AI's Impact on Entry-Level Jobs: Reshaping Career Paths for Gen Z

AI is not just ending entry-level jobs. It's the end of the career ladder as we know it

Mail room clerk with boxes for delivery4x6 | Istock | Getty Images Current CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Antonio Neri rose from call center agent at the company to chief executive officer. Doug McMillon, Walmart CEO, started off with a summer gig helping to unload trucks. It's a similar story for GM CEO Mary Barra, who began on the assembly line at the automaker as an 18-year old. Those are the kinds of career ladder success arcs that have inspired workers, and Hollywood, but as AI is set to replace many entry-level jobs, it may also write that corporate character out of the plot. The rise of AI has coincided with considerable organizational flattening, especially among middle management ranks. At the same time, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is among those who forecast 50% of entry-level jobs may be wiped out by AI as the technology improves, including being able to work eight-hour shifts without a break. All the uncertainty in the corporate org chart introduced by AI -- occurring at a time when college graduates are struggling to find roles -- raises the question of whether the career ladder is about to be broken, and the current generation of corporate leaders' tales of ascent that have always made up an important part of the corporate American ethos set to become a thing of the past. If the notion of going from the bottom to the top has always been more the exception than the rule, it has helped pump the heart of America's corporations. In the least, removing the first rung on the ladder raises important questions about the transfer of institutional knowledge and upward advancement in organizations. Looking at data between 2019 and 2024 for the biggest public tech firms and maturing venture-capital funded startups, venture capital firm SignalFire found in a study there was a 50% decline in new role starts by people with less than one year of post-graduate work experience: "Hiring is intrinsically volatile year on year, but 50% is an accurate representation of the hiring delta for this experience category over the considered timespan," said Asher Bantock, head of research at SignalFire. The data ranged across core business functions -- sales, marketing, engineering, recruiting/HR, operations, design, finance and legal -- with the 50% decline consistent across the board. But Heather Doshay, partner at SignalFire, says the data should not lead job seekers to lose hope. "The loss of clear entry points doesn't just shrink opportunities for new grads -- it reshapes how organizations grow talent from within," she said. If, as Amodei told CNBC earlier this year, "At some point, we are going to get to AI systems that are better than almost all humans at almost all tasks," the critical question for workers is how the idea of an entry-level job can evolve as AI continues to. Flatter organizations seem certain. "The ladder isn't broken -- it's just being replaced with something that looks a lot flatter," Doshay said. In her view, the classic notion of a CEO rising from the mailroom is a perfect example since at many company's it's been a long time since anyone worked in an actual mailroom. "The bottom rung is disappearing," she said, "but that has the potential to uplevel everyone." The new "entry level" might be a more advanced or skilled role, but with the upskilling of the bottom rung, pressure is being created for new grads to acquire these job skills on their own, rather than being able to learn them while already on a job they can't land today. That should not be a career killer, though, according to Doshay. "When the internet and email came on the scene as common corporate required skills, new grads were well-positioned to become experts by using them in school, and the same absolutely applies here with how accessible AI is," she said. "The key will be in how new grads harness their capabilities to become experts so they are seen as desirable tech-savvy workers who are at the forefront of AI's advances," she said. But she concedes that may not offer much comfort to the current crop of recent grads looking for jobs right now. "My heart goes out to the new grads of 2024, 2025, and 2026, as they are entering during a time of uncertainty," Doshay said, describing it is a much more vulnerable group entering the workforce than ones further into the future. Universities are turning their schools into AI training grounds, with several institutions striking major deals with companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. "Historically, technological advancements have not harmed employment rates in the long run, but there are short-term impacts along the way," Doshay said. "The entry-level careers of recent graduates are most affected, which could have lasting effects as they continue to grow their careers with less experience while finding fewer job opportunities," she added. Anders Humlum, assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, says predictions about AI's long-term labor market impact remain highly speculative, and firms are only just beginning to adjust to the new generative AI landscape. "We now have two and a half years of experience with generative AI chatbots diffusing widely throughout the economy," Humlum said, adding "these tools have really not made a significant difference for employment or earnings in any occupation thus far." Looking at the history of labor and technology, he says even the most transformative technologies, such as steam power, electricity, and computers took decades to generate large-scale economic effects. As a result, any reshaping of the corporate structure and culture will take time to become clear. "Even if Amodei is correct that AI tools will eventually match the technical capabilities of many entry-level white-collar workers, I believe his forecast underestimates both the time required for workflow adjustments and the human ability to adapt to the new opportunities these tools create," Humlum said. But a key challenge for businesses is ensuring that the benefits of these tools are broadly shared across the workforce. In particular, Humlum said, his research shows a substantial gender gap in the use of generative AI. "Employers can significantly reduce this gap by actively encouraging adoption and offering training programs to support effective use," he said. Other AI researchers worry that the biggest issue won't be the career ladder at the lowest rung, but ultimately, the stability of any rung at all, all the way to the top. If predictions about AI advancements ultimately leading to superintelligence are proven correct, Max Tegmark, president of the Future of Life Institute, says the issue isn't going to be about whether the 50% entry-level jobs being wiped out is accurate, but that percentage growing to 100% for all careers, "since superintelligence can by definition do all jobs better than us," he said. In that world, even if you were the last call center, distribution center or assembly line worker to make it to the CEO desk, your days of success might be numbered. "If we continue racing ahead with totally unregulated AI, we'll first see a massive wealth and power concentration from workers to those who control the AI, and then to the machines themselves as their owners lose control over them," Tegmark said.

