Human–AI Collaboration: What Are Gen Zs Saying?

I have the great opportunity to work and think with young minds in my teaching profession and it is always a great reward to be able to work towards getting them ready for the future job market. One of the most overpowering influences in job markets is now arising from the use of generative AI tools. 

While ChatGPT continues to dominate the world market with a market share of over 60%, the use of generative AI globally has exploded since the release of ChatGPT in 2022. According to a 2024 online survey by Statista, around 70% of business leaders globally are ready to provide additional responsibilities to workers with AI knowledge and experience, and 66% indicated that they would not hire someone who lacked AI skills.

According to recent research (McKinsey, 2025), there is currently a dramatic shift happening in the repositioning and automation of jobs, with a significant percent of these changes being in workforce training and higher education along with legal, healthcare and administration services. While businesses will work toward higher AI–generated productivity gains, the labor force will need to retrain and upskill itself on key tasks in the age of AI in order to remain fruitfully employed.

The market size of generative AI in the U.S. alone is ready to grow from $1.78 billion in 2020 to estimated $115.19 billion in 2030, according to 2024 research by Statista. The potential for human - gen AI collaboration could be the source of a new wave of productivity that will drive economic growth in the years to come. Between 2022 and 2040, according to Statista, the U.S. is set to achieve a higher economic growth rate due to gen AI-induced labor productivity.

The anticipated growth of generative AI calls for collaborative approach to human-gen AI interaction. Gen Zs, in my business economics forecasting course at Penn State Lehigh Valley, reacted positively about their first human-gen AI collaboration in my courses. They have recognized the importance of prompt engineering skills for achieving the targeted outcomes in collaboration with AI.

Student reflections provide testaments to the usefulness of incorporating gen AI in the curriculum in a productive manner. Ana Mercado, a senior undergraduate student and a co–author in research on AI, said, after working with the AI search engine Perplexity: “Working with AI has been helpful in a sense that it helps me see things that I would not have noticed prior, especially in test 1. I liked using Perplexity since it would give me the sources it got the information from, that way I can go to the source and read more about it. In terms of productivity, it helps to reduce the time of me researching with Google. Sometimes I will use Perplexity if I need more ideas on a certain question I may have. For example, if I needed information on the cost of something that would not be easy to find on Google, I would ask Perplexity for an estimate, and how it got that estimate. The cons are having to constantly double-check that the information it’s giving me is not made up.”