AI was supposed to make young workers faster. Instead, it’s eroding the one skill they need most
Story by Kit Eaton, Inc., 6/26/26
A new report reveals that while young workers excel at digital communication, their critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills are plummeting.
When the electronic calculator arrived, some critics argued the innovation was bad for youngsters as it would erode their important mental math skills. There were even protests. Today a new innovation, generative AI, is driving similar controversy as young people quiz it for everything from career advice to dating tips—even Microsoft is concerned the tech can erode users’ critical thinking skills. Now a new report on AI suggests that employers are going to be confronting this problem sooner rather than later, as new hires lack key “soft” skills. Ironically, these are the very skills that set humans apart in the workplace.
By analyzing thousands of workforce assessments of workers skills and examining AI-related job postings, Massachusetts-based AI candidate screening startup Cangrade found one big positive signal from Gen-Z and younger Millennial job candidates’ skills and three very concerning downfalls. While this age-group workforce has great communication skills, rated 14 percent above average, their critical thinking powers were nearly 20 percent below average, their attention to detail was lower (17 percent below) and their ability to solve problems creatively were 10 percent below the greater workforces’ level.
The bigger context
Breaking this down, Cangrade notes that youngsters’ better comms skills are going to be critical for the AI era: as this automating tech handles more and more “execution, humans are responsible for interpretation, alignment, and effective prompting.” This narrative chimes with notions that Gen-Z is great at certain types of digital communication, and with reports that develop arguments along the line of “as AI takes over some jobs, future employees will have totally new jobs steering AIs as they work.”
But the deficit of soft skills like creative problem solving is especially concerning, since this is a universal skill prized in most businesses (and valuable in everyday life too).
Similarly a dip in critical thinking is worrying on a society-level, and very problematic in the AI era since, as Cangrade’s report notes, “in an AI-driven environment where systems generate confident but sometimes incorrect outputs, human skepticism and judgment become non-negotiable.” In other words, even as people are relying more on AI to tackle problems for them, they may be becoming less capable of smartly and independently deciding if what the AI is advising is actually sensible, or, worse, true. The report quotes Gershon Goren, Cangrade’s CEO and founder, explaining that this issue isn’t just going to affect the productivity and value of young frontline workers in businesses. The matter may actually multiply up through the company and its impact will matter more in time: “If organizations assume AI will compensate for reasoning gaps, they risk scaling errors instead of performance, and their teams will reflect that,” Goren warns.
The implications for your company
There’s much more going on here than mere hand-wringing about the dismal state of the modern era. Though this is merely one investigation, it resonates with some harms numerous critics have said AI will cause. It also comes as the sheer scale and speed with which AI has already penetrated people’s everyday and work lives is becoming clear. For example, an early 2026 report found 60 percent of US adults are using the tech daily, and in the UK a recent study suggested 73 percent of the public had used AI in their daily life in the preceding month.
For your company, the big red flag is that if you’re looking to inject creative thinking and smart problem solving into your workplace by recruiting young, eager minds, you may find they’re not as sharp as you’re expecting or needing. If this truly is a broadspread phenomenon, then it suggests that when you try to hire Gen-Z staff you’re going to have to invest more time and cash to weed out unsuitable candidates, and maybe even add extra “soft skills” training into their early working time.
But, as Cangrade’s report notes, while having an ability for communication is a “trainable foundation,” a lack of critical thinking skills is more worrisome. Because AI’s “hallucinate confidently,” the report says that “organizations winning with AI are the ones investing in structured reasoning alongside AI deployment, not replacing one with the other.” Investing in training for critical analysis and attention to detail is a long term strategy.