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When young people aren’t tapping AI on the job, they’re using it to reel in extra income on the side.
That’s the takeaway of an Edelman report commissioned by Samsung that found that about 73% of around 2,000 Zoomers with side jobs surveyed across five countries were using AI in the course of those extra-occupational pursuits. The top three types of tasks include summarizing long documents or meeting notes, conducting research, and developing new written and visual content.
A separate Morgan Stanley report last year predicted that side hustles—or “multi-earning”—could balloon into a $1.4 trillion market by 2030, with generative AI being responsible for $300 billion of that figure, per the report’s most bullish scenario. Meanwhile, searches for AI-related gig work have flooded freelance platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, as longtime traditional freelancers have reportedly lost work opportunities.
Meet the moonlighters: The Samsung report divided side hustlers into three major categories. The biggest archetype is the “AI super user,” with 48% of respondents. These Zoomers, who skew toward the older end of the age bracket (between ages 25 and 27), tend to use AI across multiple tasks from content creation to web development.
At the younger end of the generational spectrum, the “AI experimenter” (23%) is more focused on a single AI task, whether that’s “investment, trading, or coaching.” Then there’s the “AI undecided” (29%) who focus more on offline income streams like arts and crafts and don’t use AI at all.
Job dissatisfaction: The drive to pick up more work outside of the nine-to-five may be born out of Gen Z’s widespread sense of discontent around corporate life. Around half of the 5,000 total Gen Z respondents said their job didn’t live up to expectations. The dissatisfied feeling was most pronounced in South Korea (64%) and least so in France (35%), with the US at 51%.
Gen Z tends to be optimistic overall about the potential for AI to transform work (67%), though 63% also report feeling overwhelmed by the number of new AI tools. Korea was the most optimistic about AI at work (81% view it positively), followed by the UK (66%), Germany (65%), the US (62%), and France (59%).
This finding fits with other surveys that have found that Gen Z workers tend to most readily adapt to new AI tools in the workplace.