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Companies betting against entry-level Gen Z talent by automating their roles may be making a costly long-term mistake.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the warning from MIT research scientist Andrew McAfee, who co-leads the school\u2019s Initiative on the Digital Economy. Cutting off talent at its source, he argued, doesn\u2019t just shrink today\u2019s workforce\u2014it disrupts the pipeline that produces tomorrow\u2019s leaders.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow else are people going to learn to do the job except via on-the-job learning and training apprenticeship?\u201d McAfee told Harvard Business Review<\/em> last month. \u201cThat\u2019s how you learn to do difficult knowledge work is by helping somebody who\u2019s good at that with the routine stuff. And when we put too much automation in that too quickly, we lose that apprenticeship ladder.\u201d<\/p>\n The consequences extend beyond training gaps. By sidelining entry-level hiring, companies also risk losing a key competitive advantage: Gen Z\u2019s fluency with AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n Roughly 76% of Gen Z reported using a standalone AI tool\u2014the highest of any generation, according to a Deloitte study. That familiarity, McAfee said, makes them uniquely valuable as companies race to integrate AI into their operations.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a big demographic falloff. As people tend to get older, we tend to be more set in our ways and less willing to try crazy new things like AI,\u201d McAfee, who is also the cofounder of Workhelix, a startup working to help companies understand their AI return-on-investment, added.<\/p>\n \u201cSo if you\u2019re pulling back on your entry-level hiring, you are probably sacrificing future opportunities to learn and the skilled people of the future. You\u2019re also turning off the spigot of the most enthusiastic power users of AI in your organization.\u201d<\/p>\n Fortune<\/em> reached out to McAfee for further comment.<\/p>\n For many young people, McAfee\u2019s warning may already be playing out as the job market has tightened.\u00a0<\/p>\n Postings on Handshake, a platform focused on entry-level roles, are down 2% year-over-year and 12% below pre-pandemic levels, according to its Class of 2026 Network Trends report. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for college graduates aged 22 to 27 stands at 5.6%, per the New York Fed.\u00a0<\/p>\n As commencement season ramps up, anxiety is climbing. Nearly nine in 10 graduates in the class of 2026 are concerned that AI or automation could replace entry-level roles, up sharply from 64% in 2025, according to Monster.\u00a0<\/p>\n Some business leaders have amplified those fears. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, for example, has long repeated that AI could eliminate up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.<\/p>\n The dynamic is especially striking given that entry-level roles are often the least expensive talent companies can hire\u2014yet as McAfee argued, cutting them risks undermining both cost efficiency and long-term workforce development.<\/p>\n Yet historical data suggests young workers may be more resilient than they think. A recent Goldman Sachs analysis found that college-educated young workers tend to experience earnings losses roughly half as large as other displaced workers in the decade following job loss. They\u2019re also more likely to switch occupations and move into roles that complement new technologies rather than compete with them.<\/p>\n \u201cContrary to current concerns that the costs of AI will fall especially hard on new graduates,\u201d the report said, \u201cyounger workers have actually been able to adjust more flexibly through occupational mobility and skill upgrading in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n Not every company is pulling back. Some major employers are leaning into entry-level hiring, betting that early-career workers will be essential to building\u2014and scaling\u2014AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n IBM, for example, said it would triple its entry-level hiring in part to build more durable skills and create greater long-term value.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople are talking about either layoffs or freezing hiring, but I actually want to say that we are the opposite,\u201d IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said in October. \u201cI expect we are probably going to hire more people out of college over the next 12 months than we have in the past few years, so you\u2019re going to see that.\u201d<\/p>\n Just this week, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced his company is hiring 1,000 new graduates and interns to help build its AI systems.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou are right they said AI would kill entry-level jobs,\u201d he wrote on X. \u201cMeanwhile these grads and interns are building it\u2014powering Agentforce and Headless360 at Salesforce.\u201d<\/p>\n And even Amazon\u2014which has faced scrutiny for laying off thousands of workers in recent years\u2014is maintaining its pipeline of young talent.<\/p>\n The tech giant plans to bring on 11,000 software engineering interns in 2026, in line with prior years, according to Business Insider<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cI can tell you we are hiring just as many software developers as we ever had inside of Amazon,\u201d AWS CEO Matt Garman said. \u201cAnd in fact, I see the demand for that really accelerating.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #MIT #expert #warns #automating #Gen #entrylevel #jobs #backfireand #cost #companies #future #workforce<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Companies betting against entry-level Gen Z talent by automating their roles may be making a costly long-term mistake. That\u2019s the warning from MIT research scientist Andrew McAfee, who co-leads the… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1139,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1892,1895,424,426,1292,225,1886,1894,240,412,1893,428,818,1887,430,1888,1889,433,583,1890,1891],"class_list":["post-1138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-automating","tag-backfireand","tag-career-advice","tag-careers","tag-companies","tag-cost","tag-entry-level","tag-entrylevel","tag-expert","tag-future","tag-gen","tag-gen-z","tag-hiring","tag-job-hunting","tag-jobs","tag-mit","tag-skills","tag-tech-workers","tag-warns","tag-workforce","tag-workforce-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1138\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gw.adampg777.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Gen Z, already facing an uphill job market battle, is more pessimistic than ever<\/h2>\n
Some tech firms are doubling down on early-career talent<\/h2>\n