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The pragmatic generation: How will Gen Z transform the global workplace?

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Gen Z is often accused of being disengaged in the workplace. Yet, research by Gallup suggests that Gen Z and younger millennial employees (those born in 1989 or later) are not significantly less engaged than employees in other age groups – despite reporting higher levels of stress.

What does set Gen Z apart from older generational cohorts, however, is their rejection of outdated workplace models that don’t fit with the modern age. An EY study across 10 countries, “the first global generation,” highlights that people aged between 18 and 34 are reimagining what it means to be an adult, forcing businesses to reinvent their workplaces in the process.

The right priorities

Work 15 hour-days and miss out on precious family time? That’s not Gen Z’s idea of getting ahead. More than half (51%) of the young people globally who responded to the study cite mental and physical health as their primary measure of future success. Family relationships follow closely at 45%.

Money and careers still matter to Gen Z though, ranking third and fourth on their list of priorities, while 87% of respondents believe it is highly important to be financially independent. So, it’s not that younger generations don’t prioritize work. It’s just that they, quite sensibly, won’t compromise their personal wellbeing for the sake of their jobs.

Gen Z is also making different life choices compared with other generations – out of both necessity and desire. In response to social change, rising property prices and longer lifespans, young people are postponing or even skipping what have traditionally been the global milestones of adulthood: buying a house, getting married and having children – rites of passage that were prized by elder colleagues.

Instead, this pragmatic generation is prioritizing flexibility — being able to do what they want, when they want – and living a purposeful life. They are also driving change, often unconsciously, by asking essential questions about the world and their place in it. What isn’t working? Does what I do matter? How can I help make the world a better place?

It’s no wonder that 64% of respondents to the EY study believe it’s highly important to change things that are wrong in the world, or that more than two-thirds (69%) want to work for companies that share their values. Job hopping is now seen as a positive, with young people expecting to switch employers several times to pursue their career of choice.

Advancing in the age of AI

Another important factor that differentiates Gen Z from previous generations is that many will spend the early part of their careers in a job market that has been transformed

by automation. Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping industries, replacing some jobs, redefining others, and creating completely new career pathways.

This AI-driven transformation of the workplace demands that Gen Z employees are competent users of AI tools, but a recent study suggests Gen Z are the least confident when it comes to identifying the critical shortfalls with AI.

This cohort will need to know how to apply the technologies, in addition to developing an awareness of the risks — including the risk of overreliance on AI and not sufficiently applying their own judgment.

The AI revolution is not just underlining the need for technological skills. It is also reinforcing the importance of interpersonal or ‘soft’ skills. As manual, repetitive tasks are increasingly automated, the human element that people bring to the workplace will become more important than ever. Accordingly, Gen Z’s workplace success will not just rest on their tech-savviness – important though that is. It will also be inextricably linked with their ability to lean into what machines can’t replicate: empathy, curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, and contextual insight.

For Gen Z, the world’s first truly global generation – today’s workplace is a universe of opportunity. Thanks to the internet and social media, they are the first generation to have grown up with real-time exposure to global culture, as well as the crises that have shaped our world. As a result, they are the most informed, interconnected generation in history, with the ability to offer unique insights into their organizations’ business strategies. They have the skills and knowledge to help develop products and services that appeal to both global and local tastes.

Takeaways for employers

Gen Z is shaping the workforce of both today and tomorrow. So, employers must reshape the workplace to accommodate their preferences if they want to benefit from their skills. This is how they can do it:

1. Adapt or fall behind. In a world being reshaped by Gen Z, a thriving workplace needs more than technological agility. To avoid losing talent to competitors, employers must meet the evolving expectations of a generation that is rewriting the rules of work and life. Engage with the Gen Z members of your workforce to find out what they want from work and how you can set them up to succeed.

2. Rethink traditional recruitment and retention strategies. Today’s talent strategies were often designed for linear career paths and employees who stayed with an organization for years. That doesn’t hold anymore. Gen Z talent wants flexibility – whether that’s the option to take time out, move sideways, do a secondment or launch a side-hustle.

3. Embed meaning into your employer value proposition. Younger generations see financial security as a foundation for a fulfilling life rather than the ultimate goal. While salary matters to them, just as it mattered to prior generations, young adults want to know that their work is serving a higher purpose. Employer value propositions should reflect the deeper meaning that people seek in life – they want to know that by working for your organization, they can be a force for good.

