Why Leaders Can’t Let AI Babysit Gen Alpha

✍🏼 This piece follows on from articles The Case for Teams in the Post-Truth Era and The Impact of AI on Agile Product Development (until 2030).

⚠️ Note: I’m using broad sketches here, not giving out diagnoses, nor defining individuals. Every person is more than their cohort, but patterns can be useful lenses to prepare for what’s coming.

Intro

Each generation thinks it invented IT-work and reshaped how software gets made. Boomers professionalized it. Gen X crafted it. Millennials made it collaborative. Gen Z turned it playful. And Gen Alpha? They will demand safety as a prerequisite — or they may simply not show up.

The first Alphas will enter the workplace in the early 2030s. Their success won’t hinge on the technical tools we give them but on the social tools and safety of the teams they join.

A Tour of the Generations

Each generation has brought its own flavor to IT work, shaped by the tools, methods, and social context of their time. Here’a a list of the main characteristics and shadows.

Characteristics

• Baby Boomers (1946–1964) — IT was back-office. COBOL, punch cards, and mainframes defined their careers. Projects followed strict waterfall. Work was 9–5 in the office, loyalty expected, vacation scarce.
• Generation X (1965–1980) — PCs, Unix, Assembler, and C ruled. Coding was a late-night craft. Pre-agile processes like RUP, CMMI, Crystal, and XP were the norm. They valued autonomy, switched jobs more than Boomers, and rejected endless overtime.
• Millennials (1981–1996) — Came of age during the internet and open-source boom. Agile and scaling frameworks shaped their work around collaboration, feedback, and purpose. They expect flexibility, remote work, and generous time off.
• Generation Z (1997–2012) — Digital natives, raised on social media and cloud. They learned coding through YouTube, bootcamps, and hackathons. They want growth, long holidays, and authentic employers. Their workplace culture is informal, meme-driven, and fast.
• Generation Alpha (2013–2025) — The most bruised and brittle yet. Born into AI, XR, IoT, and permanent global crises/unreality. Many already face challenges like nervous system overload and disrupted sleep. When they arrive in the early 2030s, their entry could get rocky.

Shorthand Metaphors for Maladaptive Coping

Alongside strengths, every generation develops unhelpful patterns. These aren’t diagnoses, just metaphors to notice where coping turns maladaptive.

• Boomer Pushback: ALL CAPS emails, change resistance, controlling.
• GenX Entitlement: office politics, escalations, seniority entitlement.
• Millennial Burnout: masking exhaustion with coffee, life hacks.
• GenZ Freeze: sudden blank looks, social withdrawal, checking out.
• GenA Absence: here but not here, easily unsettled when pulled back into focus.

Expect a Clash?

Generational transitions always cause friction, but the Alpha shift will be the sharpest yet. For the first time, a cohort will enter the workplace already carrying heavy psychological loads.

GenA world has been one of chaos: pandemics, political turmoil, wars, catastrophes, disinformation. For them, fear and isolation are norms. Making sense of unreality is their everyday. No wonder many GenA-children are already on their back foot.

This doesn’t make them weak, just ungrounded. They’re sharp, adaptive, and they see through facades instantly. But they are brittle. In the wrong environment, they’ll twist into bossiness, passivity, or passive-aggression. In the right one, they can flourish. We should respond wisely. So, what can we do to help them?

Leaders, Please Prepare

It would be a great disservice to push Alphas into isolated, AI-driven remote work. That would trap them further in their heads, when what they truly need is physicality and the chance to awaken their emotional life.

Healthy teams can provide that grounding. Teams are safe havens where Alphas can grow roots and thrive. Teams offer safety to speak, fail, learn, and grow. For GenA, that safety isn’t optional — it’s the only way they will mentally land in the workplace without maladaptive coping.

Leaders should empower agile coaches to start building this soil before Alphas arrive. Ideally, leaders would listen to their agile coaches and scrum masters so that they could provide some essentials:

• Prioritize psychological safety above all else.
• Create rituals that help people feel grounded in uncertainty.
• Design workshops that respect short attention spans.
• Model honesty + care because GenA will spot fakeness a mile away.

And let’s drop the fantasy that “AI will take care of Gen Alpha.” Use AI for performance boosts, yes, but don’t sacrifice too much with it. Doing so would sacrifice too much. AI can support productivity, but it cannot replace human facilitation.

Outro

I’ve long said coaching is close to therapy, because their goal is the same: change. With Gen Alpha’s arrival, the workplace will need an even deeper grasp of psychology and safety.

They will test us, but they may also be the ones who help elevate teamwork. In my team theory, GenA could be the missing element needed for arrival of ideal teams. So, let’s not mess this up. We owe it to a generation.

⚠️ Note: I’m using broad sketches here, not giving out diagnoses, nor defining individuals. Every person is more than their cohort, but patterns can be useful lenses to prepare for what’s coming.