empower the generative generation
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Everyone’s asking which industries are going to be hit hardest by AI. That’s the wrong question. Yes, there’s variation across industries—but the more useful lens might be seniority.
The writing’s on the wall: entry-level positions, as we’ve known them, are under threat across the board. These are the roles where people learn the ropes—the ones that involve doing the grunt work, getting shit done, and picking up the slack.
Whether that means writing and researching, scheduling and spreadsheeting, tweaking design files, managing inboxes, filling out forms, logging inventory, or following standard operating procedures—this is the tactical layer of work that teaches people how the system works from the inside.
And it’s exactly where AI excels.
For better or worse, every team I’ve ever been on has operated on a kind of informal value chain: experienced folks hold the deeper context and steer the ship, while more junior people learn by carrying out the day-to-day tactics that keep things moving. Now, the legacy bottom layer of that system is evolving.
In the short term, we’re facing a talent entry question. How will young people break into the workforce when the work that used to get them in the door is increasingly being handled by machines?
And in the long term, we’re staring down an experience vacuum. If AI takes over most entry-level work, who’s going to learn the system from the inside? Who’s going to build the skills and experience required to be a great leader 10 or 20 years from now? Those in strong careers today cut their teeth on the kinds of jobs that might not even exist for the next generation.
re-imagining the “entry-level” position
The optimistic take? Young people will evolve what “entry-level” even means. They’ll grow up with AI as a creative partner, learning how to prompt, steer, and co-create in ways many of us are still wrapping our heads around.
Here’s how it might look in my field: Instead of pixel-pushing, a junior designer might spend their first year prompting AI to create work and tweak strategically from there. They’ll be sharpening higher-level skills instead—developing discernment, learning to evaluate design quality, and figuring out how to present and justify their choices. Careers will start with a focus on developing skills that used to define an intermediate.
Across disciplines, this is a direction we need to lean into, not resist. If we challenge early-career workers not just to survive the AI shift but to master it—and if organizations hold space for that—we get something better than the old ladder.
We get a more generative, skill-building loop. Rather than using AI to shrink teams, we should be thinking about how a 10-hour task can now be iterated 10 times in that same time period with strong mentorship in how to evaluate outputs. The tools are changing; yet the need for human discernment is greater than ever.
At the same time, we need to avoid falling into the same old generational traps. The same way boomers rode an economic wave, millennials like me could become gatekeepers of the AI era—old enough to have built a body of experience in traditional entry-level roles, young enough to apply that knowledge to generative AI.
That is, unless Gen Z and Gen Alpha find a new definition of workforce entry—one that’s tuned for an AI-first world. That’s the future we want to support. This isn’t just about teaching kids AI, it’s about acknowledging that AI is teaching them. It’s up to all of us to not only make sure it does a good job, but also to make space for those skills to ladder up the value chain. They will have a lot to teach us, too.
leading a team of AIs
I’ve been tinkering. AI tools are already relevant across the entire design process. Large language models help us with early discovery and analysis. Agent-based tools like Manus can assist with deeper research and planning. Flora’s AI mood-boards can easily kickstart the inspiration phase. UI generators aren’t perfect yet, but tools like Stitch, UXpilot, FigmaAI, Visily, and Firefly are rapidly evolving into useful sketchpads.
When I think about the future of my career in particular, I’m not so worried about these tools replacing me (yet). Good design still needs a human touch to bring the context, evaluate the output, and iterate towards a deeper purpose. But it’s starting to become clear that they are replacing the kinds of jobs I used to hire junior designers and researchers for.
There’s a very real scenario where I reorganize my entire workflow to embrace AI—then turn around and pitch my ability to deliver high-quality design more efficiently using a team of AIs that I supervise. I’ll get hired precisely because I’m riding the front edge of this wave. To scale my impact, I will not be looking for entry-level tacticians. I’ll be looking to hire people who can each lead their own team of AIs.
It’s reminiscent of 10-15 years ago when my generation skilled up on social media in ways our bosses couldn’t understand. But there’s a wild card here: the interface itself is going to change. If you’ve incorporated this new breed of AI into your daily life at all, you already know. There’s a future just over the horizon where websites and apps are relics, search engines are obsolete, conversational interfaces are the norm, and autonomous agents become virtual assistants.
Travel booking is the go-to example for illustration. We’re searching for flights and accommodations with rudimentary keywords, then wading through an ocean of ads to reference ten conflicting websites before booking through some kind of aggregator—it already feels so tiresome. We’re so ready for digital travel agents.
This shift implies a whole new mental model for design. I don’t fully know what that looks like yet, but I have a strong sense that traditional web and mobile interfaces are fading. Change is coming. The digital landscape is shifting. I’m a knowledge worker, so I see this already, but any organization that shows up online will be affected by the transition to autonomous AI taskmasters.
a word to the wise about incentives
The larger issue with all this isn’t sci-fi fears of AGI—it’s inequality. Inequality in who gets boosted by these tools. Inequality in who gets replaced. Inequality in who gets to redefine what a “real” job even is, and how our kids need to be educated for whatever that definition becomes.
This reality makes one thing clearer than ever: we need AI systems that are deeply, structurally trustworthy. And if the social media era taught us anything, it’s that our incentives guide everything. Algorithms that prioritized views and likes made social media better at harvesting attention from the masses than building the relationships their mission statements implied.
We cannot afford to make that mistake again.
This is where our most compassionate, grounded, and wise people need to step in: to interact with these tools, to reflect on them, to help design them, and—most importantly—to rethink the incentives driving them. A wise leader (of people and AI models) isn’t afraid to push hard for success, but they also need to stay accountable—to their team, to their community, to the long tail of unintended consequences. They know how to push for results, but to put it in Basho’s words: they also know how to go lightly.
Our incoming technocracy is not a utopia or a dystopia. It’s just what’s happening. And that means there is no more important cause than making sure this next wave of technology is handled carefully.
We can roll our eyes, opt out, petition for regulation, or hope things slow down. But AI is moving with the momentum of a freight train. It’s powered by the human dataset project—a dataset built over the past 30 years under narrow, extractive, and superficial incentives. We call it the ‘internet’.
AI systems of the future will need to be wise. They will need to be benevolent. And that’s only going to happen if the wisest, most benevolent people choose to show up for this next era of technological evolution.
So here’s my invitation: If you care about depth, integrity, and compassion, don’t sit this one out. The interface between wisdom and technology has never needed to be more permeable.
“Vidyarthi's writing style is clear and understandable, drawing on his upbringing, experience, and research to demonstrate that technology and inner peace can go hand-in-hand; readers don't have to choose one over the other.”
— The BookLife Prize