AI vs Gen Z: How AI has changed the career pathway for junior developers

For promising Gen Z students, a career as a software developer seemed like the golden ticket to career stability and success. But in the age of AI, the career promise for Gen Z software developers is gone. I grew up during a very special time on the internet. I'm an older Zoomer -- or as TikTok likes to call it, a geriatric Zoomer. When I was a kid, the internet of the late 2000s was still evolving rapidly, still quite rough around the edges even as it began to show a level of sophistication. Customization and creativity in your web presence made you cool. I was handwriting HTML code onto my Tumblr and tweaking the embeds on my page's music player at 13 years old. I developed burgeoning video production skills because I liked making funny Club Penguin music videos. I owe much of my writing ability to the Spiderman fanfiction communities of an early Archive of Our Own. For kids who were trying to make their cursors have a rainbow tail on MySpace, coding was part of growing up. Even the adults knew this. In high school, one of my teachers offered extra credit for completing a beginner coding class. I even did a business report on Girls Who Code, whose popularity skyrocketed when I was a teen, partially because of excellent branding. In college, being a CS major afforded many of my peers an early sense of career security. Everyone knew that the CS kids would get high starting salaries; some of my friends even dated CS majors because of this. And while I never envied their stressed late-night study sessions and "hackathons," there was something of a shine to the promise of software engineering. It was the same sort of shine that a four-year college degree had -- a promise that the world would see you as promising, and that would open doors for you. Much of that shine and promise has changed for my generation. Perhaps it's gone away entirely. The job market has proven itself volatile post-pandemic, with job cuts reaching their highest midyear total since COVID. This has spurred on the heightened concerns about layoffs experienced by Gen Z -- 64% of us are worried about being laid off, as compared to the 45% of our millennial counterparts. We're also the generation most concerned about a recession. For people ages 22-27 -- coincidentally the age group I fall into -- the unemployment rate is nearly double the national average of 4.2%, sitting at a high 7.4% as of June 2025. It's untenable, and AI has made it worse So, yes, the job market is rough for young people, but it's not just because of the usual economic ups and downs of the past. AI has made many lower seniority roles automatable, as entry-level tech hiring decreased 25% year-over-year in 2024. Anecdotally, I experienced a layoff just last year and struggled to even get an email back from a recruiter while I was looking for work. To be fair, I have a career path that was immediately and greatly affected by GenAI. A great writer isn't as valuable to a company when you can get an LLM trained on every publicly available New York Times article for just $20 a month. And unlike me, ChatGPT probably finished and understood Infinite Jest. That is difficult to compete with. Luckily, some folks still see the value in a handcrafted story, which is why I write here. But the struggles aren't just for writers like me. My partner works in operations and took a six month sabbatical earlier this year. Sitting beside him for much of his job search, it's become clear that six months was a long enough time that upskilling on new technical tools was necessary for him to secure a role. AI has changed how every job is done, from finance to law to engineering to medicine, and to miss even a few months means missing at least a few very important skills to include on your resume. If you think your job is safe, it probably isn't. And this is especially true for junior software developers, whose career rival is no longer just the best and brightest from the elite colleges or the nepotism hires, but also the AI-powered coding tools that are supposedly making the work of junior developers redundant. A recent Stanford Digital Economy Study found that by July 2025 the employment for software developers aged 22-25 has declined nearly 20% from its peak in late 2022. The use of AI has increased rapidly over the last few years. We only started tracking AI usage via our Developer Survey in 2023, and AI tool usage during the development process has increased 14% as of our 2025 survey, now at a whopping 84% for developers. This rapid adoption has made certain skills, even entire career pathways, obsolete. And because AI is constantly evolving, what you know now may be out-of-date in just a few months. Industries at large have had a hard time keeping up; imagine what it's like for someone my age who is just now getting their footing in their careers. AI has changed everything, even how we learn This is probably a no-brainer, but AI has greatly affected the educational experience for Gen Z. I've only been out of school for a handful of years, but in the time since I've graduated, the simple act of studying has changed drastically. One survey of high school and college students found that 97% of them have used AI at some point for their education, with 66% of them using it for studying. This, of course, only makes sense. In a society that perpetuates educational elitism, school has become the Roman Coliseum where we put our youngest and brightest to the test. While I was looking for work earlier this year, I found that many applications still asked for my GPA; one recruiter was overly impressed by the university I had attended, unknowing that I spent most of my time there surviving off of canned yerba mate and writing poetry instead of studying. The cultural currency that comes with a degree from one of those lauded institutions, paired with the insanely high cost of attending one of them, makes schooling more about getting a competitive edge than it does about simply learning. Who could blame a gladiator for wanting to bring the sharpest possible sword into the fighting pit? And it seems to work for them. Students who use AI had a 10% improvement on their exams over peers who didn't use it, according to a recent Microsoft report. When it comes to grades, there is no Maximus the Merciful. So we have to ask, is using AI cheating? Whatever your answer is, students think so, with 3 in 4 believing that the use of ChatGPT constitutes cheating. And according to one survey, 75% of students stated they would still use AI tools for school even if their institution bans them. ONe report by plagiarism detection service Turnitin found that 11% of the 200 million papers they reviewed were written at least 20% by AI. Ethical dilemmas aside, an overreliance on AI obviously causes an atrophy of skills for young thinkers. Why spend time reading your textbooks when you can get the answers right away? Why bother working through a particularly difficult homework problem when you can