‘You feel radicalized’: A Meta AI exec watched agents beat her top workers. Now she’s built a nonprofit to help Gen Z find jobs before they disappear

Every job is an AI job now. That’s at least how Clara Shih sees it. The former AI exec at Meta and Salesforce , has seen the future of the job market, and it’s a workforce fully enabled by AI. Shih has worked in AI for 20 years. But the turning point came for her last fall when she saw Meta’s AI agents match and even surpass some of her top employees across multiple tasks. “In that moment I knew that nothing would ever be the same,” she told Fortune . “You feel radicalized in that moment when you see it working.” Around the same time, Shih was hearing from the kids of friends and family members—some of whom are Ivy League graduates—about the impossibility of landing a job. That’s why she launched the New Work Foundation, a nonprofit organization, with consumer-facing brand Dear CC , aiming to train Gen Z for a future workplace dominated by AI agents. “I realized that the only way to help people keep up with the pace of AI was to give them AI tools,” said Shih, who is no longer head of business AI at Meta but is currently an adviser there. “Because if you use the traditional ways…it’s just not fast enough to keep pace with how quickly AI is advancing.” AI has progressed at a breakneck pace, quickly transforming from a fun gadget used to draft emails and generate cat memes into a sophisticated tool that now threatens to displace a sizable chunk of white-collar workers. As a result of that swift development, Gen Zers today find themselves in a bind . The threat of AI-related layoffs, combined with a slowdown in entry-level job openings, has many rethinking their career choices. According to a recent ZipRecruiter report , many are exploring alternatives to the corporate ladder, including entrepreneurship, gig work, and trade school. Still, Shih believes there is a way forward for recent graduates. “If you want to find a job and if you want to keep your job, you need to learn how to get really good at using AI agents,” she said. How Gen Z can use AI to get hired, promot…