Millennials and Gen Zers at Business Insider gave their thoughts on AI agents — here is what they said.

Everyone is talking about AI agents — and Business Insider's reporters and editors are no different.

To get a sense of how members of different generations feel about the emerging world of AI agents, I, a Gen Z fellow on the Business Insider Economy team, talked to my colleagues, spanning from Gen Z to elder millennials, about their stances on the divisive topic.

While the younger generation expressed a lot of worries around privacy, the millennials in the group were cautiously optimistic about how agents could be helpful at work and at home.

Many of my Gen Z peers agreed that growing up with technology made them more aware of its limitations and dangers — making them more hesitant about handing over their information to AI agents. They also seemed most concerned about privacy and scams.

The younger members of the Economy team aren't alone — a recent poll from the Pew Research Center found that Americans under age 30 are increasingly skeptical of AI's benefits.

"I'm hearing about people using AI and they're like feeding their bank information or personal things into a software — that just immediately turns me off," she said. "Not only for the privacy reasons, but also, I just don't trust anyone or anything else to get tasks done."

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"If I want an agent to analyze something, I will give it something specific to analyze — I'm not going to give it access to my inbox," she said. "It's not just my information; sometimes it's sources' information, so I just want to be cognizant of that."

"I would have to do a lot of research into the amount of due diligence they have done with my information," she said. "At that point, I'm like, I can just do it myself."

Madison Hoff, a Gen Z economy reporter, said that while she sees the value of agents in helping manage work, she enjoys working on things herself. When looking for craft ideas in her free time, she said she enjoys the process of looking around her and finding ideas — even if an AI agent would help her do it more quickly.

Several of the Gen Z reporters said that while friends in creative fields were more hesitant to adopt AI agents, peers in finance, consulting, and tech-adjacent fields seemed more open to adopting them earlier.

The idea that AI agents still have a long way to go before they are accurate and efficient enough was shared by the Economy team's millennial editors, who held a more cautious optimism about the future of adopting agents to streamline workflows and team operations.