{"id":238000,"date":"2025-11-01T15:19:27","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T15:19:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/238000\/"},"modified":"2025-11-01T15:19:27","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T15:19:27","slug":"airbnb-ceo-brian-chesky-says-employers-need-to-hire-gen-z-even-if-ai-can-do-the-interns-work-or-one-day-the-bots-will-outnumber-bosses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/238000\/","title":{"rendered":"Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says employers need to hire Gen Z even if ‘AI can do the interns’ work’\u2014or one day, the bots will outnumber bosses"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c[AI] can do a lot of lower-level, more entry-level position jobs. But if no young people can get jobs, then you have no one in the future to do the highly strategic leadership positions,\u201d Chesky told ABC News in a recent interview<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we need to make room for people early in their careers, even if AI can do the interns\u2019 work.\u201d<\/p>\n

As companies like Amazon<\/a>, Meta<\/a>, and Salesforce<\/a> are cutting workers<\/a> to make way for AI investments and job automation, there\u2019s fear in the air that tech could take over human jobs for good. But so far, the bottom rung of the corporate ladder is being most affected<\/a>; employers are using AI to automate simpler, lower-level tasks, managers are hesitant to hire Gen Z professionals, and internships are dwindling.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Chesky maintained that humans don\u2019t \u201crealize how smart people are relative to AI,\u201d and that workers will always be needed for novel and operational tasks. Plus, chatbots don\u2019t have that human touch; people have a certain je ne sais quoi needed to lead workforces that AI can\u2019t replicate. However, Gen Z needs the chance to work their way from the bottom up and learn the ropes of leadership, as millennials and Gen Xers one day age out of their jobs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are going to still want relationships. Leadership is still going to matter,\u201d Chesky continued. \u201cI think AI is mostly going to be a tool. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s magic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Employers are favoring AI over Gen Z\u2014and it could backfire\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no secret that AI is coming for jobs, and Gen Z is experiencing the shift first-hand. Mass firings have wiped out entire corporate departments across the U.S.; companies announced more than 806,000 job cuts from January through the end of July this year, according to a report from <\/a>Challenger, Gray & Christmas\u2014a 75% spike from the 460,000 reductions announced through the first seven months of last year.<\/p>\n

Young job-seekers from all around the world are feeling the heat, too; In the U.K., a whopping 1.2 million applications were submitted for<\/a> just 17,000 U.K. graduate roles in 2023\/2024. And as of this July, 58% of Gen Z students globally who finished college in the past year were still trying<\/a> to find stable work, compared to 25% of millennials and Gen Xers who faced the same predicament.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s getting even tougher to land a job at major tech employers like Meta<\/a>, Microsoft<\/a>, and Apple<\/a> which were once known for snatching up budding talent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The percentage of young employees between the ages of 21 and 25 has been cut in half<\/a> at tech firms over the past two years. In January 2023, these Gen Zers accounted for 15% of the workforce at large public tech firms, and by August 2025, they only represented 6.8%, according to<\/a> data from compensation management software business Pave. It\u2019s the same at big private tech companies, too\u2014during that same time period, the proportion of early-career Gen Z employees dwindled from 9.3% to 6.8%.<\/p>\n

Just like Chesky, Pave founder and CEO Matt Schulman worried that this change could break the leadership pipeline. Schulman used sales roles as an example: there is a very linear path up the career ladder at every tech company, where they start with junior-level outbound sourcing work, then become mid-market account executives, then enterprise sellers. But if Gen Z can\u2019t even snag an entry-level job, who is being trained to fill more senior roles down the road?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cEnterprise sellers are still needed, but you\u2019re removing the roles beneath them on that career hierarchy,\u201d Schulman told Fortune<\/a> last month. \u201cHow are we going to train the future of enterprise sellers, if they aren\u2019t going through the conventional steps to get there?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201c[AI] can do a lot of lower-level, more entry-level position jobs. But if no young people can get…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":238001,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,24277,2151,733,4308,20635,100532,4792,7295,5627,2195,5629,11459,8655,4998,1935,8656,1371,11460,5027,1324,1907,227,86,56,1932,54,55],"class_list":["post-238000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-airbnb","tag-amazon","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-automation","tag-brian-chesky","tag-careers","tag-chatbots","tag-chief-executive-officer-ceo","tag-employment","tag-executives","tag-firing","tag-gen-x","tag-gen-z","tag-job-hunting","tag-job-seekers","tag-jobs","tag-layoffs","tag-leadership","tag-meta","tag-millennials","tag-tech","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-unemployment","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238000\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}