AI Is Reshaping The Entry-Level Job Market. Young Workers May Need A New Way In.

Artificial intelligence is taking on more of the routine work traditionally assigned to junior employees, changing what some companies expect from entry-level hires and how young workers gain the experience that has long formed the first stage of a career.

At London advertising agency Catalyst, AI tools now handle research, gather data and produce initial drafts of copy, allowing one junior employee to work across five client accounts. Founder Tobias Green said the agency previously needed several employees to handle that workload, CNBC reported.

"If AI removes the grunt work, then the grunt work is no longer relevant," Green said. Instead of learning to perform those tasks manually, he said junior employees increasingly need to know how to work with AI and improve what it produces.

The change extends beyond individual workplaces. The Open University's 2026 Business Barometer, based on a survey of 1,500 U.K. business leaders, found that 51% said AI was changing how they hire. Nineteen percent said they had reduced entry-level recruitment, with 42% of that group linking the reduction to wider adoption of AI for junior-level tasks. The survey was conducted by Opinium in April and May.

Economic conditions are also affecting recruitment. The same research found that 76% of organizations said economic uncertainty had made recruitment or training more difficult, while 43% had hired fewer staff over the previous year. The figures show that changes in entry-level hiring are taking place against a broader slowdown in recruitment rather than being driven by AI alone.

The effect of automation is particularly noticeable in jobs where new employees have traditionally spent their first years performing repeatable tasks. Research, basic drafting, data gathering, administrative work and some coding can now be completed or accelerated with generative AI tools, leaving employers to reconsider what work should be assigned to people at the beginning of their careers.

In finance, companies are making similar changes to jobs that once centered on reconciliations, journal entries and basic reporting. Employers are not necessarily abandoning junior talent, but some are changing the work those employees perform as automation handles more repetitive assignments, Fortune reported earlier this month.

The shift matters in part because entry-level jobs have traditionally served as training grounds. Employees learn how businesses operate by completing routine assignments, correcting mistakes and working alongside more experienced colleagues before taking on greater responsibility.

Not all companies are responding by reducing junior recruitment. A survey of 500 U.K. and Irish mid-market leaders by technology consultancy Klarus found that 45% were using AI to help junior employees work faster and more effectively, while almost a quarter said the technology was creating new roles and opportunities.

Some large employers are expanding early-career recruitment while changing the jobs themselves. IBM said in February that it planned to triple entry-level hiring in the United States in 2026 across a range of departments as it recast junior roles for workplaces using AI, Bloomberg reported. The company did not disclose the number of positions involved.

The experience has been different in some industries with greater exposure to AI. Research using U.S. Census Bureau data found weaker hiring of workers ages 22 to 24 in highly AI-exposed industries following the release of ChatGPT, while hiring in less-exposed industries remained steadier. Some graduates trained for highly exposed white-collar occupations have instead taken jobs in industries such as retail and food service.

Software development is another area where the work assigned to junior employees is changing. Sheila Flavell, chief operating officer at business and technology consultancy FDM Group, said tools including Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex mean developers are increasingly overseeing projects involving both AI agents and people.

Changes in the work itself are also influencing how some companies recruit. Beaumont said employers are looking more closely at broad capabilities and whether candidates can be retrained rather than selecting graduates solely for narrowly defined technical skills. One global retail bank she works with has widened its recruitment beyond traditional talent pools to include graduates in subjects such as psychology and law, placing greater emphasis on skills including critical thinking.

For employers, removing repetitive work also changes how inexperienced employees acquire the judgment needed to review the work produced by AI. Cheney Hamilton, a director at research firm Bloor, said the routine assignments given to junior employees historically provided experience through repetition and gave workers the context needed to recognize mistakes.

Rather than keeping repetitive assignments simply as a training exercise, some employers are changing how new workers learn. FDM Group is training employees on real business problems and asking them to develop solutions using agentic AI tools, shifting the focus from learning individual tasks to understanding the work those tools are being used to complete.