Artificial intelligence is driving a sharp decline in entry-level employment for young adults aged 22 to 25, particularly in roles heavily exposed to automation, according to findings by Brynjolfsson et al. The shift is closing traditional professional on-ramps and creating a widening gap in early-career hiring across global markets.
Stanford Research Links AI Exposure to Entry-Level Job Declines
The impact of artificial intelligence on the labor market is hitting new college graduates and young workers harder than experienced personnel. Research highlights that for young adults aged 22 to 25, jobs where “automative” users of AI are especially prevalent show heavily declining entry level employment rates. In contrast, for jobs where AI is merely “augmentative,” the entry level job picture is much more muddled.
The researchers also theorized that entry-level workers could be especially affected by AI’s impact on jobs requiring heavily “codified” knowledge—the kind of formal, standardized, documented knowledge that can be taught through education, textbooks, or written procedures. That contrasts with jobs where AI mainly complements an experienced worker’s more “tacit” knowledge, which is overwhelmingly acquired through practice, mentorship, and repeated exposure to real situations, the researchers write.
Global Jobpocalypse and the Decline of Big Tech Junior Hiring
In 2022, Rishabh Mishra joined a high-ranking engineering college in India’s Jabalpur with the most predictable dream in global tech: study computer science, write code, and one day make it to Silicon Valley. Three years later, Mishra faces a sobering reality as artificial intelligence has gutted entry-level roles in the tech industry that Mishra and his classmates were counting on. Among his 400 classmates at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design and Manufacturing, fewer than 25% have secured job offers ahead of his course ending in May 2026, creating a sense of panic on the campus. Mishra told Rest of World that the situation out there is really bad, adding that everyone is so panicked, even their juniors, and noting that as the degree end nears, the anxiety is heightened among all of them. Some of his classmates are exploring the option of pursuing higher studies before entering the job market, though Mishra noted that if you return to the job market after one year, your degree is even more irrelevant.
Students at engineering colleges in India, China, Dubai, and Kenya are facing a “jobpocalypse” as artificial intelligence replaces humans in entry-level roles. Tasks once assigned to fresh graduates, such as debugging, testing, and routine software maintenance, are now increasingly automated. Over the last three years, the number of fresh graduates hired by big tech companies globally has declined by more than 50%, according to a report published by SignalFire, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm. Even though hiring rebounded slightly in 2024, only 7% of new hires were recent graduates, and as many as 37% of managers said they’d rather use AI than hire a Gen Z employee. The report stated that as demand for junior roles declines, even highly credentialed engineering graduates are struggling to break into tech, especially at the Big Tech companies.
Codified Knowledge Versus Tacit Expertise in Workplace Automation
To test their hypotheses regarding codified versus tacit knowledge, the researchers used the required level of formal education in O*NET’s extensive occupational database as a proxy for how reliant that job is on codified knowledge. Breaking out the employment data, the researchers found that occupations with higher codified knowledge have slower entry-level employment growth, while occupations with higher tacit knowledge have faster employment growth for mid-career and senior workers. At the same time, the researchers found that higher education might still serve as a buffer against the employment effects the Stanford researchers identified, as occupations with a higher share of college graduates showed muted differences between more-exposed and less-exposed occupations regarding AI.
Corporate Workforce Strategies and the Shift in Technical Roles
Corporate adaptation strategies are reflected in insights published by Michelle Vaz, managing director, AWS Training and Certification, in an Amazon blog post. To understand this dynamic, Amazon partnered with Draup, a data intelligence firm specializing in workforce planning and talent analytics, to conduct a study entitled The Evolution of Early-Career Technical Roles in the AI Era. Vaz reports that young adult unemployment is at 6.6%, the highest in the past 10 years outside of the pandemic, while the overall unemployment rate according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics was 4.1% in June and has been fairly steady for the past year. One startling result from the study is that 50 to 55% of early-career workloads are now AI-augmented,
demonstrating that AI is already having an outsized impact right now.
Broader economic indicators reflect mounting pressure across the labor market. A Federal Reserve Bank of New York analysis notes that 4.8% of recent college graduates can’t find jobs in 2025. Furthermore, a Goldman Sachs analysis estimated that up to 300 million full-time jobs globally are exposed to AI automation, including many admin, legal, and basic tech roles. Entry-level job postings in the USA have dropped by about 35% since January 2023, and much of this decline is directly linked to AI replacing those tasks, leading 49% of young job seekers to believe AI has made their degrees less valuable.
Adapting Higher Education and Upskilling Pathways for Graduates
Traditional entry-level jobs involved routine tasks that helped new workers learn professional skills, such as filing, answering phones, basic data analysis, or simple writing tasks, allowing them to learn how offices work, how to communicate professionally, and gain industry knowledge. AI has eliminated many of these stepping-stone positions, as ChatGPT can write emails and reports, AI customer service bots handle phone calls, automated systems manage scheduling and data entry, and software can analyze basic data and create presentations. As one CEO told the Wall Street Journal, they decided not to hire a summer intern this year, opting to run social media copy through ChatGPT instead.
