If AI Starts Replacing Entry-Level Jobs, How Will Future Leaders Get Started?

As AI expands across business operations, will the jobs of young workers be among the first to go? If that happens, how will the future leaders of tomorrow enter the talent pipeline? Those are questions that have many HR leaders worried. Headlines warn that AI will damage, or already has damaged, the first rung on the corporate ladder, where young workers start their careers and occupy an important and useful position in corporate hierarchy. Though the full effects of AI on the labor market remain to be seen, some employers are already rethinking their workforce strategies.With AI revolutionizing the most fundamental parts of work, employers must decide whether to regard AI as a substitute for early-career workers or as a tool to accelerate their growth. “If you are a head of HR and you are not jumping up and down and saying, ‘Hey, this is going to impact our culture and our business and our people, and me and my team need to be a part of it,’ then you’re not doing your job,” said Dan Kaplan, managing director of the chief HR officer practice at executive search firm ZRG.Kaplan, who has more than a decade of experience advising CHROs, believes most HR leaders do understand the moment. But he says not enough attention is being paid to the early-career stage, since managerial succession is built on solid entry-level talent.How Much Is AI to Blame?The working world in 2025 is looking grim to many early-career workers, especially for those with college degrees. It’s been a year of layoffs, hiring freezes, and ominous predictions about the obsolescence of entry-level roles under the weight of AI. Salesforce eliminated 4,000 customer-support roles this year, and CEO Mark Benioff told podcaster Logan Bartlett that with AI, he simply doesn’t need as many people. Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei told Axios in May that AI could wipe out half of entry-level jobs. Yet so far, there’s little hard evidence that AI is displacing young workers en masse. “A lot of this is just related to the fact that the labor market has shifted back to a low-hiring, low-firing labor market,” said Joseph Briggs, senior economist at Goldman Sachs, on the firm’s Exchanges podcast. While it’s true that, across many sectors, college graduates are having trouble finding work, “the relationship that the anecdotes have to AI is often a little bit overstated,” he added.Briggs did note some evidence of impact in tech industries, where unemployment among young workers is slightly higher than in other sectors. A working paper from researchers at Stanford University also suggests that widespread adoption of generative AI contributed to a 13% decline in the relative employment of early-career workers in sectors like tech and customer support.Whether AI alone will trigger widespread unemployment among young people remains unclear. Still, companies in key industries are bringing in fewer entry-level hires in 2025. And with large-scale retirements looming, the question becomes: How are they filling the leadership pipeline?Avanade Leans Into Early-Career TalentAt the IT professional-services company Avanade, Paul Phillips isn’t cutting entry-level hires—he’s reaching further upstream. The company targets college sophomores and juniors for internships, training them early so that graduates arrive ready-made for full-time roles.In professional services, it’s imperative that talent is qualified as early as possible, so that their work can be chargeable to clients. Phillips, who is the company’s global head of HR, talent acquisition, and onboarding, likes to know that when he makes a hire, it’s clear right away where that person will fit in the organization. Since expanding the internship program two years ago, Avanade converts roughly 80% of its interns into full-time employees.For those young workers, “the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn is going to be key,” Phillips said. “We have a number of academies that we’ve spun up across Avanade where we bring in talent from non-traditional backgrounds and non-tech backgrounds, or we bring people working in sectors that we do see becoming commoditized in the near term and retrain them on the new set of skills.”In other sectors, where companies might have an older workforce, the retirement of baby boomers has created a knowledge drain. For process industry companies, which includes everything from metals and mining to paper and packaging, retirements are an acute problem and recruiting the next generation is a challenge. In such cases, AI can be a talent attractor, with employers positioning themselves as places where workers can use the latest tools and tech with less toil. In fact, a study by Boston Consulting Group and MIT found that when employees see the value of AI, they feel “more competent in their roles, more autonomous in their actions, and more connected to their work, colleagues, partners, and customers.”AI’s Short-Term Gain and Long-Term ImplicationsBusiness Insider reported that professional-services giant PwC is scaling back on hiring entry-level talent by nearly one-third over the next few years, citing “the rapid pace of technological change.” More broadly, BI has reported in May that AI could reshape consulting at every level of the business.If companies do rely too heavily on AI instead of young talent, “it is going to be short-term gain and massive long-term implications,” ZRG’s Kaplan warned. “If we find ourselves losing out at the entry level, it’s going to have a compounding effect, and it’s going to ultimately affect leadership pipelines.”Some employers are betting big on the opposite approach. “We’re helping a ton of clients think through AI investment and bring AI experts across their portfolio,” Kaplan said. Law, consulting, and private equity firms are doubling down on entry-level hiring. They see today’s graduates as a rare asset: digitally native, agile, and curious about technology. “Private equity tends to really see trends. They see trends and they understand.”Some leaders in the tech industry share this philosophy. Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman called replacing junior workers with AI “one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard,” arguing that this segment is the “least expensive” and “the most leaned into your AI tools.”Publicis, the global ad and PR company, launched a program to help jump-start these junior workers by building foundational skills. Called Ignite, the two-and-a-half-day kickoff program for early-career hires focuses on communication, time management, and business acumen. “We used to wait, but that’s when Ignite came to fruition. The goal is to get them to greater impact quicker,” said Nikki Slowinski, the Publicis group’s EVP of talent experience and development, at a From Day One conference.Without young workers, corporate culture will suffer. “You want that youthful excitement that typically comes from having new college grads and young professionals starting their career,” Kaplan said. “They socialize, they go out, they’re the ones who show up to the office baseball game and the office run in Central Park. If you don’t have that, it will erode your culture.”Augmentation, Not Replacement Trent Cotton, head of talent acquisition insights at iCIMS, told From Day One that while he can’t directly link fewer entry-level hires to AI, the trend does reflect a broader workforce-planning shift. Employers are asking where new hires are essential, and where AI can augment existing teams.Because AI is boosting individual productivity, some companies are consolidating roles and rethinking headcount. They’re asking whether they really need as many full-time employees, focusing instead on where those roles add the most value.Cotton believes the future is in augmentation, not replacement. AI is going to supercharge the young worker, he says. It normally takes 90 days to ramp up a new employee, but with AI, an employer can help an entry-level worker apply their education and start contributing right away. “I mean, AI can help them almost from day one.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism. She is the host of How to Be Anything, the podcast about people with unusual jobs.(Featured photo by FG Trade Latin/iStock by Getty Images)