just dump it into an AI to give you the answer? To form the critical thinking skills necessary for not just a fruitful career, but a happy life, must include some of the discomfort that comes from not knowing. AI tools eliminate the discovery phase of learning -- that precious, priceless part where you root around blindly until you finally understand. Not all students have lost the ability to search and discover; real learning is certainly not a lost art. But clearly there is a very sharp and shiny sword they could bring into the Coliseum if they wanted. Goodbye interns, hello chatbots For today's students, they know that the competition will just get tougher once they join the workforce. Because of this, internships have been a mainstay of the college experience, no matter what you're studying. I was one of those kids that did internships every summer, and often during the school year, starting my Freshman year. Internships were always seen as necessary if you wanted to get a competitive job. It's why myself and so many peers did legal unpaid child labor for companies that forgot about us the very next semester. But, and forgive me if I've said this before, the landscape has changed dramatically because of AI. In fact, the landscape has all but disappeared. A 2024 survey of hiring managers found that 70% of them believe that AI can do the jobs of interns. And 57% of those surveyed said they trust AI's work more than the work of interns or recent grads. If an AI can do it, why bother spending the time and energy teaching a student how to do the same thing? Year-over-year, internships across all industries have decreased 11%, according to Indeed. Handshake, an internship recruitment platform, reported a whopping 30% decline in tech-specific internship postings since 2023. Meanwhile internship applications have risen 7%. And the need for early career -- or I might argue, pre-career -- experience hasn't gone away just because the internships have. Indeed's Career Guide says that most entry-level jobs list two to five years of experience as a requirement by hiring managers. When I first started applying for jobs, most competitive roles asked for one to two years of experience at the entry-level. For me, and for most of my peers, that experience came from internships and part-time summer gigs that we proudly displayed on our resumes. There is no more promise for the promising junior developer In August, the New York Times released an article bleakly titled, Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle. One story detailed in it is of a 2023 computer science graduate who has applied to 5,762 tech jobs, but has yet to receive any full-time offers. You can find stories like this from pretty much any source talking about AI's effects on early career pathways. As per the Stanford Digital Economy study, for jobs with the most AI-exposure -- read: IT and software engineering jobs -- employment has declined 6% for workers aged 22-25, while it's increased 9% for workers aged 35-49. Hiring is happening, just not for people my age. This does not bode well for the increasing number of computer science graduates, a number which has more than doubled in the US since 2011, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Per this year's Federal Reserve report on labor market outcomes, computer engineering graduates had one of the highest rates of unemployment across majors. At a 7.5% unemployment rate, fine arts degree holders are more employed than computer engineers. Computer science graduates are also taking a hit when in the labor market with a 6.1% unemployment rate. This is almost one point higher than a liberal arts graduate. If you're keeping up with any of the news around AI, it's probably not difficult to see why. Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI could someday wipe out 50% of entry-level jobs. We have to take his guestimate with a grain of salt since this happens to be the guy making one of those entry-level-wiping AI tools, but perhaps there's something to his psychic abilities. Already, employers are hesitant to hire new talent, with 37% saying they'd rather "hire" AI than a recent graduate. And when they do hire Zoomers for roles, their turnover rate is high. As of 2024, 60% of employers had fired new hires within a year. The truth is that AI has made much of what junior developers of the past did redundant. Gone are the days of needing junior developers to manually write code or debug, because now an already tenured developer can just ask their AI assistant to do it. There's even some sentiment that AI has made junior developers less competent, and that they've lost some of the foundational skills that make for a successful entry-level employee. See above section on AI in school if you need a refresher on why this might be happening. But even if you are competent, in the words of one Head of Data and AI, "Being good isn't good enough." So what does this all mean for the promising college graduates who thought their degrees meant a promising future? It's hard to tell now when the decline in early career opportunities has just begun to fully show. There's no doubt that the computer science graduates of the last few years are going to continue feeling the squeeze for a while longer, as companies continue to bet on AI's rapid growth above young talent acquisition. But I expect there will be an equilibrium point. Just look at OpenAI, whose recent job posting is promising a content strategist almost $400,000 a year, a job that I, a content writer, was told would be completely eliminated by AI. More optimistic outlooks on the AI job market see this disruption as an opportunity for early career professionals to evolve their skillsets to better fit an AI-driven world. If I believe in nothing else, I believe in my generation's ability to adapt, especially to technology. As the full picture of AI's ability to change entire industries starts to become clearer, the hope is that the junior developer role will not disappear, but instead shift to complement these changes. Our very own CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar told the BBC that AI will not be without problems and challenges, and that this will open a whole new career pathway for Gen Z developers. And it's in companies' best interest to tend to their talent pipelines, supporting new talent to better prepare for the inevitable future where they'll be needed. I'm not the first to say this, but it's true: if you don't hire junior developers, you'll someday never have senior developers. There's still something to mourn here -- the shine that coding once had for my generation, when being a developer was something the most gifted among us strived towards. There was a beauty to that clear and promising pathway to success that is no longer being offered to my peers. But maybe a new pathway is being cleared for us, one where we are not replaced by AI but are the shepherds of it. I believe my generation will actually be the one to clear that path for ourselves.