The workplace is evolving rapidly driven by social and economic change, along with technological advances. What’s more, it is now home to five distinct generations that each lean toward certain characteristics, expectations and values. Businesses should capitalize on this reality by acknowledging the shifts underway and harnessing the power of every generation, including the transformative power of Gen Z. That way, they can step into the future with confidence.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

Fortune Global Forum returns Oct. 26–27, 2025 in Riyadh. CEOs and global leaders will gather for a dynamic, invitation-only event shaping the future of business. Apply for an invitation.



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Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi says company will be worth $1 trillion by doing these three things

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December 9, 2025

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Ali Ghodsi, the CEO and cofounder of data intelligence company Databricks, is betting his privately held startup can be the latest addition to the trillion-dollar valuation club.

In August, Ghodsi told the Wall Street Journalthat he believed Databricks, which is reportedly in talks toraise funding at a $134 billion valuation, had “a shot to be a trillion-dollar company.” At Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, he explained how it would happen, laying out a “trifecta” of growth areas to ignite the company’s next leg of growth.

The first is entering the transactional database market, the traditional territory of large enterprise players like Oracle, which Ghodsi said has remained largely “the same for 40 years.” Earlier this year, Databricks launched a link-based offering called Lakehouse, which aims to combine the capabilities of traditional databases with modern data lake storage, in an attempt to capture some of this market.

The company is also seeing growth driven by the rise of AI-powered coding. “Over 80% of the databases that are being launched on Databricks are not being launched by humans, but by AI agents,” Ghodsi said. As developers use AI tools for “vibe coding”—rapidly building software with natural language commands—those applications automatically need databases, and Ghodsi they’re defaulting to Databricks’ platform.

“That’s just a huge growth factor for us. I think if we just did that, we could maybe get all the way to a trillion,” he said.

The second growth area is Agentbricks, Databricks’ platform for building AI agents that work with proprietary enterprise data.

“It’s a commodity now to have AI that has general knowledge,” Ghodsi said, but “it’s very elusive to get AI that really works and understands that proprietary data that’s inside enterprise.” He pointed to the Royal Bank of Canada, which built AI agents for equity research analysts, as an example. Ghodsi said these agents were able to automatically gather earnings calls and company information to assemble research reports, reducing “many days’ worth of work down to minutes.”

And finally, the third piece to Ghodsi’s puzzle involves building applications on top of this infrastructure, with developers using AI tools to quickly build applications that run on Lakehouse and which are then powered by AI agents. “To get the trifecta is also to have apps on top of this. Now you have apps that are vibe coded with the database, Lakehouse, and with agents,” Ghodsi said. “Those are three new vectors for us.”

Ghodsi did not provide a timeframe for attaining the trillion-dollar goal. Currently, only a handful of companies have achieved the milestone, all of them as publicly traded companies. In the tech industry, only big tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta have managed to cross the trillion-dollar threshold.

To reach this level would require Databricks, which is widely expected to go public sometime in early 2026, to grow its valuation roughly sevenfold from its current reported level. Part of this journey will likely also include the expected IPO, Ghodsi said.

“There are huge advantages and pros and cons. That’s why we’re not super religious about it,” Ghodsi said when asked about a potential IPO. “We will go public at some point. But to us, it’s not a really big deal.”

Could the company IPO next year? Maybe, replied Ghodsi.



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New contract shows Palantir working on tech platform for another federal agency that works with ICE

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December 9, 2025

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Palantir, the artificial intelligence and data analytics company, has quietly started working on a tech platform for a federal immigration agency that has referred dozens of individuals to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for potential enforcement since September.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency—which handles services including citizenship applications, family immigration, adoptions, and work permits for non-citizens—started the contract with Palantir at the end of October, and is paying the data analytics company to implement “Phase 0” of a “vetting of wedding-based schemes,” or “VOWS” platform, according to the federal contract, which was posted to the U.S. government website and reviewed by Fortune.

The contract is small—less than $100,000—and details of what exactly the new platform entails are thin. The contract itself offers few details, apart from the general description of the platform (“vetting of wedding-based schemes”) and an estimate that the completion of the contract would be Dec. 9.Palantir declined to comment on the contract or nature of the work, and USCIS did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

But the contract is notable, nonetheless, as it marks the beginning of a new relationship between USCIS and Palantir, which has had longstanding contracts with ICE, another agency of the Department of Homeland Security, since at least 2011. The description of the contract suggests that the “VOWS” platform may very well be focused on marriage fraud and related to USCIS’ recent stated effort to drill down on duplicity in applications for marriage and family-based petitions, employment authorizations, and parole-related requests.

