Gen Z hasn't stopped using AI. They've just stopped enjoying it.

I had lunch this week with a friend who has run a UX and design house out of Southeast Asia for more than a decade. We got onto how AI has changed his business, and the thing that’s actually shifted isn’t the creative work. It’s the recurring revenue.

When he launched, a steady share of the money came from unglamorous production. PowerPoint template builds. Short stock video. It paid the rent between projects, and it was the work you used to put a new designer on for their first year. Neither line disappeared overnight. They thinned out over several years, and at no point was there a month where anyone would have said something had happened. Both are gone now, and so is that first year.

He also doesn’t much mind, and I don’t think he should. He adapted, which is what a decade of running a business teaches you to do. Losing the volume work has made him far more selective about who he takes on. He mostly does projects he can genuinely influence, largely for clients he’s known for years, because his read is that this business has always been about relationships more than output. He told me he’s enjoying the job more than he has in years.

Both of those things are true at once.

In May, Eric Schmidt was booed by graduates at the University of Arizona for saying AI would shape their world, and had to stop and acknowledge it from the stage. Days earlier a property executive was jeered at Central Florida for calling AI the next industrial revolution. A music executive at Middle Tennessee State got the same, and told them to deal with it and make it work for them. NBC found students have started anti-AI societies on at least five campuses.

Every one of those speakers was describing my friend’s experience accurately. They just weren’t talking to anyone in my friend’s position.

Gallup asked 1,572 people aged 14 to 29 in February. Adoption is holding steady. Excitement has fallen 14 points in a year, to 22%. Anger is up 9 points, to 31%. They haven’t quit, then. They use it every day and resent it, which is a stranger place to be than a boycott, because at least a boycott is visible. You lose customers, the number moves and you do something about it. Ambivalence never surfaces anywhere at all, and people carry on using the thing while quietly ceasing to believe in it.

His own view is that the tools don’t hold context. They’ll follow a brand’s guidelines without knowing what those guidelines are protecting, or what the architecture underneath them is for, so you get work that looks ‘kinda’ correct and isn’t. They don’t hold a relationship either. Context and relationships are both things you accumulate, and they get accumulated in year one, on the boring work.

Every number above is American, incidentally. I’ve yet to see a credible read on any of this from Southeast Asia, where I sit and where my friend’s studio sits.

We took away the bottom rung and told them to climb.

Where do you land on this one? I’d like to know.