{"id":6901,"date":"2026-05-22T02:32:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T02:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/?p=6901"},"modified":"2026-05-22T02:32:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T02:32:15","slug":"business-school-professor-says-ai-could-eliminate-many-jobs-for-young-people-even-as-they-lead-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/?p=6901","title":{"rendered":"Business school professor says AI could eliminate many jobs for young people\u2014even as they lead innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Artificial intelligence has inspired visions of a near-utopian future: cures for cancer, breakthroughs in space, and even a world where money matters less. But the people who will experience that future the most may also be the ones most harmed by it now.<\/p>\n

Speaking at Fortune\u2019s Workplace Innovation Summit on Wednesday, Jeff DeGraff\u2014clinical professor of management and organizations at the University of Michigan\u2019s Ross School of Business\u2014admitted young people are increasingly driving the newest forms of innovation\u2014often outside traditional corporate structures.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cLook to young people, they\u2019re creating federations of meaning, they\u2019re trying to cure river blindness in these loose affiliations, they\u2019re creating walkways for animals,\u201d he told Fortune C-Suite and Leadership Editor Ruth Umoh. \u201cThey\u2019re doing things outside the traditional industrial structure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet despite their desires to transform the world toward a bright future, DeGraff said society has failed to adequately prepare young people for the AI transition.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve sort of given the short end of the stick,\u201d he added in the panel titled What High-Innovation Teams Do Differently. One of the most glaring examples, he said, is how companies are deploying AI: primarily for efficiency.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s going to eliminate a lot of opening jobs,\u201d DeGraff said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to eliminate a lot of that first staircase for young people, which is concerning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rather than fueling breakthrough innovation with young people, he added that much of today\u2019s corporate world has been focused on doing things \u201cbetter, cheaper, faster.\u201d<\/p>\n

DeGraff\u2019s warnings come as many early-career workers are already facing a cooling labor market. According to the latest data analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 5.6% of recent college graduates aged 22 to 27 are unemployed, compared with 4.2% across all workers. Moreover, data from early-career hiring platform Handshake found that job postings are down 2% as compared to last year\u2014and down 12% from pre-pandemic levels.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gen Z need to follow the innovation to find success, business professors say<\/p>\n

But not all hope is lost for Gen Z job seekers. Instead, young people might have to think about the companies that are eager to foster innovation\u2014and take advantage of their digital-native skillset.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think there\u2019s a lot of innovation theater that goes on,\u201d DeGraff added. \u201cIn a lot of the larger corporations, what happens is that they let more boundary-based organizations\u2014smaller organizations that cannot compete on scope or scale to do the innovation\u2014and they acquire them, so that\u2019s usually part of the basic problem until they run into an inflection event that requires them to change.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, while big companies may lack innovation cultures, startups often provide the creative environment young workers need to develop their skills.<\/p>\n

Once they land at those innovative companies, however, young workers will need to stand out. In the same panel, Sheena Iyengar, the S.T. Lee Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, offered insight into how to be a successful innovator. It starts, she said, with a better problem-solving approach.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs Einstein put it, \u2018If I had an hour to save the planet, I\u2019d spend the first 55 minutes thinking about the problem, and the last five about the solution,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cMost people get to solutions way too fast.\u201d<\/p>\n

Iyengar emphasized understanding critical questions like, \u201cWhat is that pain point? Why does that pain point exist? What are going to be the barriers?\u201d<\/p>\n

Solutions, however, need to be genuinely innovative. Iyengar joked about the marketplace now offering over 100 different shades of white paint as an example of meaningless differentiation.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s face it, all of us have tons of ideas, and with ChatGPT, you can have a lot more ideas and that any given idea is worth less than maybe a penny today,\u201d Iyengar said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the key has to be generating more meaningful options. Yes, you want more choice, but you don\u2019t want them to be minor variations of each other. They should be meaningfully different, and I think that\u2019s true, whether you\u2019re looking at the marketplace or whether you\u2019re looking at your organization.\u201d<\/p>\n

#Business #school #professor #eliminate #jobs #young #peopleeven #lead #innovation<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Artificial intelligence has inspired visions of a near-utopian future: cures for cancer, breakthroughs in space,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[245],"tags":[272,636,637,12716,7302,641,3086,310,910,12717,1693,12715,2148,643,624,12469,4407,3788],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6901"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6901\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}