USCIS has been outspoken about its recent collaboration with ICE. Over nine days in September, USCIS announced that it worked with ICE and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct what it called “Operation Twin Shield” in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where immigration officials investigated potential cases of fraud in immigration benefit applications the agency had received. The agency reported that its officers referred 42 cases to ICE over the period. In a statement published to the USCIS website shortly after the operation, USCIS director Joseph Edlow said his agency was “declaring an all-out war on immigration fraud” and that it would “relentlessly pursue everyone involved in undermining the integrity of our immigration system and laws.” 

“Under President Trump, we will leave no stone unturned,” he said.

Earlier this year, USCIS rolled out updates to its policy requirements for marriage-based green cards, which have included more details of relationship evidence and stricter interview requirements.

While Palantir has always been a controversial company—and one that tends to lean into that reputation no less—the new contract with USCIS is likely to lead to more public scrutiny. Backlash over Palantir’s contracts with ICE have intensified this year amid the Trump Administration’s crackdown on immigration and aggressive tactics used by ICE to detain immigrants that have gone viral on social media. Not to mention, Palantir inked a $30 million contract with ICE earlier this year to pilot a system that will track individuals who have elected to self-deport and help ICE with targeting and enforcement prioritization. There has been pushback from current and former employees of the company alike over contracts the company has with ICE and Israel.

In a recent interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit, Karp was asked on stage about Palantir’s work with ICE and later what Karp thought, from a moral standpoint, about families getting separated by ICE. “Of course I don’t like that, right? No one likes that. No American. This is the fairest, least bigoted, most open-minded culture in the world,” Karp said. But he said he cared about two issues politically: immigration and “re-establishing the deterrent capacity of America without being a colonialist neocon view. On those two issues, this president has performed.”



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CoreWeave CEO: Despite see-sawing stock, IPO was ‘incredibly successful’ amid challenges of tariff timing

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December 9, 2025

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CoreWeave has been rocked by dizzying stock swings—with its stock currently trading 52% below its post-IPO high—and a frequent target of market commentators, but CEO Michael Intrator says the company’s move to the public markets has been “incredibly successful. And he takes the public’s mixed reaction in stride, given the novelty of CoreWeave’s “neocloud” business which competes with established cloud providers like Amazon AWS and Google Cloud.

“When you introduce new models, introduce a new way of doing business, disrupt what has been a static environment, it’s going to take some people some time,” Intrator said Tuesday at Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco. But, he added, more people are beginning to understand the CoreWeave’s business model.

“We came out into one of the most challenging environments,” Intrator said of CoreWeave’s March IPO, which occurred very close to President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs in April. “In spite of the incredible headwinds, we’re able to launch a successful IPO.”

CoreWeave, which priced its IPO at $40 per share, has experienced frequent severe up-and-down price swings in the eight months since its public market debut. At its closing price of $90.66 on Tuesday, the stock remains well above its IPO price.

As Fortune reported last month, CoreWeave’s rapid rise has been fueled by an aggressive, debt-heavy strategy to stand up data centers at unprecedented speed for AI customers. And for now, the bet is still paying off. In its third-quarter results released in November, the company said its revenue backlog nearly doubled in a single quarter—to $55.6 billion from $30 billion—reflecting long-term commitments from marquee clients including Meta, OpenAI, and French AI startup Poolside. Both earnings and revenue came in ahead of Wall Street expectations.

But the numbers were not all celebratory. CoreWeave disclosed a further increase in the debt it has taken on to finance its expansion, and it revised its full-year revenue outlook downward—suggesting that, even with historic demand in the pipeline.

With media headlines calling CoreWeave a “ticking time bomb,” with critics calling out insider stock sales, circular financing accusations and an overreliance on Nvidia, Intrator was asked whether he felt CoreWeave was misunderstood.

“Look, we built a company that is challenging one of the most stable businesses that exist—that cloud business, these three massive players,” he said, referring to AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.  I feel like it’s incumbent on CoreWeave to introduce a new business model on how the cloud is going to be built and run. And that’s what we’re doing.” 

He repeatedly framed CoreWeave not as a GPU reseller or traditional data-center operator but as a company purpose-built from scratch to deliver high-performance, parallelized computing for AI workloads. That focus, he said, means designing proprietary software that orchestrates GPUs, building and colocating its own infrastructure, and moving “up the stack” through acquisitions such as Weights & Biases and OpenPipe.

Intrator also defended the company’s debt strategy, saying CoreWeave is effectively inventing a new financing model for AI infrastructure. He pointed to the company’s ability to repurpose power sources, rapidly deploy capacity, and finance large-scale clusters as proof it is solving problems incumbents never had to face.

“When I look back at history of the company, it took us a year with with a company investor like Fidelity, before they were like, ‘Oh, I get it,’” he said. “So look, we’ve been public for eight months. I couldn’t be prouder of what the company has accomplished.” 



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