GenAI Replacing GenZ
The boundary lines between different named generations are a bit fuzzy but the goal should always be to draw the boundary at an event significant enough to create substantial behavior changes in the new generation worthy of consideration in strategy formation.
I believe we have arrived at such a point and that it is time for GenZ to cede the top of strategy mountain to a new generation I call Generation AI (GenAI).
The dividing line for Generation AI falls around 2014 and the people of GenAI are characterized by being the first group of people to grow up not knowing a world without easy access to generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools that begin to transform their interactions with our institutions and each other.
We have already seen professors and teachers having to police AI-generated school essays, while the rest of us are trying to cope with frighteningly realistic deep fake audio and video. But what other impacts on people’s behavior will we see as a result of the coming ubiquity of artificial intelligence?
It is important to remember that generative artificial intelligence is not really artificial intelligence but collective intelligence informed by what we the people have contributed to the training/reference set. As such these large language models are predicting the next word or combining existing content based on whatever training set they are exposed to. They are not creating original thought.
Generative AI is being built into nearly all of our existing software and cloud tools, and GenAI will grow up only knowing a reality where every application and web site they interact with will have an AI component to it. Generation AI will not know a time where they cannot ask an AI, in the same way that GenZ relies on social search, and Gen X and Millenials assume search engines hold their answers.
Our brains are changing to focus more on processing and less on storage. These changes make us more capable, but more vulnerable too.
This new AI technology represents a double-edge sword and its effects could fall on either edge of the sword in different areas:
