AI Hype Cooling: Managers Finally Match Gen Z Skepticism

The AI Hype Cooling moment for corporate America has officially arrived, and it looks a lot like how Gen Z has felt all along. A new survey from Wharton Human-AI Research and GBK Collective finds that managers at large U.S. companies now use artificial intelligence daily at record levels, yet their enthusiasm is sliding at the same time. The technology has gone from marvel to management headache in the space of a year.

According to TokenPost's coverage of the survey, 62% of managers and higher-ranking employees said they use AI every day, up from 46% the previous year, and 91% now use it more than weekly. But the share describing themselves as excited about AI fell eight percentage points to 51%, while the shares calling themselves cautious and skeptical both rose. The researchers called it the first year in the four-year study in which usage and sentiment moved in opposite directions.

Money is not what is souring the mood. Four in five respondents said AI had produced positive financial returns, although only 28% described those returns as strongly positive, and the findings do not prove AI caused them. The frustration seems to come from the work around the tool rather than the tool itself.

The amazement is wearing off

Prasanna "Sonny" Tambe, a Wharton professor and co-director of Wharton Human-AI Research, told Fortune: "The amazement is kind of wearing off a little bit." He added that the technology is moving fast while organizations are not ready to keep up, as reported via Halla Back's write-up of the Fortune interview.

What replaced the wonder is a grind young workers will recognize: checking the machine's homework. Nearly three-quarters of managers and above said their focus had shifted from creating outputs to managing AI-generated ones, and that figure climbed to 82% among vice presidents and higher. When AI performs work inside a department, a human approves it before execution in about half of cases, while only 17% of departments allow autonomous operation with monitoring or guardrails. The big unsolved question is verification. As Tambe put it, organizations have been overindexing on what AI agents can do instead of asking what can be verified that they can do.

Gen Z got there first. A Gallup survey of Americans ages 14 to 29, published in April, found that just over half already used generative AI at least weekly, even as excitement fell 14 percentage points from the prior year. Among employed Gen Z respondents, 48% said AI's workplace risks outweighed its benefits, though 56% acknowledged the tools help them work faster. Tambe said he has watched the two groups converge. After giving back-to-back talks to high school students and senior executives over the summer, he noticed the students were far less enthusiastic while the executives were ready to go. "There's a bit of convergence happening here," he said.

What it means for your first job

The survey carries a warning for anyone entering the workforce now. One-third of managers and higher-ranking employees said their departments had slowed or frozen hiring because of AI, and nearly a quarter expected fewer entry-level hires over the next two to five years, compared with 14% who expected fewer executive hires. At the same time, 82% of leaders said AI helps newer employees contribute faster, creating a squeeze: early-career workers get more productive while the number of early-career roles may shrink.

Bosses and their teams also disagree about preparation. Managers were far more likely than entry- and mid-level employees to say workers had received adequate AI training, at 78% versus 56%. The two groups were not matched within the same companies, but the gap points to a perception problem: the people assigning AI work think the workforce is ready, while the people doing the work are less sure.

There is a practical takeaway. Departments that judged AI by growth measures, like net-new revenue, were far more likely to report strongly positive returns, at 35%, than those that measured efficiency alone, at 13%. And companies seeing real returns are the ones redesigning work around the technology rather than just layering it on top. For young workers, the skill that matters most may not be prompting the model but verifying its output. Jeremy Korst, a Wharton lecturer and GBK partner, compared the moment to factory electrification: swapping in electric motors helped a little, but the real gains came when companies like Ford rebuilt the whole production process around the new capability.

The AI Hype Cooling era is not a rejection of the technology. Optimism among managers held steady at 59%, most workflows have genuinely changed, and the transformation has, in Tambe's view, kicked off in earnest. It is the end of the honeymoon. Bosses have finally caught up to the skepticism young workers brought with them from the start: useful is not the same as trustworthy, and the real work begins after the output.

The same cool-down mood is showing up in markets. Read AI Debt Panic: Wall Street Prices a CoreWeave Default for how investors are pricing AI hype, and Aligned Seller Agent Brings AI Execution Inside the Deal Workspace for how agents are moving deeper into real workflows.