of hard and soft skills required for AI, ranking creativity and curiosity as the most important skills needed to use AI well (52%), followed by critical thinking (47%) and then coding / computer programming (46%). This lays the foundation for Gen Z’s perception of AI’s benefits and risks. Respondents view the greatest benefits of AI to be time saving on repetitive tasks, analysing large amounts of data and reducing human error, and they view the greatest risks as increasing unemployment, reducing human learning and creativity, and generating false information.
While many Gen Z use AI as a tool to help them learn, there is a disconnect between how AI is perceived in workforce and education settings ...
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