How AI Is Reshaping Gen Z Careers: Insights from Entrepreneur Jared Navarre

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): A Further Inquiry

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/07/30

Jared Navarre, a multidisciplinary entrepreneur and creative strategist, explores how AI is transforming career paths for Gen Z, especially those pursuing nontraditional or unstable roles. With deep experience consulting for over 250 businesses and launching ventures across industries, Navarre explains that AI is rapidly replacing many traditional roles—from dispatching to graphic design—demanding that young professionals become strategic tool users. While AI democratizes intelligence, it also elevates the need for critical thinking, subject-matter expertise, and adaptability. The value now lies in directing AI effectively and maintaining creative and analytical depth in a quickly evolving workforce.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, today, we’re here with Jared Navarre. He’s a multidisciplinary entrepreneur and creative strategist based in Anchorage, Alaska, with experience spanning the IT, logistics, entertainment, and service sectors.

He has successfully launched, scaled, and exited multiple ventures. As a consultant to over 250 businesses, Jared specializes in operational systems, technology infrastructure, and brand ecosystem development. He is the visionary behind ZILLION—an immersive music project that integrates storytelling, multimedia, and live performance—transforming artistic ideas into monetizable intellectual property. He is positioning ZILLION for cross-platform expansion across music, animation, comics, and augmented reality.

So, how is AI changing careers for Gen Z, particularly those looking to pursue less traditional or more unstable career paths? For the last five to ten years, we’ve been hearing that people are increasingly unlikely to stay in a single job or career from college to retirement.

People will be shifting roles frequently. So, how is this landscape changing, and how is it impacting the group that’s entering the job market?

Jared Navarre: First of all, I love the topic. Futurists have been predicting these shifts for decades. There’s a quote I’ve adapted over the years

“The future will be divided into two groups—those giving instructions to machines, and those taking instructions from them.”

In my opinion, and based on what I’ve seen across my companies, Gen Z is the generation that will be most affected by AI. I’ll share a few stories—both from recent consulting projects and from my businesses.

Many professions are not just in limbo—they’re being actively replaced. I’ve seen individuals spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on degrees in fields like graphic design, marketing, legal research, journalism, and even contract law—only to see those roles downsized or automated. In some cases, even the companies I advise or those I work with have had to make those difficult decisions.

When I think of Gen Z, I break it into two groups. The younger Gen Zs—say, those still in school—have a potential opportunity to pivot early. They might even help shape how AI is implemented and maybe even contribute to building the next generation of tools. But even they have a narrow window, and by the time many are making career decisions, these shifts may have already solidified.

That said, people who are adaptable and strategic will always find ways to add value. That’s been true throughout history. But yes—if it helps, I can give a few specific examples from my businesses and some larger organizations I’ve consulted for.

Jacobsen: Sure, let’s do it. You’ve got 250 examples to choose from!

Navarre: Yeah—we stopped keeping track a few years ago, but once we passed the 250 mark, we just focused on quality and depth. One interesting example is from a company I still own—it’s a plumbing and heating business…

And on the dispatching side, multiple companies are racing toward the finish line—and this is already happening across call centers throughout the U.S. Dispatching is especially interesting because each trade, profession, and craft has unique nuances. I’ve consulted for a wide range of service-based businesses.

Take plumbing and heating, specifically. We’re currently in the process of deploying automated dispatching and scheduling systems. As we’ve populated and refined the AI model, it now has better decision-making capabilities than many of our seasoned dispatchers.

We’ve been able to train the model using master-level plumber knowledge and institutional expertise unique to that company. This business operates exclusively in Alaska, which, as you can imagine, presents particular challenges. In Alaska, “no heat” is a real emergency—when it’s -30°F, and someone loses heat, it can be life-threatening.

That’s one fascinating use case. Another involved a major shoe company—a household name. We conducted a three-week AI exploration project for them, and by the end, unfortunately, they let go of ten staff members. Nine of them were Gen Z. The impacted roles included graphic designers and marketers, as the AI tools we implemented were significantly faster and more effective by comparison.

Jacobsen: That’s brutal. So, what does this mean in terms of upskilling and acquiring knowledge? Is traditional knowledge becoming less of a leverage point and more about how well someone uses tools that can instantly provide or apply knowledge?

Navarre: Are you asking from an employee’s perspective—from a human worker’s point of view?

Jacobsen: Is the path forward going to revolve more around an individual’s ability to work effectively with AI tools?

Navarre: Yes, I see what you’re getting at. It depends on the application.

Take, for example, the traditional workflow: something breaks in your house. You make a few phone calls, talk to a human dispatcher who coordinates with another human, check availability, schedule a technician, and so on—eventually, someone shows up to fix the issue.

With automation in place, especially in home services businesses, we’ve eliminated up to three human roles in that entire process.

So yes, it does depend on the context. But to answer your question more directly, when we’re responding to an RFI or RFP—whether it’s from a large company or a government contract—from the consulting side, the human value increasingly comes down to how effectively someone can manage and deploy these tools.

I typically have to estimate between thirty and two hundred person-hours to bid on a job, okay? And that applies whether I’m doing it myself or a large company is bidding—whether it’s for BP, Conoco, or any central entity. There’s a significant amount of labour and detail that goes into preparing those proposals.

But the last contract proposal I put together—for a city project—I completed it myself using Jasper without any assistance from my team. It took me forty-five minutes, pricing and everything included.

So, to your earlier question: yes. You have to be able to use these tools. That is non-negotiable now. But I also think, in the end, intelligence—real cognitive ability—is still going to win.

