Seattle's Komo News Talks To Matt Britton About Generation AI & The Modern Workforce

Artificial intelligence is redefining an entire generation. Generation Alpha, born between 2010 and 2025, is the first to grow up with AI as an integral part of their daily lives.

Their relationship with technology will reshape education, careers, and consumer behaviors. Joining us to continue the conversation is Matt Britton, a consumer trends expert and author of Generation AI. Matt, your book comes out tomorrow. Congratulations.

That' thanks so much and thanks for having me.

So how does this book compare to your first book, Youth Nation, and how does it address the challenges and opportunities created by AI in shaping the future of consumer behavior?

Yeah, well, I wrote Youth Nation almost exactly 10 years ago, and Youth Nation was based on the premise that for the first time ever, youth culture was no longer counterculture. Before the power of social media, if young people want to have a voice, they would have to protest at places like Woodstock, or stand on town squares or stamp their feet in defiance. But with social media, young people finally had a voice to change culture and business and society at large. And now, 10 years later, we're seeing another revolution, much bigger, much more intense than what I saw 10 years ago, which is with AI. And AI is going to change humanity at its core. It's going to change our interactions with technology and really change the future of the workforce, parenting, and so many different portions of society.

I mean, it is just everywhere you look right now, it's almost on every social platform. Meta just announced its own chat GPT style app. What does that reveal about the evolving relationship between consumers, brands and their data?

Well, the interesting thing about artificial intelligence, it's really the first technology that really didn't have a learning curve in order for you to interact with artificial intelligence, it really isn't that much different than interacting with friends. You're texting it and it's texting you back. And because that barrier to adoption wasn't there, we've seen just incredible popularity of tools like ChatGPT, by far the fastest platform ever to reach 1 million, 10 million, and now far more than 100 million users. And it's not surprising to see platforms like Meta rollouts own AI chatbot. Google's going deep into it. Amazon, all big tech is. And really any company that wants to survive and thrive in this new era is going to have to embrace AI and really rethink their entire business model to be able to push forward in the right ways in this world.

Artificial intelligence also showing up in the workplace. Google and Microsoft, for example, reportedly relying on AI to generate large portions of their code base. How is AI reshaping Software development processes at companies and what does it mean for the tech workforce?

I mean, it's a great point and it's really fascinating. You know, for the last two decades, a tried and true path to being successful in corporate America was learning how to be an engineer, learning how to code. The dream job was to get hired at a place like Google to be an engineer. And obviously being a coder was such an important and valued skill set in our world. And now there's platforms like Lovable and Cursor that with a simple prompt you can output a near perfect software product. We've seen dramatic decreases in the amount of open available jobs for software software coders right now. For that reason and moving forward, engineers, like so many other professions, are really going to have to reinvent themselves to remain relevant in an AI driven world.

A concern for so many is privacy. Do you think AI and privacy can coexist? Especially when we're talking about this younger generation using AI gen Alpha? I mean, what is, what does that say about their privacy?

You know, we've seen the story play itself out in the past. When E commerce first hit mainstream, people were worried about putting their credit card numbers online. And now people buy everything online. And then when social media became popular, everybody was worried about sharing where they were sharing pictures of their children. But now everybody does that. And I think the same is going to happen with AI as long as there's a trade off between parting ways with your personal data and what you get back. And obviously the trade off has a positive benefit for you as an individual. I think consumers are going to continually share, you know, in the case of AI, my own personal use. I created my own personal health bar where I uploaded 20 years of X rays, MRIs, blood test information, and that health bot tells me what doctor's appointments I need to make or why I might be feeling a certain symptom. That trade off is incredibly valuable for me relative to if chatbots really going to care about, you know, my last cholesterol score. So I'd rather get the benefit of what I can do for me in trading off my personal data. And I think a lot of people are going to make that same choice.

Oh, very interesting. We'll all be kind of changing our priorities as AI becomes more and more capable now. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you. It is fascinating and oh my goodness to think about this generation that's born between Twitter.