"It Is Just Demoralising": Young People's Despair Over AI And What To Do About It
10 min read
Ministers insist they are tackling youth unemployment, but is AI transforming the world of work too quickly for government to keep up? Zoe Crowther explores young people’s despair over AI and whether government is doing enough to help
Young people increasingly find themselves applying for jobs without ever interacting with another human being.
In response to her application for a door-to-door sales role, 22-year-old graduate Siena tells The House she received repeated emails addressed to “Dear English” after the recruitment system – likely powered by AI – appeared to mistake the word ‘English’ on her CV for her name.
“I understand some companies are overwhelmed with applications, but it’s got to a different level now,” she says. “It just feels like there’s a lack of actual personal connection with the people who are hiring.
“It is just demoralising. I’ve seen people with so much experience who can’t even get a hospitality job. It makes me feel like everything I’ve worked towards isn’t really worth it in the end.”
Others report that thousands of AI-generated ‘ghost’ adverts have made online job searches even harder to navigate.
The automation in the job application process works both ways. Danny, who has spent months struggling to get a graduate job, resorted to taking a free online course by digital learning platform TechTalk that taught him how to use AI to his own benefit when applying for jobs.
Danny uses AI to edit and tailor CVs and cover letters for each application, as he says he has to write up to 10 applications a day, which “gets a bit tedious when companies either don’t read them or reject them”.
“I don’t want to overuse AI because it creates generic cover letters which lack personality,” he says. “But I’m not sure it makes any difference, as it seems that AI is reading them too.”
The use of AI has rapidly expanded at a time when young people’s confidence in the future is already collapsing. Former health secretary Alan Milburn’s detailed review revealed a “lost generation” of more than one million 16- to 24-year-olds who are now Neet (not in education, employment, or training) – the highest level for over a decade and still growing.
The IPPR think tank has published new research showing a crisis of hope among young people, with only a quarter of 16- to 29-year-olds believing talent and hard work lead to fair opportunities. The report suggests that pessimism itself is becoming a policy problem as it could further discourage people from pursuing education, training or employment.
While many young people say AI is deepening those fears, Keir Starmer’s government made clear it saw adoption of AI as central to its mission to grow the economy. For many of those ministers still in post, the greatest risk of all would be businesses failing to build trust around adoption and bringing workforces with them.
Notably, both those worried AI is moving too quickly and those urging Britain to adopt it faster argue that the country is getting the transition wrong.
Experts and employers are concerned that Britain is failing to prepare workers, employers and the education system for an AI economy. This uncertainty is already forcing difficult questions about the advice young people have long been given, in terms of which skills to develop and which routes they can take towards achieving their career goals.
Dex Hunter-Torricke spent more than a decade leading communications for some of the world’s biggest technology companies, including Google DeepMind, before leaving the industry in autumn last year. He then joined the HM Treasury Board as a non-executive director to advise Chancellor Rachel Reeves on how AI could transform the economy.
He tells The House he would encourage young people to have a “wide-ranging intellectual curiosity” and build up skills and knowledge around a broad range of areas, rather than rely on narrow technical expertise in an increasingly automated economy.
“The tech industry in particular pushed this idea that coding and Stem were the key to success in the future,” he says.
“I have always strongly disagreed with this; it turns out machines are very, very good at doing lots of quantitative work, and are having a transformational impact on how many of those domains are operating.”
Anna Brailsford, CEO of Code First Girls, an organisation that provides free coding courses to women and connects them with employers, recently shared similar reflections with The House while considering the future of software engineering.
“The most well-rounded candidate is a humanities student that is technically brilliant. Their ability to articulate themselves, their ability to go client-facing – those women are absolute gold dust,” she said.
But the crisis of hopelessness among young people has cast doubt over whether going to university remains the most important guarantor of success, as many graduates struggle to find jobs. The British Social Attitudes Survey published this month found that 34 per cent of the public believes a university education “just isn’t worth the time and money it usually takes” – up from 14 per cent in 2005.
When ChatGPT was launched to the public in late 2022, it made powerful generative AI accessible to ordinary people overnight and changed the policy conversation almost instantly.
According to Francesca Fraser, former No 10 special adviser in the previous Conservative government, the adoption rate of ChatGPT took some parts of the government “by surprise”.
She says governments “always struggle with doing really long-term thinking”, particularly when the nature of technological impacts on the economy is so unpredictable.
Fraser is now head of policy and public affairs at Multiverse, the British educational technology company co-founded by Euan Blair that works with employers to deliver apprenticeships and workforce training.
