AI to Bring Long-Term Gain, Short-Term Pain to Job Market, Says Pelgo's Chieh Huang

Chieh Huang, Co-Founder and CEO of AI-driven career transition platform Pelgo, discusses the benefits and pitfalls of AI adoption in the workplace.

Companies are increasingly looking to young workers to inject enthusiasm for AI into their workplaces, as concerns mount that employees aren’t “disrupting themselves” fast enough for a number of reasons: ignorance, inertia, skepticism, fear, professional pride. Like the digitally native millennials before them, Gen Zers have found that the introduction of a new technology in their formative years has in many cases engendered a level of fluency no one else in the workplace has.

That’s why certain businesses are doubling—or tripling—down on entry-level hiring, even as the overall entry-level market has tanked: Unemployment among recent college graduates hovered near 6% last year and underemployment reached almost 43%, the highest since 2020, the latest data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York show.

When e-commerce platform Shopify declared itself an AI-first business last year, it began requiring managers requesting additional workers to first prove AI couldn’t do the work. The one exception the company made was for its intern program, which it expanded from 25 to almost 1,000, seeding teams with AI-native undergraduates.

Last year the company hired more than 120 of them full time. Other software makers, like cybersecurity company Cloudflare, have followed suit.

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