Dad’s worried about his job. So’s mom. Now the teens are too, because it turns out that AI is killing teen jobs even faster than it’s coming for adult roles.
For the first time ever, I interviewed a teen on the TechFirst podcast. And she was really, really smart. But even she doesn’t have a lot of ideas for what to do when AI takes 30% of teen jobs away. Her name is Karissa Tang, and she’s a high-school student in California. She’s also interned at a VC, assisted with research at UCLA, and founded her own company.
But seeing some of the anecdotal evidence of AI’s impact on teen jobs, she decided to deep dive on the topic. And what she found is deeply, deeply concerning.
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Full transcript: AI is killing teen jobs faster
Note: this is an AI-generated transcript. It may not be 100% correct.
John Koetsier: Is AI going to kill teen employment? According to a new study by a teen, it’s not gonna be pretty. Hello and welcome to TechFirst. My name is John Koetsier. MIT just released a study saying that AI can replace about 12% of the U.S. workforce. That’s about $1.2 trillion in wages lost to AI in areas as diverse as finance, healthcare, HR, logistics, and professional services.
Most studies, though, don’t really look at teen impacts, so a teen did. She researched how AI will impact teen jobs and published a pretty significant study based on her results and findings. I quote: AI is expected to reduce teen employment by 30% by 2030 for the top 10 most popular teen jobs. Her name is Karissa Tang.
She interned at NSV Wolf Capital, a VC. She’s the founder at Booted, a board games company. She’s a research assistant at UCLA and a high school senior in California. Welcome, Karissa.
Karissa Tang: Thank you for the introduction, John. It’s great to be here.
John Koetsier: Hey, super pumped to have you. My first time interviewing somebody who just got back from school, so it’s gonna be good.
I think it’s not looking great, though, for teen employment, is it?
Karissa Tang: Yeah, so it is not. Currently there’s over 5.66 million teens employed in America. That’s 30% of teens ages 16 to 19 who are employed. And my research looks at AI’s impact on teen jobs.
So I looked at specifically how tech will impact the top 10 most popular teenage job segments like cashiers and waiters. And net-net, my analysis shows that AI can replace thousands of jobs by 2030. That’s the prediction within just the leading top 10 teenage jobs, which is around 50% of teenage employment. And that’s a 27% decline in 2030 from 2024 employment figures. So massive implications. It’s not looking too great for us teens.
John Koetsier: Wow.
Which jobs will be hardest hit? What are those top 10?
Karissa Tang: Yeah, so for all the top 10 jobs I looked at, it’s just the top 10 most popular ones: cashiers, waiters and waitresses, fast food counter workers, cooks, and retail salespersons. That’s like the top five.
In terms of which jobs are the hardest-hitting in terms of AI’s impact, it’s cashiers, which is the number one most popular. Huge job. There’s over 700,000 teens employed at grocery stores and places like that. And due to AI-powered self-checkout systems, by 2030 there will be a 54% displacement. That means over 350,000 teen cashiers will be impacted.
And second is fast food counter workers, with the rise of AI-powered kiosks at your local coffee shop or different stores, where you can order on a kiosk instead of talking to someone face to face. That wipes out about 37% of teenage fast food counter worker jobs.
So those are the two hardest-hitting jobs. Some runner-ups are retail salespersons and customer service reps, with the rise of online shopping and also the rise of gen AI assistants.
John Koetsier: So it sounds like the common denominator there is basically self-service.
I mean, we see that in retail, right? We see that with some of the Amazon Go stores. We see that at other stores where you just grab stuff and walk out. You see that with self-checkout at grocery stores. Is that kind of the common denominator? That AI or automation is just going to take over those sorts of things?
Karissa Tang: Yeah. It’s usually the simpler exchanges. Like, “Let’s just do this and finish it up.” Cashiers—just exchange and finish it up. Fast food workers—let’s just pay for my hamburger and be done with it. Let me just ask this question and finish it. Those types of jobs.
But the safer jobs are ones that require a little more manual or physical labor, such as cooks, stock and order fillers at grocery stores, food prep workers, and hosts and hostesses. Those are only seeing between 0% and 5% AI displacement by 2030.
John Koetsier: Interesting. Of course, because I talk a lot about robots as well, and I’ve interviewed the CEOs of a lot of robotic companies.
Flippy, the hamburger-making robot—I interviewed them probably three years ago. They started putting those into White Castle restaurants and places like that. I think it’s still challenging. They’re still quite expensive and still fairly limited. But who knows—as we get humanoid robots that can go into a workspace designed for humans and start doing these tasks, maybe not quite as fast, maybe eventually at the same speed.
Fast food places work at a very high rate of speed. If you ever look behind the order counter, it’s pretty chaotic. Those jobs might be at risk as well in the future.
Karissa Tang: A hundred percent. Yeah. My research even includes Flippy by Miso Robotics, which is cool.
White Castle uses Flippy for fried foods and fries and all that. So that definitely contributes to AI’s impact on cooks’ jobs among teens. And I agree—there will be a progression there. My research predicts AI will impact around 5% of those jobs, but definitely less compared to the more exchange-based, less manual-labor jobs.
John Koetsier: Yeah. Are there other jobs that teens do that involve more interaction with people, where the human touch matters? In the adult world, those might be a little safer.
Do you see anything like that in the teen world?
Karissa Tang: Yes, a hundred percent. Within the top 10 teenage jobs, the one that really sticks out is hosts and hostesses, which my paper predicts will see a 0% impact from AI.
At higher-end restaurants, most people don’t want to order a really nice steak from an AI robot. So that personal touch matters for hosts and hostesses. I don’t see AI impacting that segment as much. That’s the ninth most popular teenage job.