If you still bring something valuable to the table—strategic thinking, adaptability, creativity—you will navigate through the changes. High-IQ individuals will continue to rise, even as these systems become increasingly analytically advanced.

Jacobsen: These systems are already more analytically alert than we are. They may not yet fully replicate emotional nuance or lived experience, but this democratization of intelligence—what does that do to how we define business and work, especially for the upcoming generation? Could you clarify your perspective on that?

Historically, someone’s skills, knowledge, and cognitive abilities—as well as soft skills—have been the key benchmarks for accessing specific industries, working with certain firms, or building particular kinds of businesses over time.

Now, with these AIs and algorithms—tools that are becoming more intelligent every month—the barrier to entry is lower. These tools can do high-level analytical work. All people need is the ability to frame a good prompt.

That’s a significant shift: it democratizes access to cognitive and strategic output. So, if something that once took 200 hours can now take 45 minutes, what does that mean for our concept of work from both a business and a worker perspective?

Navarre: That’s a great question. And I think we’ve already seen a version of this before—with the democratization of information through the Internet. There were many assumptions made about what that would lead to—most of them incorrect.

I think we’re now approaching a similar inflection point with AI. To provide some broader context, I serve as chairman of a couple of NGOs that run projects in places such as Burma, Thailand, and the Philippines—even in areas where we engage with communities affected by cartel violence in Mexico. These are some of the most remote and underserved places on the planet.

And even in those regions, we’re now seeing meaningful access to the Internet. The infrastructure is catching up. So, if access to information became nearly universal in the past decade, we’re now on the brink of something similar with intelligence—the ability to act on that information at scale.

Sadly, it’s still taking far too long for some of those areas to gain access, which is ridiculous. That being said, based on what I’ve seen across all of my companies—and specifically, if we’re staying focused on Gen Z—a lot of these AI models are still being trained and populated by humans.

Even when people use the tools, I’ve seen more incorrect work products in the last three to six months than at any other point in my career. You still need a deep enough knowledge base to sort through and assess what is accurate, what is viable, and what constitutes a good work product. The number of times these models—I won’t call any of them out individually—have generated incorrect outputs is unsettling.

For example, if I’m preparing for an interview with you and I know nothing about the topic, I can surface a bunch of information quickly. But that does not mean I can speak about it with any depth or authority.

That’s changed how I hire across all of my companies. Now, I prioritize individuals with in-depth institutional knowledge and genuine subject-matter expertise over those who are merely skilled at navigating AI tools. That’s where the real value lies.

I wouldn’t say raw IQ is everything, but deep expertise and cognitive sharpness still matter. They’re the foundation for adapting—and thriving—as AI accelerates.

At the same time, perseverance is another major factor—it can even outperform IQ in some cases.

Some Gen Z professionals who were laid off by Fortune 50 companies three or four years ago—people who had spent the last decade, including their teens, mastering skills like graphic design—have come back to me after retooling and relearning how to bring value to the same space.

Please take one of my companies: I used to have six full-time graphic and web designers. I’m down to one. And the reason that one person remains is because they have an eye for design. That’s it. Their job is now to direct the AI tools—they guide the machine by telling it exactly what to do, but the creative judgment still comes from them.

That’s powerful. And I appreciate that—today is our first formal meeting, but I did a lot of prep to understand who you are and where you’re coming from. You seem to have a strong voice, and ironically, that kind of presence may be more critical than ever in your profession.

People like that are only going to become more valuable. And the truth is, I don’t know how you replicate that—how you bottle it—outside of years and years of deep, focused learning and immersion. There’s no shortcut to that.

Jacobsen: What about educational institutions and creative development programs? How can they adapt to remain valuable in this rapidly evolving landscape?

Navarre: These guys are now generating bids with significantly more accuracy, to be honest, because they’re leveraging historical job costing data—looking at what they estimated for labour versus what it cost and what their margin ended up being on comparable projects.

They’re also submitting around 40 times the number of bids they used to. And beyond that, they’re using AI to scale their workforce dynamically. The entire recruitment pipeline—from sourcing to onboarding—is partially automated.

So when I talk about this window of opportunity, I mean there’s a real chance for individuals and companies to generate massive value—financial and otherwise—if they leverage these tools effectively now. But that window is shrinking every single day.

The same goes for your world. If it’s a race to generate quality content at scale, and it’s you versus someone else who’s using the right tools—then, honestly, the one not leveraging them is at a serious disadvantage.

Jacobsen: What are the sincere risks we should be keeping in mind, even while we enjoy the benefits of these technologies—particularly among younger generations, who are often the most fluent in using them?

Navarre: Man, that’s a great question. I think accuracy and sourcing—I don’t know if anything is more important than those two things right now. Then there’s the importance of keeping intelligent humans around you. And still, find ways to engage your critical thinking mechanisms actively. That can look different for everyone, but it’s essential.

One of the saddest things I’ve seen, and a reason I’ve had to let people go, is that they stopped thinking critically. They relied too heavily on AI tools and just went through the motions. No more analysis. No more depth.

Please—don’t lose sight of the value of the human brain. Applied with depth and intention, it still outperforms the smartest tools. Keep thinking critically. That’s your edge.

Jacobsen: Absolutely. Thank you for your time today. I appreciate it—and thank you for your insight and expertise.

Navarre: Hey, man, I appreciate it. Seriously—your work is excellent. You’re incredibly talented. It’s been a pleasure to be here today. Hopefully, we’ll talk again.

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