The Growth Guide | October 2026: AI skill levels drive workforce divide

Antonio’s Take

Half your people thinking they're falling behind isn't a training problem yet. It's a fear problem. And scared people don't raise their hand and ask questions. I've seen this dynamic in family businesses for years, just with different tools. The folks who've been there thirty years assume the young ones already know, and the young ones assume asking makes them look slow. Nobody talks, and the gap grows. So make the conversation normal. Pair the person who goes deep in the tech with someone who can translate it, and give everybody permission to say "show me." Communication closes gaps that training budgets can't.

Antonio’s Take

Everybody reads the iced coffee thing as proof that Gen Z is soft or entitled. I read it as proof that we're still judging work by how it looks instead of what it produces. That's an old habit. Millennials got the same treatment because we found answers in seconds instead of hauling ten library books home to write one report. If you don't see the sweat, you assume there wasn't any. So before you decide a younger employee's habits are a problem, ask what the work is actually producing. Then ask them why they do it that way. You'll usually learn something.

Antonio’s Take

This is what proactive leadership looks like. Most of us wait until the crew is short-handed and then scramble to hire. A 1.7 million a year gap is not something you fix reactively. I'll say this as someone whose family has run a Detroit business for over a hundred years: the trades built this city, and they built companies like ours. But young people won't choose a path nobody has explained to them. So explain it. Show a young employee what the ten-year version of this job looks like, what it pays, and what they own at the end. That conversation costs you nothing, and it's the one that keeps them.

Antonio’s Take

In my book I made the case that Millennials are not lazy, they are misunderstood. They want to build things. So when a kid says he wants to work with his hands and his parents wave it off, we are doing the discouraging, not him. I have watched family businesses lose their best young people this way. The talent was there. The permission wasn't. If you run a trade or legacy shop, stop selling the job and start asking the kid what he wants out of life. Then show him how your business gets him there. That is how you keep your legacy from getting sold.

Antonio’s Take

There's a story I tell about a Millennial assistant manager at a packaging company who showed up every day but had no fire. His manager asked him to write down his top three life goals. One was building a gaming app. Turned out pieces of that idea solved their production and order fulfillment problems, and he built it. That's what I see in a headline like this. Old family businesses aren't buying AI. They're buying a future they can't build alone. You don't need a hundred million to do this. Ask your younger people what they're already building on their own time. The next big move might already be in the building.

Antonio’s Take

When was the last time you tried to find a file from three years ago and actually found it on the first try? That's the real story here. AI didn't create the mess. It just turned the lights on. In a 100+ year old business, the knowledge lives in people's heads and in folders named after whoever created them. That works right up until you ask a machine to make sense of it. So before you buy the tool, do the boring work. Name things the same way. Write down what you did, how you did it, and why. Your next generation needs that anyway.