AI is threatening to upend the way we work, live and think entirely. And the kids are not alright.

A recent Gallup poll of 1,500 people ages 14 to 29 found that excitement around AI is down 14 percentage points from 2025, sitting at 22% of respondents. Respondents reporting feeling hopeful about AI fell nine percentage points to 18%. Anger and anxiety related to the tech, meanwhile, are on the rise, with 31% and 42% of respondents reporting those sentiments, respectively.

Though nearly half of respondents reported feeling curious about the tech, many are concerned about AI’s impact on things like creativity, critical thinking and the job market:

• Around 48% of respondents reported that the risks of AI in the workforce outweigh the benefits, compared to just 15% who reported feeling the opposite.
• Confidence in the benefits of AI has also declined, with those who agree that AI will help us work faster down 10 percentage points.
• Despite the anxiety, people are increasingly viewing AI skills as nonnegotiable: Around 52% of Gen Z students surveyed reported that they will need to know how to leverage AI in postsecondary education, up 5 percentage points from 2025. 48% reported that they believe AI skills will be a necessity in their careers.

These sentiments may match up with broader anxieties about AI in the workforce. Of the 200 readers who responded to The Deep View’s daily poll on AI fueling job loss, 48% said they were concerned that the tech was causing economic displacement.

It only makes sense that people are worried about AI job replacement. With executives under pressure to generate returns, many see cutting payroll as an adequate way to claw back some of their AI investment. A survey of executives from AI agent platform Writer published earlier this week found that 60% of enterprises intend to lay off employees who can’t or won’t use AI.

“There's going to be an opportunity to AI wash headcount reductions this year,” Chad Seiler, KPMG U.S. Industry Leader for Telecom, Media and Technology, told The Deep View. “The ones that are saying, ‘I'm going to reduce costs,’ that's a short-term dynamic. It probably isn't enduring.”

Our Deeper View

Though the increasing noise around scary projections for job loss and economic displacement are likely to strike fear into the hearts of young students and graduates, scaring people into using technology isn’t a winning strategy. AI is already losing the narrative among the public. If people feel like they need to use the technology in order to stay off the chopping block, they may grow to resent it, rather than appreciate it, only using it for the bare minimum. Instead, if enterprises and businesses want their workforces to use AI, they should address their concerns with openness, rather than hostility. That way, they may actually want to use it.