Gen Z Retail Workers Will Expect AI-Native Workplaces. Companies Need to Catch Up
The future is here and Gen Z won’t be fooled by empty artificial intelligence calories. In 2025, Gen Zers (born between 1997 and 2012) entering the workforce will overtake baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) retiring. Gen Z’s expectations for the work experience and the technologies they already embrace will be dramatically different than those of the cohort of employees hitting retirement age.
As a tech-native generation already emboldened by AI, Gen Z will be quick to cut through the noise of empty employer promises for training and development, especially as it applies to innovative offerings with AI. Gone are the days of flashing the word “AI” in your marketing — you might as well say you use the internet. Employers need to be prepared to meet this market with engaging training technology that has proven paths to employee development that match the evolution of the times.
Less a question of potential, retail companies need to confidently incorporate AI-powered training and development into their 2025 business strategy to entice and retain Gen Z. The delivery has to be engaging and challenging and, most importantly, impactful. According to a McKinsey study, Gen Z has different views and expectations than their older cohorts. With time as a recognized commodity, Gen Z wants development — they want to build skills, and they want it faster. They're living in an "optimized world" in their day to day, and this operating state flows into their expectations of employment.
Related story: Training Generation Z for Confidence Rather Than Compliance
This is where AI-powered training solutions soar. Generative AI has empowered organizations with access and speed to content, allowing them to be agile about their approach to employee training. The ability to create a personalized learning journey, a historically resource-heavy, manual process, has transformed what’s possible for both organization and individual, from affecting business goals such as new joiner churn, sales and retention, to attracting, incentivizing and developing the employee. This is all the more compounded when you look at this in terms of scalability.
And for all their tech savviness, we've begun to measure the loss of interpersonal skills in the younger workforce. As Gen Z has expectations of employers, employers equally have expectations of Gen Z to uphold the customer service experience imperative to this industry. A survey we recently conducted to dig further into this growing gap uncovered there is indeed a desire for younger workers eager to train in difficult conversations and explore AI virtual role-play to do so.
As many as 42 percent of Gen Z and 44 percent of millennials identified this as a need for this support, compared with 35 percent for Gen X and 29 percent for baby boomers. This is where tech can either contribute to tunnel vision and corrode core soft skills such as customer interaction and objection handling or enhance them. Once again, looking at the integrity of the tech adoption, the purely GenAI solutions vs. robust agentic systems that allow for immersive, role-play training. We've begun to see true business impact for companies that make decisions with this peripheral in mind. For example, they're being able to comprehensively upskill employees from catalog knowledge to customer service, while attracting Gen Z with fun, engaging solutions that provide them with the development they seek.
The time for experimenting with AI — “dipping a toe in” is over. AI must be at the forefront of operational investment and not a matter of “when” but “to what extent.” As learning and development begins to be ushered to the forefront of business strategy, retailers can capitalize on Gen Z’s desire for development to affect real-world key performance indicators through smart AI-powered integrations.
How are you working with AI to attract prospective employees as well as retain current ones?
Greg Hull, MD of retail and hospitality at Attensi, a mobile training app.