Ex-Meta AI Exec Clara Shih Launches New Work Foundation for Gen Z

The job market is shifting beneath the feet of recent graduates, and Clara Shih is trying to build a ladder before the ground disappears entirely. The former AI executive at Meta and Salesforce has launched the New Work Foundation, a nonprofit organization with a consumer-facing brand called Dear CC, designed to train Generation Z for a workplace increasingly dominated by AI agents.

Shih's motivation came from a collision of two realities she witnessed firsthand. On one side, she watched Meta's AI agents match and even surpass top employees across multiple tasks. On the other, she heard from friends and family about Ivy League graduates who simply could not land entry-level positions. The timing was brutal. As she told Fortune, "In that moment I knew that nothing would ever be the same. You feel radicalized in that moment when you see it working."

The foundation is debuting with three distinct tools, each targeting a different friction point in the job search process. JobClaw maps a user's strengths and interests to suitable roles without requiring a traditional résumé—just a five-question intake form about who they are and what they want from a career. Field Report provides career path analysis, showing open roles in specific fields alongside AI automation risk assessments. For example, law currently shows 31,500 open roles in the U.S. with low competition but very high automation risk.

The third tool, dear [CC], functions as a modern twist on career advice columns, detailing how AI is affecting each profession. According to Axios, JobClaw is launching as an open-source prototype on GitHub with plans for a consumer release. Andrew Yang, whose 2020 presidential campaign focused on automation job risks, is joining the nonprofit as a founding adviser.

Shih is no longer head of business AI at Meta but remains an adviser to the company. She has worked in AI for 20 years, giving her a front-row seat to the technology's evolution from novelty to infrastructure. Her conclusion is blunt: "If you want to find a job and if you want to keep your job, you need to learn how to get really good at using AI agents." Traditional career pathways are simply not fast enough to keep pace with how quickly AI is advancing (a problem that has plagued users for years, frankly).

The data supports her urgency. A recent survey from AI enterprise platform Writer found that employees actively using AI in their day-to-day tasks are more likely to earn a promotion or raise compared to employees refusing to adopt the tech. Meanwhile, a ZipRecruiter report shows Gen Z workers exploring alternatives to the corporate ladder, including entrepreneurship, gig work, and trade school. The threat of AI-related layoffs, combined with a slowdown in entry-level job openings, is forcing many to rethink their career choices entirely.

Entry-level jobs are among the most vulnerable to AI automation. Repetitive tasks, basic data analysis, customer support, simple content production, document screening—these functions that once served as a gateway for young professionals are being taken over by AI systems with growing efficiency and shrinking costs. The practical result is an entire generation competing for a smaller pool of real opportunities for learning and professional growth.

Shih's message to those rejecting AI for moral reasons is direct. "While I admire their principle, I don't think they're doing themselves or society any favors," she told Axios. "They're the exact young people that I want being part of building these AI solutions." She believes those with moral objections are actually critical to steering these systems in the right direction.

Business leaders remain divided on the ultimate impact. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes the technology will disrupt half of the white-collar workforce. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang foresees the technology working alongside human workers, even enabling more hiring. The truth likely sits somewhere between these extremes, but the window for preparation is narrowing.

Gen Z's sentiment toward AI has grown significantly more negative compared to a year ago, according to a recent Gallup poll. Yet adoption grows regardless of sentiment. The physical reality of using these tools matters—filling out a five-question form instead of spending weeks crafting a résumé, or seeing automation risk scores before committing to a career path. These are tangible interactions, not abstract concepts.

Whether the New Work Foundation can actually bridge the gap between AI advancement and workforce readiness remains to be seen. The tools are available now, but the job market doesn't wait for anyone to catch up. Whether users actually pay attention to the warnings remains the real question.

Artūras Malašauskas is an AI Systems Integrator with 20+ years of production-grade web engineering experience. He has designed, shipped, and scaled enterprise Python/PHP systems for logistics, SaaS, and public-sector clients. For the past year, he has focused exclusively on AI integrations: deploying open-source LLMs, building generative media pipelines (image, audio, video), and engineering multi-agent workflows for real production environments. His standard: reproducibility, security, cost-efficient inference—no vaporware. He documents and evaluates emerging AI tooling, separating verified capabilities from marketing noise. Technical editor at: muza-ai.eu, ai-verslas.lt, ai-naujinos.lt Connect on LinkedIn