MIT’s David Autor warns AI may widen the skill gap for Gen Z workers

Gen Z was handed a tidy promise about AI: give a 24-year-old a capable enough assistant, and their work starts to look like a veteran’s. New research co-authored by MIT economist David Autor suggests that promise may run in reverse. AI made everyone’s drafts better. It did not make everyone better. The working paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in September 2026 as Working Paper 35720, followed 133 patent lawyers from 11 US intellectual property firms through a three-month randomized controlled trial. The most important result only appeared after the AI was switched off. What the patent lawyer experiment found Participants worked with a custom Google AI drafting assistant called InFlow. The tool has since been folded into Gemini Notebook. With the assistant in hand, drafting quality rose quickly. Output improved by 0.34 standard deviations after 10 days and by 0.38 standard deviations at the 90-day mark. Junior lawyers looked like the clear winners at this stage. They saw the biggest improvements in quality and efficiency, finishing tasks 18 minutes faster on average. In an unaided test of independent judgment, lawyers who had used the AI beat the control ...