Time to ditch AI anxiety — experts say there’s a lot less to fear than we think - Fox Business

More than two thousand years ago, Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus coined the phrase, "Change is the only constant." That observation has remained true since his death, but now change is happening even faster, largely due to generative artificial intelligence (Gen-AI) technology such as ChatGPT or Claude. And that is making many workers even more anxious than usual. But there’s also some good news for people willing to learn.

"Change is always stressful," Liz Bentley, a workplace and career consultant at Liz Bentley Associates in New York, told FOX Business.  Britain’s Industrial Revolution in the 1700s was stressful, too. New industries put people out of work, but new jobs were created. "At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, people didn’t know there would be new jobs," she says. We now know the 1700s inventions, including steam trains and mechanical weaving, brought prosperity to the U.K. then to other economies.

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Gen-AI is driving change to a new level. "It’s coming fast and furious," Bentley says. "There are so many things that AI can usurp." That’s making workers anxious in new ways. People don’t know what changes will happen in the workplace. "There’s a lack of predictability," she says. Gen-AI is the branch of artificial intelligence that creates content rather than just analyzing data.

A few years ago, job losses were often due to employee performance. Now it’s frequently AI displacing the job. Data from Challenger, Gray and Christmas finds Gen-AI was directly involved in firing 54,000 people during 2025. The idea was to let AI handle repetitive work, such as data collection. It’s no wonder that approximately 30% of workers fear losing their jobs as AI agents take over, according to Bentley.

The job losses might sound ultra-scary to a lot of people. But the reality is that Gen-AI is here to stay, and there are plenty of reasons to stop worrying.

First, investors have put a boatload of money into making AI work. U.S. private and venture capital investments totaled $109 billion. Last year, similar investors plowed in another $194 billion. Put simply, these investors are betting heavily on the future of AI, and they wouldn’t be doing that unless they thought there was a solid future in it.

In the U.S., 28.3% of the working-age population used generative artificial intelligence, or approximately 3 out of every 10 workers in the second half of 2025, according to Microsoft’s AI Economy Institute. The U.S. was far ahead of the average global usage of 16.3% in the same period.

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While AI has so far resulted in layoffs, it’s also created many new jobs that most of us would never have dreamed of. Last year, approximately 280,000 new jobs in Gen-AI were created for people, according to Electro IQ Job Creation Stats. Some of those jobs were for people involved in AI training, data analysis and Gen-AI ethics specialists. 

Another positive is that humans working with AI agents are a lot more productive. The amount of work being done by humans assisted by Gen-AI has changed much, Bentley says. But more importantly, workers are now more productive. That’s particularly beneficial for people without advanced degrees or who lack experience, she says. 

The most important trick in benefiting from these new roles seems to be a willingness to learn. "Those opportunities will include people who will embrace the new technology," Jed Ellerbroek, a portfolio manager at Argent Capital in St. Louis, Missouri, told FOX Business. "And AI can make you a lot more creative."

In part, that creativity comes to life because people working with AI need to do the thinking. Notably, that means critical thinking, which involves questioning answers and challenging perceived wisdom. "It requires a human being," Ellerbroek says. 

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Ellerbroek says the best way to start learning is to use free Gen-AI agents, such as the basic version of ChatGPT. With that basic knowledge, moving on to a paid version will then be easier. "It’s dramatically better," he says. "You need to double-check the output."