“Ultimately, the impact that AI will have on the labour market will definitely be profound, but the precise way it lands depends on the economics of supply and demand and how people continue to use it,” she says. “So, it’s a really hard thing to map out.”
Starmer ministers point to the Youth Guarantee pledge that every 18- to 21-year-old should have access to education, training, an apprenticeship, work experience or employment, as well as expanded youth hubs and more than £1bn of AI investment, as evidence they are preparing young people for the future labour market.
However, critics argue these initiatives remain fragmented and do not amount to a coherent strategy to address the overall decline in entry-level jobs and the long-term impact of technological change, including AI, on junior roles.
Hunter-Torricke believes, as many do, that AI will deeply transform our societies and our economies, and that young people will need to be protected from an impending huge shock to the job market. The former tech insider tells The House that the money the government is throwing at the problem is simply acting as a sticking plaster.
“It makes me feel like everything I’ve worked towards isn’t really worth it in the end”
“But there are huge question marks about whether it’s even going to be competitive against the enormous amounts of investment from US big tech and other ecosystems,” he says.
“British businesses generally have been bad at adapting towards technology – that has been the case for decades now.”
AI adoption among UK SMEs is rising rapidly, with 35 per cent having actively used AI in 2025, up from 25 per cent in 2024, according to the British Chambers of Commerce. However, only around 11 per cent are deploying AI extensively to automate or streamline services.
“If you can’t invest in the general transformation and modernisation of industries and companies and workers, how do you expect them to be in a position where they’re able to hire young people?” Hunter-Torricke asks.
He says “sporadic announcements” and investments in AI-related infrastructure and supercomputers will not be as impactful as fixing the physical infrastructure in schools and investing back into public spaces and civil society.
“If you are only investing in those things which you know are likely to attract approving nods from Silicon Valley and from the tech elite, then you’re going to [see] what we’ve seen over the last couple of decades: which is a very small number of companies and people are going to do extraordinarily well, and the vast majority of workers remain stuck in low-wage jobs, which have very limited growth opportunities.
“What we have clearly been missing is the kind of political vision of what kind of country we want to be and how we intend to prepare our country to deal with a set of societal-wide and global transformations that are under way as a result of the arrival of the most powerful technology in history.”
Fraser from Multiverse argues that the problem lies partly in the way Britain develops skills policy. With the government struggling to build a system that keeps pace with technological change, she says employers need greater freedom to respond quickly to emerging skills gaps.
“There is a need for a slightly more agile skills system, whereby if employers see gaps they can fill those gaps without having to go to government and have an 18-month process to work out how the training should look,” she says. “The existing route to develop apprenticeship standards is probably a little bit too clunky.”
Fraser argues that helping people adapt to AI will be essential if governments are to maintain public confidence in the technology. “The best way you maintain consent for AI is by giving people human agency. The best way you can empower people is by training them, so that they can adapt in an AI-affected world.”
Labour MP Natasha Irons, who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Youth Affairs, tells The House that AI is simply exacerbating deeper structural issues that have created a “hostile environment for young people in this country”.
She believes that a feeling of despair among young people has built over years of events that have stacked up against them: the stripping back of youth services through austerity in the 2010s; the Brexit referendum; worsening mental health and the rise of addictive social media algorithms; rising housing costs and insecure living standards; the disappearance of traditional routes into stable careers; and the Covid pandemic.
For Irons, the problem with the government’s approach to helping young people has been a lack of “joined-up vision” for what growing up in this country should look like.
“I’m not sure there’s that thought leadership on this at the moment,” she says. “I would hope that the new Milburn review is an opportunity for the government to make this a real cross-government mission.”
Irons, who has children aged five and 11, says young people themselves might have to find ways to individually adapt to a changing world.
“Perhaps we’re moving to a world where, instead of having your path planned out for you the second you’re a teenager and you pick your GCSEs, we’re going to have to be more flexible and resilient to the jobs market around us,” she says.
“Our job as government and politicians is to ensure that our young people have those opportunities to develop those skills. The current education system is ‘pass an exam’ and that’s it, but actually we need our kids to be resilient and confident and be able to seek opportunities around them and not wait for things to happen for them.
“With votes at 16, young people have a real chance to flex their political muscles. If they’re concerned about the impact of AI, then perhaps it’s time they pull together their views and put forward a counterargument to it being an inevitable thing that we will have to just deal with. Maybe that’s where the hope will come from – from young people themselves.”
