‘The amazement is kind of wearing off a little bit’: Wharton survey reveals managers are learning what Gen Z already figured out

Have you talked to a Gen Zer or even a Gen Alpha kid about AI lately? On playgrounds, kids point at each other and say “that’s AI” about behavior they find fake or unconvincing. In high school and college, AI is a cheating tool that turns in easily spotted slop if you’re not careful. In the workforce, it’s a tool for rendering an email inbox almost entirely useless.

In short, the AI natives most exposed to this technology have the most intense love/hate feelings about it. It’s not a technological revolution to them; it’s a giant pain.

Managers at large U.S. companies are using AI more than ever and increasingly feeling the way their kids and younger colleagues do, according to a new survey from Wharton Human-AI Research and research firm GBK Collective. Among managers and above, 62% reported using AI daily, up from 46% last year. Meanwhile, the share describing themselves as excited fell eight percentage points to 51%. A quarter described themselves as skeptical, and 44% as cautious. The researchers called it the first wave in their four-year study in which usage and excitement moved in opposite directions.

“The amazement is kind of wearing off a little bit,” Prasanna “Sonny” Tambe, a professor of operations, information and decisions and co-director of the Wharton Human-AI Research, told Fortune. In its place, he said, is greater caution: “This technology is moving so fast and our organization is not ready to keep up.”

This cooling isn’t a backlash. Optimism among managers and above held steady at 59%, and 80% reported positive financial returns from AI, though only 28% called those returns strongly positive. The annual waves are separate samples rather than a panel tracking the same people, so the data describe a shift in mood across the management ranks; the findings suggest that the people responsible for putting AI to work are encountering a distinction younger users have already been expressing. A technology can be useful, even game-changing, without inspiring confidence about everything that comes with it.

A Gallup survey conducted with the Walton Family Foundation and GSV, published in April, found that 51% of Americans ages 14 to 29 used generative AI at least weekly, even as excitement fell 14 percentage points from the previous year. Among employed Gen Z respondents, 48% said AI’s workplace risks outweighed its benefits, even as 56% acknowledged that AI tools can help them do their work faster.

For Jeremy Korst, a Wharton lecturer, GBK partner and founder of AI consultancy Mindspan Labs, the cooling reflects the move from experimenting with a technology to making it work inside an organization.

He said it’s like going from an “Oh, wow” level of excitement to how to make that transition actually work.

The work after the output

One of the most consequential changes may be what happens after AI produces an answer.

Seventy-two percent of managers and above said their focus had shifted from creating outputs to managing AI-generated outputs. Among........

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