Gen Z is getting cut at big tech companies, and fast

The share of young workers at major tech firms has fallen sharply over the past two-and-a-half years, according to new data from compensation platform Pave. At large, public tech companies, employees between the ages of 21 and 25 made up 15.0% of the workforce in January 2023. By July 2025, that number had dropped to 6.7%. At private firms, the decline was smaller, from 9.3% to 6.7% over the same period. Matt Schulman, chief executive of Pave, said the trend highlights the challenges facing new grads. "Recent college graduates are struggling to find jobs, especially at public technology companies," he wrote in a LinkedIn post. Schulman, who is a former software engineer at Facebook, before it changed its name to Meta, said AI is reshaping the early-career job market. "AI tooling is disrupting many entry-level roles that have traditionally been attractive entry points into the tech labor force for new grads." As younger employees leave the sector, the average age of the workforce is climbing. At public tech firms, it increased to 39.4 years in July 2025, up from 34.3 years in January 2023. At private firms, it rose to 36.6 years from 35.1 years. Schulman asked, "Is the shift in the labor force towards older, more experienced employees a temporary economic adjustment, or a permanent shift in how tech companies build their workforce?" The data follows hot on the heels of a Stanford University study that found employment among 22- to 25-year-olds in the most AI-exposed jobs, such as software engineering and customer service, has dropped 13% since late 2022. That research, based on payroll data from millions of workers, suggests that generative AI is displacing entry-level employees even as older workers in the same roles hold steady or see gains. The findings add hard data to a growing sense of anxiety among Gen Z. Goldman Sachs recently calculated that the value of college degrees is quickly diminishing, while Bank of America Global research has said that the unemployment rate for recent graduates has started to exceed the overall rate for the first time in years. Schulman also pointed to difficulties for business school graduates, adding that 15% of Harvard Business School grads in 2024 were without a job offer three months after leaving college, way up from 4% in 2021. The trend "likely reflects the same economic pressures affecting new grads: companies prioritizing experienced hires during uncertain times and focusing on 'efficient growth.'" Pave bases its data on about 8,200 companies with age demographic information participating in its real-time compensation database.

