Firms betting in opposition to entry-level Gen Z expertise by automating their roles could also be making a expensive long-term mistake.
That’s the warning from MIT analysis scientist Andrew McAfee, who co-leads the varsity’s Initiative on the Digital Economic system. Chopping off expertise at its supply, he argued, doesn’t simply shrink at present’s workforce—it disrupts the pipeline that produces tomorrow’s leaders.
“How else are individuals going to study to do the job besides through on-the-job studying and coaching apprenticeship?” McAfee informed Harvard Enterprise Overview in April. “That’s the way you study to do tough data work is by serving to any individual who’s good at that with the routine stuff. And once we put an excessive amount of automation in that too shortly, we lose that apprenticeship ladder.”
The implications lengthen past coaching gaps. By sidelining entry-level hiring, corporations additionally danger shedding a key aggressive benefit: Gen Z’s fluency with AI.
Roughly 76% of Gen Z reported utilizing a standalone AI instrument—the best of any era, in keeping with a November 2025 Deloitte examine. That familiarity, McAfee mentioned, makes them uniquely priceless as corporations race to combine AI into their operations.
“There’s a large demographic falloff. As individuals are inclined to become old, we are usually extra set in our methods and fewer prepared to attempt loopy new issues like AI,” McAfee, who can also be the cofounder of Workhelix, a startup working to assist corporations perceive their AI return-on-investment, added.
“So when you’re pulling again in your entry-level hiring, you might be most likely sacrificing future alternatives to study and the expert individuals of the long run. You’re additionally turning off the spigot of probably the most enthusiastic energy customers of AI in your group.”
Gen Z, already dealing with an uphill job market battle, is extra pessimistic than ever
For a lot of younger individuals, McAfee’s warning could already be enjoying out because the job market has tightened.
Postings on Handshake, a platform targeted on entry-level roles, are down 2% year-over-year and 12% under pre-pandemic ranges, in keeping with its Class of 2026 Community Tendencies report. In the meantime, the unemployment fee for faculty graduates aged 22 to 27 stands at 5.6%, per the New York Fed.
As graduation season ramped up, anxiousness climbed. Almost 9 in 10 graduates within the class of 2026 are involved that AI or automation may exchange entry-level roles, up sharply from 64% in 2025, in keeping with Monster.
Some enterprise leaders have amplified these fears. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, for instance, has lengthy repeated—however later walked again—predictions AI may get rid of as much as half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.
The dynamic is very hanging given entry-level roles are sometimes the least costly expertise corporations can rent—but as McAfee argued, chopping them dangers undermining each price effectivity and long-term workforce growth.
But, historic knowledge suggests younger staff could also be extra resilient than they assume. A current Goldman Sachs evaluation discovered college-educated younger staff are inclined to expertise earnings losses roughly half as giant as different displaced staff within the decade following job loss. They’re additionally extra prone to swap occupations and transfer into roles that complement new applied sciences somewhat than compete with them.
“Opposite to present considerations that the prices of AI will fall particularly exhausting on new graduates,” the report mentioned, “youthful staff have truly been capable of modify extra flexibly by means of occupational mobility and talent upgrading up to now.”
Some tech companies are doubling down on early-career expertise
Not each firm is pulling again. Some main employers are leaning into entry-level hiring, betting that early-career staff will likely be important to constructing—and scaling—AI.
IBM, for instance, mentioned it could triple its entry-level hiring partly to construct extra sturdy expertise and create better long-term worth.
“Individuals are speaking about both layoffs or freezing hiring, however I truly wish to say that we’re the alternative,” IBM CEO Arvind Krishna mentioned in October 2025. “I anticipate we’re most likely going to rent extra individuals out of school over the following 12 months than we have now up to now few years, so that you’re going to see that.”
In April, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff introduced his firm is hiring 1,000 new graduates and interns to assist construct its AI techniques.
“You might be proper they mentioned AI would kill entry-level jobs,” he wrote on X. “In the meantime these grads and interns are constructing it—powering Agentforce and Headless360 at Salesforce.”
And even Amazon—which has confronted scrutiny for shedding hundreds of staff in recent times—is sustaining its pipeline of younger expertise.
The tech big plans to deliver on 11,000 software program engineering interns in 2026, in step with prior years, in keeping with Enterprise Insider.
“I can let you know we’re hiring simply as many software program builders as we ever had within Amazon,” AWS CEO Matt Garman mentioned. “And actually, I see the demand for that actually accelerating.”
A model of this story initially printed on Fortune.com on Could 1, 2026.
