This post was originally published on Stack Overflow
It’s hard to escape the ubiquity of AI tools when you’re a person who uses the internet. It is doubly hard to escape when you’re a young person glued to your phone for most of the day. In a surprise to no one, people aged 14-29 spend the most hours a day looking at a screen (by a large margin, I might add). Recently, TD reported that 90% of Zoomers are using AI tools in 2026, a sharp increase from the 76% reported in Deloitte’s 2025 survey. Our own Stack research on learning and AI corroborated this data, finding that 67% of early career developers use AI tools daily in their work. That’s 13% more than in 2025, and 10% more than the cross-generational average.
With so much time spent staring at lighted pixels on their handheld electric boxes, the fact that Gen Z’s AI usage is skyrocketing probably doesn’t make you gasp in shock. But the numbers don’t paint the most flattering picture of my generation, especially as those numbers continue to increase so starkly year over year. Although Gen Z is proficient at knowledge discovery via the wealth of instantaneous search tools at our disposal, what Gen Z is
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