A lot has been written about Gen Z’s complicated relationship with AI in the workplace. The anxiety is real. Younger employees worry about displacement, about whether leaning on AI will leave them less skilled than the generation before them, about what their careers look like in a market that’s rewriting itself in real time. Those concerns deserve to be taken seriously by the people leaders trying to support a multigenerational workforce.
But from where I sit, running executive searches and sitting in board conversations about leadership transitions, Gen Z’s AI anxiety is a symptom, rather than the root issue. The leadership readiness gap that’s driving it starts much higher in the organization, and it’s not getting talked about enough.
See also: Gen Z is taking over the workplace: 5 things HR leaders need to know
The readiness gap: Wider than the C-suite realizes
Our recent research at ON Partners surfaced a striking divide. Seventy-five percent of C-suite leaders say they feel very personally prepared for AI. At the VP level, that number drops to 42%. The same pattern shows up in how leaders assess their organizations: 68% of C-suite respondents say their organizations are very prepared, against just 40% at the VP level. And that’s just one layer below the C-suite, so the gap almost certainly widens as you move further down the org chart.
Now think about what that looks like to a Gen Z employee three or four layers below the executive team. The signals coming down from the top are confident, but those coming from their direct managers and the leaders one or two levels above are far less certain. They can feel that disconnect and it shows up as anxiety because they don’t have anyone close enough to them in the hierarchy who’s actually modeling what good AI adoption looks like.
That’s a leadership readiness problem, rather than a generational one.
The market is already repricing what leadership means
The broader picture from our research reinforces this. Nearly 1 in 2 executives say AI fluency will be the most important skill their successor needs, a skill they themselves were never required to have when hired. Seventy-one percent say future leaders will require fundamentally different technical capabilities around AI and digital transformation, while 94% say executive roles are already evolving because of AI. The market is repricing what leadership means, and organizations that haven’t built the pipeline to meet it are going to feel the gap most acutely at the layers where Gen Z employees live and work.
Real adoption is coming from the middle.
In the organizations I see handling this well, AI adoption isn’t being mandated from the top. It’s through grassroots efforts happening in operations and technology workflows, where people are quietly figuring out how to use AI to make their own jobs easier and their teams more efficient. The leaders gaining ground are the ones who recognize that and create the conditions for it to scale: permission to experiment, willingness to reward small wins instead of waiting for a 300-pound transformation project, and enough flexibility built into how teams operate that when a new capability shows up on a Tuesday, someone has tested it by Friday.
That posture matters more than any single AI initiative, because the tools and capabilities are moving on a weekly cadence. The organizations adapting fastest have stopped trying to plan around the technology and started letting their people work with it.
Why this closes the Gen Z gap
When that culture of experimentation exists, the Gen Z anxiety problem starts to take care of itself. Younger employees aren’t looking for executives to have all the answers; they’re looking for environments where it’s safe to figure things out, where curiosity is rewarded, and where the leaders one or two rungs above them are visibly working through the same questions. That’s harder to manufacture from the top of the org chart than it is to enable from the middle.
The C-suite leaders who are getting this right understand their role isn’t to have all the answers about AI, but rather to build organizations that can find them at every level.
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