Why Gen Z Is Learning to Type for AI Prompts

What the reporting found

On Sept. 27, 2026, Business Insider ran a story headlined "AI is prompting these Gen Zers to learn how to type." It follows young workers and students who are teaching themselves to type, and a teacher helping others do the same.

On Oct. 3, 2026, South Korea's Asia Business Daily (아시아경제) picked up the story for its series on Gen Z around the world. The Korean original describes Gen Z as people born from the late 1990s to the early 2010s. Most of them learned to write on phones and tablets. Many never had a proper chance to learn a computer keyboard, and plenty got by with two fingers.

That is starting to change as AI shows up in school and at work. In the paper's English edition, "an increasing number are practicing typing to communicate their ideas to artificial intelligence (AI) more quickly and accurately."

A prompt is a piece of writing

The idea at the center of both stories is simple. Business Insider put it this way: "AI is only as good as the prompt it's given." Asia Business Daily made the same point. To get the result you want, the prompt has to be specific and precise, and typing it yourself "can be more efficient than explaining at length via speech."

That makes sense. A good prompt usually has some background, a clear request and a few details about what you want back. That takes full sentences. If every sentence is a struggle, it is tempting to cut the prompt short and hope the tool fills the gaps. If typing feels easy, you are more likely to write the whole thing out.

Andrey Gerasimov, a 23-year-old computer science graduate, never took a typing class. He picked up the skill in video game chats and built it up to 170 words per minute. He believes faster typing makes for more efficient prompting. "You're going to be a lot more comfortable actually giving your full thoughts and ideas if you know that, hey, doing this is only going to take a minute," he told Business Insider.

Why not just talk to it?

Voice input is an option, and some people use it. Julia Andrusiak, 26, has an AI-focused job that sometimes means writing strong prompts. Her typing is still not fast, so she dictates her longer prompts. Business Insider reports that she feels self-conscious doing it, because in an open office it looks like she is talking to herself.

As the same story puts it: "Rambling voice prompts can be insufficiently clear and precise." Speaking is fine for plenty of things. But when you want to pick your words, read them back and fix a detail before you press Enter, a keyboard makes that easier.

Andrusiak's own start came in college. Her two-finger typing was so loud that a professor kept pausing his lecture. "It was the first moment I realized that I may not be the best at this," she said. She practiced by typing out books, then moved on to touch typing, which means typing without looking at the keyboard. She is still working on her speed and accuracy.

She happily uses AI for writing and research, but she has mixed feelings about leaning on it too much. "With the ever increasingly fast world, we need to type quicker. But I feel like people are really relying on AI," she said.

It isn't only about AI

Andreas Francazi, a 36-year-old IT teacher in Vienna, has spent a decade teaching typing to 15- to 30-year-olds. He told Business Insider that his students' typing skills have declined. His newer students didn't grow up around physical computers, and some arrive typing fast with just two fingers. So he starts with the basics.

He has also noticed that students of all ages get absorbed in a three-minute typing test. "The practice can be quite meditative," Francazi said. "You just sit there, you have the text in front of you, and you type character by character, and it kind of calms you a bit."

Tarun Krishnamurthy, an 18-year-old sophomore at San Diego State University, started practicing typing in middle school, just for fun. Now it helps him keep up with professors who talk fast and power through their slides. He told Business Insider that some other students might have a hard time, because they need to look at their keyboard instead of the professor's slideshow. Looking ahead to work, he put it plainly: "typing could be a big bottleneck."

How to practice typing prompts

You don't need a natural gift. You need a few good habits and a little time each day.

• Type full sentences. Prompts are sentences, not word lists. Practice with capitals, commas, question marks, colons and quotes, the way you really write. Sentence practice is a good place to start.
• Accuracy first. Slow down until your typing is clean. A prompt full of typos is harder to read back and check before you send it. Speed tends to follow.
• Keep your eyes on the screen. If you're watching your hands, you can't see what you just wrote. Learning to touch type fixes that.
• Write it out, then trim. Type the whole request first, with the context and the details. Cutting words is easy. Adding the ones you skipped is harder.
• Practice a little every day. A short session most days is easier to keep up than one long session on the weekend.

To put these habits to work, try our new typing practice for AI prompts.

A skill that carries over

The people in these stories mostly learned on their own: typing out books, chatting in games, practicing for fun in middle school. The skill then helped with lectures, work and prompts alike. Typing is something you learn once and use for everything you write. For the bigger picture, read Does typing still matter in the age of AI?

Frequently asked questions