Are Entry-Level Jobs Changing Due to AI?
August 13, 2025
It鈥檚 happened to us before. A new technology cresting like a giant inevitable wave, blotting out the horizon and a clear view of the future along with it. The printing press, steam engines, machine production, factory automation, the internet. Each one was the kind of turning point that enters the history books: here is the moment where everything changed.
But it鈥檚 hard to tell the significance of a moment when you鈥檙e still standing in it. Harder still to guess the practical ways it might impact any one individual. But it鈥檚 safe to say that this new technological moment, like those previous ones, will mark some critical shifts to the status quo. And AI, like the industrial revolutions of eras past, will almost certainly have the biggest impact on the people who have the least to gain from the spoils of technological advancement.
As this new generation of young people enters an AI-giddy job market, what do they have to look out for? While have warned of an of entry-level jobs in particular, the current climate is a bit more complicated. What are the real impacts of AI on entry-level jobs? Let鈥檚 take a look at the main points:
Is AI Responsible for Entry-Level Job Cuts and Hiring Freezes?
While AI is certainly impacting the job market in several ways, it is not the main driver of either slowed hiring or increased elimination of jobs right now. The implementation of AI is happening in the midst of , such as federal budget cuts and shifting trade and tax policies. Because of this, it is hard to completely isolate the factor of AI from the difficulty of the job market as a whole.
Even so, we are almost certainly at the front end of AI impacting hiring/firing. In the on job cuts from Challenger, Gray, & Christmas, the firm reported that in the year to date, 10,375 job cuts were explicitly attributed to artificial intelligence, 鈥渟uggesting a significant acceleration in AI-related restructuring.鈥� This is not to mention the eliminated positions and shrunken hiring policies that are not explicitly stated to be AI-driven.
As companies grapple with these new tools and decide if and how they want to implement them, there will continue to be disruptions and fluctuations in hiring and firing trends. While it鈥檚 impossible to anticipate exactly how these developments will play out, we will likely be feeling the direct effects of this transition for the next several years at the very least.
Will Some Entry-Level Jobs Feel AI’s Impact More Than Others?
Yes. Going forward, the entry-level jobs that will feel the impact of AI first and most heavily are those whose responsibilities have the most relevance and exposure to AI (). This includes data engineers, database administrators, IT specialists, cybersecurity personnel, and auditors鈥攑rofessionals who work consistently with large datasets that AI is primed to work with better than humans can. These are already evolving to the use of AI tools, by automating routine, manual tasks.
However, for entry-level jobs, even outside of these more technical fields, the range of job responsibilities that could be impacted by AI is much wider. Already, young professionals are being encouraged to use AI to write emails, coordinate meeting schedules, prepare datasets, brainstorm ideas, conduct research, and draft documents.
Does AI Carry Productivity Risks for Entry-Level Workers?
The great hope behind the AI push is that automating these daily tasks will increase worker productivity. While this may be true in some ways, there are also genuine risks. For entry-level jobs in particular, where building foundational skills and knowledge is critical, it may be harder for young professionals to develop competency and fluency. have come out about the . When users regularly rely on AI for problem-solving, decision-making, and synthesizing and analyzing information, there is a measurable decline in their ability to perform those tasks without the use of AI. And when it comes to relying on generative AI for research, models are still regularly producing what have been termed 鈥渉allucinations,鈥� or incorrect information presented as fact.
Despite these risks, many companies and business leaders are taking the shift towards AI not only as economically positive, but also as existentially inevitable. If AI is a runaway train, many CEOs have taken the stance that they must jump on it, now, and fast, so they can get ahead, regardless of where the train is going, or whether it should be slowed or stopped. For young people entering the workforce for the first time, or new professionals seeing their job responsibilities shift beneath their fingers, the inevitability of AI feels more dangerous, because they are the ones who may well be caught on the tracks.
Automation vs. Augmentation?
The current fear around entry-level jobs is that they will be automated out of existence. And without those early chances to develop the skills needed to advance to higher roles, every rung of the corporate ladder has the potential to be cut off.
But for AI-exposed jobs that are most likely to be impacted by this shift, a more measured estimate is to think of certain discrete job tasks being automated, while the human responsibilities might shift more into the realm of quality assurance, oversight, and management. Indeed, certain jobs will simply not exist the way they used to. But this has been true in the wake of all new technologies. The question that remains open is how deeply we will incorporate these new tools into our human systems, and how we will weather that shift.
In an , MIT economics professor Sendhil Mullainathan discussed the possible paths forward for AI integration鈥攁nd the fact that any one path is not inevitable but a choice we get to make. Mullainathan says:
“Whether we end up building things that replace us, or things that enhance our capacities, that is something that we can influence. But I am feeling as much urgency as everyone else: If we keep going down the automation path, it鈥檚 going to be very hard to walk back and start changing things.”
Currently, the largest AI developers are building models inside of an automation framework, and setting them up to hit benchmarks within that path. But economists and scholars like Mullainathan see a more sustainable path in AI-augmented jobs: those in which the strengths of the AI complement and communicate with our human strengths. While AI is and will continue to be better at working with large datasets than we are, it doesn鈥檛 see outside the data. And as Mullainathan says, 鈥渢here are just so many problems where what鈥檚 not in the data is as important as what鈥檚 in the data.”
Where To Go From Here?
Entry-level jobs are certainly changing due to AI, but it remains to be seen exactly how extensive those changes will be. With constant headlines warning of an impending elimination of most entry-level jobs, it鈥檚 hard not to get swept up in the panic, especially when other factors are contributing to a very difficult job market. While the tech and business worlds are likely to continue morphing to accommodate a greater use of AI, there are other fields, such as those dominated by human-facing interpersonal roles and highly-skilled physical ones, that are less likely to be affected.
Sea changes like this have happened before. Ask any large language model, and it might tell you that much. But unlike AI, we humans not only have the ability to recognize patterns in history, but to think, choose differently, and act in alignment with our choices. Unfortunately, those of us with the most to gain from AI are the ones with the largest say in what we do next, while those of us with the most to lose have close to no say at all. May we each, to the extent that we are able, choose our next steps wisely.
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