We Run an AI Business and Our Own Kid Won't Touch It

Katie is 21. She works reception at a GP surgery. She's our daughter. And yesterday, at our dinner table, she said something I can't shake, which went a bit like this ...

"Is there any point in planning for a future? We'll probably get blown up or AI will take your jobs and you can't afford to live no more."

That's not a headline from some think piece. That's my daughter, explaining why she refuses to think about what comes next.

Helen and I run Collab365. We've spent four years helping Microsoft 365 pros get their heads round Microsoft 365 and now AI. We've watched our own business model get gutted by the sheer pace of it. So when Katie describes her shift, I'm not listening as a dad who doesn't get it. I'm listening as someone who knows exactly what's coming for her desk.

Here's her day. Patients ring in usually shouting or grumbling at her. She triages the obvious stuff, shortness of breath goes straight to A&E, no debate. Then the emails roll in from hospitals, she prints the attachments, scans them back into their "Manual" filing system, and walks stacks of repeat prescriptions to doctors who are already drowning. That's the job.

The NHS are trying to automate part of it with a new AI bot called Emma. Currently, Emma can't handle a Scouse accent and Emma doesn't know the patient's history. I suspect, right now, Emma makes people yell louder, which lands the call back on people like Katie anyway.

But Emma is the worst this tech will ever be. Heidi AI can already read and scan clinical docs in seconds, and agent-based email sorting is a solved problem. Give it two to four years and 99% of what Katie does in a shift is gone. Not reduced. Gone.

Here's the bit that gutted me. Helen and I run an AI business and Katie has watched us build it. We've offered to get her involved countless times, but she still won't touch the stuff.

She says AI is "boring", "fake" and "wastes power". She's probably not wrong on any of those things, but I suspect that's not really why she's refusing. I think it's because if she engages with it, she has to accept that the transition to a world where "the bots take all the jobs" is now real.

One in seven young people aged 16-24 in the UK are already out of work. Katie knows that number already. She just doesn't want to carry it around with her or accept what's happening.

Helen called it the "Don't Look Up" shrug. A whole generation watching the asteroid and deciding that if nothing can be done, nothing will be done. And I understand it, genuinely. I scraped through 90s uni learning tech that was obsolete by graduation, wondering if I'd be able to eat. That fear made me move. Katie's fear makes her freeze.

We tried the optimistic angle. AI doesn't just eat jobs, it caves in costs. It should make things really cheap meaning we may not even HAVE to work. Life could be very good and the "9 to 5" could seem the most bizarre concept we all bought into, come 2050. "Abundance" as they call it, is a real possibility, not just a pitch deck word.

Right now, she's not buying it. And honestly, sitting across from her, neither was I, fully. Because the abundance story only works if the transition doesn't crush the people living through it. And right now the people living through it are 21, working reception, and quietly convinced there's no point planning for a future career.

I'm her dad and I don't have the answer.

That's the part that keeps me up.