Other jobs like coaching, teaching, or tutoring aren’t within the top 10, so I didn’t study them. But I coach basketball for my school’s middle school team, and maybe I’m a little biased, but I don’t see AI impacting coaching and teaching as much.
I do think there’s some impact in the sense that AI can help you learn material and explain concepts. But there’s still a need for human interaction—to ask questions and to have that hands-on guidance, like, “This is how you shoot a basketball.” So I don’t think AI will heavily impact those more human-connection-based jobs.
John Koetsier: I tend to agree. OpenAI released an education or training version a few months ago, and that’s very cool.
But typically you need someone who comes alongside you and gives you motivation. Especially as a teen, if you’re struggling. Tutors provide that as well. It’s the why as much as the how.
Is there anything that makes teen jobs specifically more vulnerable to AI displacement than adult jobs? Or is it similar across the board according to your research?
Karissa Tang: Teenagers tend to take on lower entry-level jobs because we haven’t had the time to develop all those skills yet. We’re still on step one or step two.
Many of these entry-level jobs—like cashier or fast food counter worker—are more replaceable by AI because they’re lower-skilled. And within the top 10 jobs, teens typically take on the easier parts of those roles.
For example, in retail sales, you might have a 35-year-old salesperson and a 16-year-old salesperson. Typically the 35-year-old handles higher-level, more difficult questions, while the teenager handles easier ones. My research doesn’t explicitly model that, but we do acknowledge that because of this, AI is likely to displace even more teen jobs since we’re doing lower-level, more easily replaceable work.
John Koetsier: That mirrors what we see at the adult level too. Mid-level or senior people are using AI to do things they might’ve previously delegated to assistants.
It strikes me—my mom was a retail salesperson at very high-end fashion stores. Very high-touch, very personal. A two-hour shopping journey with a client. That kind of role is less amenable to AI. But then again, we’re seeing AI tools that show what clothing looks like on you, what colors suit you, and so on. So it’s entering everywhere.
What made you decide to do this study? What motivated you to write a 20-page paper with dozens of citations?
Karissa Tang: My biggest motivation was my aunt, who runs a boba shop.
In the Bay Area, a lot of teens take on boba jobs. I know several friends who work there during the summer. Some classmates even asked me if my aunt was hiring. But she told me they didn’t need as many workers that summer, which surprised me.
From talking to friends and classmates, it seemed pretty difficult to land a summer job at boba shops, cafés, or fast food chains. That really piqued my curiosity.
We hear a lot about AI taking over jobs in engineering or customer service, but there wasn’t much discussion about how AI impacts teen jobs. When I looked at tea shops and cafés in my area, I noticed kiosks replacing cashiers. Instead of two cashiers, there are now zero. That’s two jobs per shop gone.
That’s what launched me into this study. I focused on the top 10 most popular teenage jobs because that’s statistically the most impactful way to analyze the issue.
I’ve also been doing research under Professor George Geis at UCLA, which gave me an introduction to conducting research and analyzing data. I worked on this paper for about a year, and I’m glad to have finished it.
The paper predicts a 27% displacement of teenage jobs, and I think that’s huge. Parents, students, and policymakers need to know about this. I genuinely enjoyed writing the paper.
John Koetsier: Very cool. And you did a great job.
When you mentioned the automated kiosk at the boba shop, it’s not just two jobs—it’s eight or ten people when you consider coverage and part-time shifts. There are still other roles like prep, restocking, and cleaning, but clearly there’s an impact.
What was your methodology? How did you approach the data?
Karissa Tang: I approached this from a top-down analysis. First, I looked at the top 10 teenage jobs according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2024.
Then I examined AI technologies replacing those jobs. For example, with cooking robots like Flippy, I looked at the U.S. market size for cooking robots, the projected growth rate through 2030, and estimated how many units would be deployed.
From there, I estimated how many human jobs those technologies would displace, and then how many of those jobs were held by teens. Most of the data came from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and market growth reports, depending on the job category.
John Koetsier: Perfect. Super smart.
So what’s the solution? You and your friends still need jobs. These roles teach life skills—working with a boss, having a schedule, learning responsibility.
What are you doing to stay relevant and employable?
Karissa Tang: I think AI is inevitable. But one solution is for schools and governments to create job opportunities specifically for teens, so we can learn without fear of displacement.
That could mean better awareness of summer camp jobs or coaching opportunities. Another approach is incentivizing employers to hire teens.
On a personal level, building people skills is really important. By building relationships, I was able to get a job coaching basketball at my school. That helped me learn communication, leadership, time management, and financial responsibility.
Teenage jobs teach important life skills, including financial literacy. One way teens can adapt is by focusing more on budgeting and learning how to use AI productively, because AI skills will matter for the rest of our lives.
John Koetsier: That’s a great point. I spoke with a CTO who said his 16-year-old son was using AI in ways that blew his mind.
Young people aren’t afraid to experiment and fail. They jump in, try things, and learn quickly. That can help teens upskill beyond traditional service jobs.
I have a future guest who’s going to talk about an automation tax—similar to Bill Gates’ old proposal to tax robots. That money could fund new jobs, including for teens, in areas like elder care or environmental projects that currently aren’t economically viable.
Huge changes are coming. Your generation is right at the forefront. You may have to find employment—or create it. You’re already a founder, after all.
Great work. Super interesting. Thanks for being here and talking about it.
Karissa Tang: Thanks so much, John. It’s an honor to be interviewed by you. I’m excited to see where this impact leads the world, and I’m grateful to have been able to speak on this podcast.