Protecting the Endangered Species Known as Entry-Level Workers

How will fresh grads gain the experience and skills to take on senior roles when AI breaks the lower rungs of the career ladder?

- Laurel Teo

One of the biggest fears about artificial intelligence (AI) has been the extent to which it can reduce or even remove the roles of large swathes of employees.

The debate is now zeroing in on the disproportionate threat it poses to young people entering, or about to enter, the job market.

It's no longer about AI stealing jobs. It's about AI smothering careers in their cradle.

Experts from research firms and big tech companies have flagged that AI capabilities have advanced to the point that they can deftly handle entry-level work across multiple fields—from marketing to management consulting, law, finance, and even creative fields such as the entertainment industry.

This enables companies to—if they so wish—automate an entire bottom layer of junior jobs, thereby slashing considerable costs.

To be clear, no organization has publicly declared that it will stop hiring entry-level workers altogether.

The latest (2025) edition of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Future of Jobs Report notes that 40 per cent of the 1,000-plus global employers surveyed expect to cut jobs in which tasks can be AI-automated.

While the WEF report did not pinpoint those jobs to be entry-level ones, others have gone further to call out what some have described as breaking the lower rungs of the career ladder.

Oxford Economics said in its May 27 US research briefing that "there are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates".

In the same month, leading AI researcher and entrepreneur Dario Amodei made the dramatic prediction that AI could erase half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.

Dr Amodei led the development of OpenAI's ChatGPT before leaving the firm with his sister to start competing business Anthropic in 2021.

DISENFRANCHISING FRESH GRADS The implications are immense.