Gen Z is graduating into a labor market reshaped by AI pilots, hiring freezes, and jittery managers.
That doesn’t mean a jobs cliff is imminent, said James Ransom, a research fellow at University College London, who studies the impact of AI on work.
But it does mean the rules of entry into the job market are changing fast — and the smartest move isn’t to chase prestigious titles, he said, but to understand the tasks inside those jobs, then show how you can supervise and scale AI to do them more effectively.
“I do think in the short term there’s a potential productivity dividend, or a windfall that people need to be trying to grab,” Ransom told Business Insider.
“That doesn’t mean that you just wholeheartedly embrace AI for the sake of it. It does mean critically looking at what it might do — particularly things where a human is still needed in the loop, but they might be able to be supercharged in what they do,” he said.
Audit the work, not the role
Ransom’s thinking builds on research from global institutions, including the IMF, OECD, and the World Bank, which have mapped automation risk by breaking jobs into their component tasks.
Ramson specifically pointed to an International Labour Organization report released in May.
It found that few jobs are fully automatable, since most include tasks that require human input — a nuance Ramson said is often lost when people label entire jobs as either secure or doomed.
“You look at these indices and, you might say, ‘Okay there’s a job here, senior accountant, where eight out of nine tasks are potentially exposed,'” he said.
“However, when you start to look closely, you see that the ninth one that’s not exposed is managing a team and quality checking. That’s pretty indispensable, so that doesn’t mean this one is necessarily at risk,” he said, clarifying that this is a hypothetical example.
Ransom said the key for Gen Z is to demonstrate AI fluency.
“Your typical organization does not have people who understand what an LLM is, what its strengths or limitations are,” he said.
He said that for younger workers, this era favors those who can show their skills through measurable impact.
“Particularly where you can point to actual gains or time savings,” he said.
“Whether it’s X number of outputs that you achieved or time saved, accuracy, and how then that can be replicated — where you’ve got a playbook,” he added.
The human advantage
Ransom sees the present AI rollout as a brief window of opportunity before the real disruption begins.
Companies are still in an “augmentation” phase, he said, where people can use AI to boost productivity — but that could eventually give way to “a crunch” as automation matures and headcounts shrink.
He compared it to the ATM era, when banks initially hired more staff before reducing their workforce once the technology took hold.
The same cycle, he said, may now be unfolding across white-collar industries: firms hire to experiment, expand, then trim the excess.
The pace of that shift, he added, will be uneven, hitting local labor markets and industries at different speeds.
Even as he studies automation risk, Ransom rejects both utopian and dystopian narratives.
“I certainly don’t think we’re heading towards a tech utopia where everyone lives happily ever after,” he said. “I also don’t think we’re heading towards imminent superintelligence.”
He expects the “human-in-the-loop” era — where a human checks and guides AI — to probably last three to five years, with oversight, judgment, and persuasion remaining indispensable.
“To safeguard yourself, do the things that AI can’t,” he said. “Particularly things that involve interaction, social skills, leadership, oversight of things, and being able to use AI to solve problems.”
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