The Fear Index Is Up. The Strategy Is Wrong.

A new Quinnipiac poll released today finds that 55% of Americans now believe AI will do more harm than good in their daily lives. That is an 11-point jump since April 2025. The fear is rising faster than the technology is actually displacing anyone.

I understand the anxiety. But anxiety without a strategy is just suffering.

The same week that poll dropped, a Tufts University research team published the most detailed AI job displacement map ever assembled. They mapped vulnerability by city, state, and occupation across the entire U.S. economy. The median projection: 9.3 million American jobs are at risk of AI-driven displacement within the next two to five years. At the high end, if agentic AI adoption accelerates, that number climbs to 19.5 million. The income at stake ranges from $200 billion to $1.5 trillion in annual wages.

Here is the part that caught my attention as a business professor: the most exposed cities are not struggling former industrial towns. They are New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston. The places we thought were future-proof. The most exposed occupations are writers, computer programmers, and web designers. Not truck drivers. Not warehouse workers. White-collar, knowledge-economy professionals.

And over at Forbes, a sobering look at higher education notes that half of recent college graduates with bachelor’s degrees are already underemployed or jobless. The author’s argument is direct: higher education’s biggest risk is not AI disruption. It is institutional inertia. Universities are still preparing students for a world that is evaporating.

That is a lot of bad news to absorb before lunch.

Now here is the part of this week’s data that actually matters for what you should do about it.

KPMG surveyed 361 Gen Z interns in February and March of this year and found something striking. These young professionals expect one-third of their future full-time roles to be automated or AI-enhanced. They know it is coming. Nearly 30% of their current work assignments already involve AI assistance. And rather than resisting, they are leaning in. They are doubling down on judgment, creativity, and adaptability. The skills AI cannot replace.

Derek Thomas, KPMG’s National Partner-in-Charge of University Talent Acquisition, put it this way: “What’s different from prior technology shifts is how they respond: by doubling down on judgment, creativity and adaptability.”

That is not accidental wisdom. That is the right strategic response, articulated from lived experience.

The 4I model I describe in After the Grind is built around exactly this logic. When AI absorbs the grind work, the tasks that are repetitive, procedural, and time-consuming, what remains valuable is what machines cannot commoditize. Interpretation: making sense of ambiguous data and translating it into decisions. Integration: connecting ideas, people, and systems in ways that create coherent outcomes. Interpersonal connection: the human trust and relational texture that no algorithm replicates. Imagination: the ability to envision what does not yet exist.

The Tufts finding that “for every one percentage point increase in job automation, researchers found a 0.75 percentage point actual job loss” is alarming precisely because it dismantles the comfortable assumption that displaced workers simply slide into higher-value roles. That does not happen automatically. It requires deliberate repositioning toward the 4Is. The grind tasks do not get upgraded by default. You have to move.

This is where the Forbes piece on higher education stings. If universities are still optimizing for the grind, training students to execute the exact work that Tufts identifies as most vulnerable, then the underemployment numbers will get worse before they get better. Half of graduates underemployed is not a rounding error. It is a curriculum problem.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is planning to nearly double its workforce from 4,500 to 8,000 employees by end of 2026, and a companion report finds that workers with AI skills earn, on average, 56% higher wages. The premium is real. The labor market is not uniformly collapsing. It is bifurcating. The gap between those who can direct, interpret, and integrate AI and those who are replaced by it is widening by the week.

So back to the Quinnipiac poll. Fifty-five percent of Americans are scared. The correct takeaway from this week’s data is not that they are wrong to be worried. The data supports some of that worry. The correct takeaway is that fear without a reorientation strategy is the most dangerous position of all.

The Gen Z interns get it. They are not waiting for reassurance. They are adjusting. They are building the judgment and creativity muscles that command the wage premium. They are treating AI not as a competitor but as infrastructure, the way prior generations treated email or the internet.

The question is whether institutions, companies, universities, and professional associations will move fast enough to support that transition or whether inertia will do what it has always done: protect yesterday’s model until tomorrow makes it obsolete.

The numbers are real. The fear is understandable. But the strategy writes itself: move toward interpretation, integration, connection, and imagination. That is where the value is going. That is where the work is going. And if you start there now, you will not just survive the automation wave. You will be positioned to direct it.

Andrew Perkins is the author of After the Grind: Rethinking Your Business Career in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and Chair of the Department of Marketing and International Business at Washington State University’s Carson College of Business.