PwC's U.K. chief admits he's cutting back entry-level jobs and taking a 'watch and wait' approach to see how AI changes work

Despite promises that degrees would open doors to stable, well-paying jobs, just landing an interview is an uphill battle. Even execs are slowly admitting what graduates already know: entry-level hiring is shrinking fast. "AI is reshaping roles, global markets remain volatile, and graduate intakes everywhere are under pressure," Marco Amitrano, head of PwC's U.K. practice, recently wrote in a LinkedIn post. "At PwC, our entry-level numbers are lower this year, reflecting the wider slowdown in investment, hiring and deal-making across the economy." By the numbers, the accounting and consultancy company is hiring 200 fewer entry-level talent this year (1,300 versus 1,500). For a young Amitrano, this pullback could have been life-changing; after all, he started his career 33 years ago through to a PwC entry-level role. Today, however, the landscape looks different, with AI partly to blame for the (potentially temporary) slowdown for young people. "Innovation in AI is certainly reshaping roles. For now, the development of new tools and the parallel investment in skills are offsetting more serious disruption," he added in an op-ed for The Times. " Yet this balance may not last forever. Our research shows that job postings for AI-exposed occupations are growing at a slower pace compared to those with lower exposure -- and this gap is widening." Even though AI is viewed as a way to turbocharge productivity in the workplace, it hasn't been the saving grace anticipated. In fact, a recent study from MIT found that 95% of AI pilots at companies are failing. This is especially problematic for the U.K., which is already facing productivity levels falling to Victorian-era lows. Amitrano cited struggling productivity as the single biggest contributor behind a lower graduate intake at PwC this year. "Right now, many businesses -- both domestic and international -- are watching and waiting," he wrote for The Times. "Activity is improving, but it's still far removed from the levels of investment, hiring and deal-making that we saw immediately after the pandemic." The entry-level cuts at PwC may not end this year. According to documents obtained by Business Insider, the Big Four firm has plans to cut entry-level hiring in the U.S. by almost a third over the next three years. PwC is not alone in admitting its workforce is shrinking, thanks in part to AI. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in June that AI will lead to there being a need for fewer workers at the e-commerce giant. "It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company." At Salesforce, the changes are even more stark. The software company's CEO, Marc Benioff, admitted late last month that AI had allowed him to cut 4,000 workers. "I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support," Benioff revealed on the podcast The Logan Bartlett Show. "I've reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000, because I need less heads. But despite changes across industries, it remains to be seen whether AI-induced reshuffling will continue -- or if companies will take a playbook out of Klarna, which began rehiring humans after going too far with AI cuts. "As cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality," Klarna's CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg in May. "Really investing in the quality of the human support is the way of the future for us."

Entry-level job cuts might boost your profit margins now -- but they will gut your future

There is a troubling trend spreading across some of today's most recognizable tech companies. Spotify, Shopify, Dropbox, and others are cutting training programs and significantly reducing entry-level hiring. At first glance, the decision might seem sensible: reduce costs, restructure teams, and prepare for a future driven by AI. In reality, it is a short-term move that will cause long-term damage. The numbers tell the story. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates has climbed to 5.8%, higher than the national average and the worst in a decade outside the pandemic. More than 40% of graduates are underemployed, working in roles that do not require a college degree. Entry-level postings in the United States have fallen by more than 40% since mid-2022. Even graduates in traditionally "safe" majors such as computer science or engineering are struggling to find jobs that match their training. Young professionals are not just looking for a paycheck. They want a chance to learn, to join a program, and to work with a team that believes in their potential. When companies dismantle these programs, they are not simply shrinking headcount. They are cutting off the future of their own talent pipeline. AI is advancing rapidly, but despite the hype, it cannot replace human intuition, creativity, and judgment. These are the qualities that truly differentiate companies. What we need now are people who can work alongside AI: analysts who know how to use machine learning to make smarter decisions, design better products, and deliver more personalized customer experiences. That kind of talent is not built overnight. It is developed through years of deliberate investment.

