AI and Work – How Young People Are Thinking About the Future

AI Young People and Work Full Recording 01052026 1004

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“I’ll use my passion elsewhere if it’s not wanted at work” Fernanda (30)

"In a week there'll be three more tools I need to learn. And two of the ones I've learned — you don't need those anymore." Noah (26)

"People aren't interested in their projects anymore... it was different only a year ago" Clara (25)

There is a prevailing narrative, generally blowing from Silicon Valley right across the world, that AI will imperil huge swathes of human work, especially affecting entry level and young workers. We hear a lot about this from Dario Amodei and Sam Altman and many others. Imagine being young, at the start of your working life or a short way into it, and hearing this discourse. Does anyone stop and ask what young people themselves are thinking?

Well, that’s what we have just done at Full Moon. Right from the start we have had as part of our mission a drive to engage students and younger workers with thinking about technology and humans. We sponsor a young artist every month to do our Full Moon illustration.

But this month, we took this imperative further. We went out and talked to 25 people aged between 18 and 30, hosting in-depth group discussions to find out how they are framing AI and the changing world of work. What follows is what we heard. We found it illuminating and think you will too.

It is not a simplistic story. The young people we heard from are excited, and fearful in equal measure. They have profound questions about how their personal knowledge will develop and how deep it can be. They fret about loss of culture and loneliness in organisations. The velocity of change is a given and energising, but keeping up is exhausting. The discussion is live and constant – at work, at home, in pubs. Most of all, where will meaning from their labour come from?

A quick word on methodology.

• This is not quantitative research and we are not putting it forward as statistically reliable. It reflects conversations with a small number of real – not synthetic - people all of whom are in, looking for, or expecting, white collar jobs.
• Ages span 19 – 30, which is a broad range with very different life challenges at either end. We had a good observable gender mix, slightly biased towards women.
• Contributors found via posts on Linked In and a request to Full Moon subscribers.
• A wide range of countries including Dubai, Chile, Netherlands, Spain, UK, US, Italy, Brazil, India, Germany. The highest representation was from the UK (four) but as you will see, the viewpoints expressed were remarkably consistent across the world.
• Note: some quotes are tidied mildly from verbatim.

So let’s be clear: what follows are pointers at how some people of this generation are thinking, which can be explored further. That said if we had to put money on it — and we have seen a lot of qualitative research like this in our careers — we’d bet our conclusions are not far off for most markets, and most young people trying to find or hold down white collar jobs.

We’ve divided this into two parts. In part one, we will run through what we heard, structured into nine key themes. In part two, let’s look briefly at what ‘experts’ — from frontier labs to academics — are saying about AI and work, to see if there are patterns there, and contrast these with what our research group are thinking.

The public discourse is pretty polarised - utopian vs. dystopian. Our participants are living something more complex — and arguably more truthful. And – plot spoiler – something major is lacking. 

PART ONE – THE TESTAMENT OF YOUTH

We spoke to over twenty young people in a series of six hour long conversations. They were broad-ranging and varied, but across them a series of key patterns emerged, and there were core refrains that we heard time and again.

These included concerns over the long term impact on learning of relying on AI, difficulty keeping up with the pace of change in LLMs and questions over whether AI augmented work culture would inspire them to bring their best to work. Taken together, the nine themes give a picture of the way young people are experiencing this moment with AI and work and envisaging the future.