Baby Boomers might be retiring early to get out of working with Gen Z, based on the findings of a new study.
A new survey conducted by Clari + Salesloft in partnership with independent research firm Workplace Intelligence revealed that 19 percent of Baby Boomers are planning to retire early because they’re tired of dealing with Gen Z at work.
Why It Matters
Gen Z has quickly garnered a negative reputation since entering the workforce.
The age cohort, which spans from roughly 13 to 28, has often been fired over concerns of their work preparation and professionalism.
A prior study from late 2024 found a whopping six in 10 employers had already fired college graduates who were hired in 2024. And one in seven said they might refrain from hiring new college grads.
What To Know
Some Baby Boomers, often defined as people born from 1946 to 1964, are leaving the workplace early over their concerns of Gen Z co-workers.
The Clari + Salesloft survey, which looked at responses from 2,000 U.S. sellers and sales leaders, discovered that in addition to the 19 percent of Baby Boomers who are looking to retire early to avoid Gen Z. Gen Z was also looking for jobs where they could stay away from Baby Boomers.
Roughly 28 percent of Gen Z said they were looking for roles where the interactions with Baby Boomers was minimal, and generational conflict is believed to cost organizations $56 billion in lost productivity per year, according to the report.
A large source of the strain between Baby Boomers and Gen Z is the adoption of artificial intelligence, which may allow some younger workers to meet quotas that their elders cannot, despite more work experience.
“Sales should be one of the biggest beneficiaries of AI, but right now it’s becoming a divider instead of a multiplier,” said Steve Cox, CEO at Clari + Salesloft in a statement. “Some sellers are moving faster, closing more, and hitting quota with AI. Others are resisting it or barely using it. That gap is creating friction inside teams and dragging down performance. When AI is implemented intentionally, it aligns how work gets done and raises the floor for everyone, not just the early adopters.”
Across the sales sector, 39 percent of Gen Z sellers say they would rather be managed by AI than a Baby Boomer, while 25 percent of Boomers say they would prefer working with AI over a Gen Z colleague.
Work-life balance has also sparked a generational standoff. With 71 percent of Gen Z believing Boomers value hours worked over results, another 56 percent blamed Boomers for today’s toxic work culture.
This was in comparison to the 64 percent of Boomers who said Gen Z prioritizes work-life balance over business needs.
“The $56 billion productivity loss is only the visible cost,” Cox said. “When AI adoption is fragmented, the damage compounds—leading to missed forecasts, slower execution, and higher attrition quarter after quarter. At that point, generational conflict isn’t a culture issue; it’s a balance-sheet issue.”
While Boomers built careers around loyalty and stability, that sort of employer contract has essentially evaporated, Michael Ryan, a finance expert and the founder of MichaelRyanMoney.com, told Newsweek.
“Pensions disappeared, housing got expensive, careers stopped being linear. Now they’re managing Gen Z in a world where one bad Slack message can blow up their reputation, where the old implicit deals don’t exist anymore. Early retirement isn’t about Gen Z. It’s about realizing the game they trained for isn’t being played anymore,” Ryan said.
“Gen Z walks in with different survival math. They saw their parents’ loyalty rewarded with layoffs. They’re entering AI uncertainty and debt. So they ask ‘what’s the ROI on destroying myself?’ Boomers hear laziness. Gen Z hears exploitation. Same job, different risk calculus.”
What People Are Saying
Kevin Thompson, the CEO of 9i Capital Group and the host of the 9innings podcast, told Newsweek: “At the core is a clash over what ‘work ethic’ actually means. Boomers grew up in an era where employers and workers shared responsibility; loyalty, benefits, and retirement were part of a mutual contract. That contract no longer exists. Risk has shifted to the individual, worker protections have weakened, and retirement is now largely self-funded.”
Michael Ryan, a finance expert and the founder of MichaelRyanMoney.com, told Newsweek: “When generations stop talking, you lose two things at once. Institutional memory from the top, technical instincts from the bottom. Productivity tanks. More broadly, generational friction is just one flavor of workplace disengagement that already costs hundreds of billions annually.
“The risk is not that they dislike each other. It’s that both sides decide the other is impossible and opt out. You end up with nobody mentoring, knowledge transfer breaks, retirement systems get squeezed, and you’re trying to run an economy on one generation’s capacity at a time. That math fails.”
Alex Beene, a financial literacy instructor for the University of Tennessee at Martin, told Newsweek: “There is perhaps no generational gap as substantial in the history of the modern workplace as that between Baby Boomers and Gen Z. Gen Z is the first generation to be born into a world that was fully integrated into an online infrastructure. They’re used to their personality and beliefs being public and publicly shared. This is in contrast to many Baby Boomers who still prefer the majority of their personal and professional interactions to be offline and are used to decades of separating those worlds.”
What Happens Next
Younger workers continue to push back against some of the toxic workplace culture and weak employee protections they’ve been inundated with, Thompson said.
“Older workers often interpret that pushback as entitlement or lack of commitment,” Thompson said. “Both sides are reacting to the same broken system just from different lived experiences. Over time, this tension should ease as each group better understands what the other values and why they see the system differently.”