I'm chief legal officer at a $4 billion IT unicorn and I've got Gen Z advice for leaders looking to reimagine entry-level work in the age of AI

LinkedIn's chief economic opportunity officer recently warned that AI is "breaking" entry-level jobs that have historically served as stepping stones for young workers. As Aneesh Raman wrote in The New York Times, "Breaking first is the bottom rung of the career ladder." AI tools are performing simple coding and debugging tasks that junior software developers once did to gain experience, along with work that young employees in the legal and retail sectors traditionally handled. Wall Street firms are also reportedly considering steep cuts to entry-level hiring in light of this. The implications go way beyond individual hardship -- they threaten the foundation of how organizations build expertise, maintain security and sustain innovation. However, there are things all organizations can do now to help. Hasty AI adoption at the expense of hiring and developing human workers creates serious security vulnerabilities. AI is only as effective as its inputs, and the interpretation and action steps that follow are only as sound as the skills and contextual understanding of the people involved. In short: reducing human oversight creates breeding grounds for security gaps. Indeed CEO Chris Hyams recently noted that while AI can't completely replace a job, "for about two-thirds of all jobs, 50% or more of those skills are things that today's generative AI can do reasonably well, or very well." These shifts underscore the urgent need for organizations to take a balanced approach, investing thoughtfully in both emerging technology and human talent. To shape a sustainable future of work, neither people nor progress can be left behind. This challenge is particularly acute in fields like cybersecurity, where gaining hands-on experience is crucial. Today, many cybersecurity roles require experience that young professionals can't acquire because entry-level positions that build that experience no longer exist or have been automated away. An increasing number of cybersecurity job postings list artificial intelligence skills as a requirement. Yet research shows that 44% of professionals say their companies have invested in AI across the organization while employees lack adequate skills and training to use these tools effectively -- meaning professionals are being left behind and there is a gap in the skills needed to manage AI investments correctly. If this is happening now, consider how these changes could reshape our workforce in the next five years and beyond. Heavily leveraging AI while human workers at all levels lack the training and skills to manage it appropriately -- that is a recipe for significant risks. When you can't build a pipeline of talent from the ground up, you end up with senior professionals who lack the diverse perspectives and fresh thinking that come from working alongside newer team members. As organizations increasingly lean on AI to handle tasks once reserved for junior employees, the danger isn't just the disappearance of foundational career steps, it's the erosion of the very systems that foster growth, innovation and security. Overreliance on technology threatens to sever the pipeline that develops future experts, leaving critical gaps in both skills and perspective. LinkedIn COO Dan Shapero says, "When I was at Bain, a lot of the time I spent was making slides and going to the library to figure out research reports. All of that is now automated. Bain still hires scores of recent graduates. They just do different parts of the process." Rather than eliminating entry-level jobs, organizations should reimagine them for a new era -- where early-career professionals are empowered to work alongside AI, learning higher-order skills instead of just routine tasks. Use AI to augment new workers, not replace them. Allow junior employees to focus on strategy, creativity, relationship-building, and complex problem-solving while AI handles routine tasks. This approach requires treating AI like a new hire -- every AI tool should be evaluated, supervised and developed like an employee, not simply deployed and forgotten. Successful workforce transitions require structured evaluation processes for each potential AI use case. This evaluation should include a return-on-investment analysis not just in terms of dollars and hours saved, but also in terms of human impact. When an AI tool eliminates repetitive tasks, the affected employee should be retrained for a more strategic role, making AI a catalyst for internal mobility rather than displacement. Organizations need cross-functional governance that ensures decisions aren't just compliant but human-centered. Representatives from IT, privacy, product, security, and HR should collaborate to balance innovation with workforce development. When GenAI first captured widespread attention in 2023, smart companies built sustainable AI governance models, prioritized transparency and tackled employee displacement through reinvention rather than layoffs. As leaders, we need to ask ourselves: What are we doing to ensure the next generation can build the experience they need to become our future leaders? Here is a starter kit: Develop AI fluency as a core competency. Cultivating AI fluency must become a cornerstone skill for tomorrow's workforce. Increasingly, job candidates will need to demonstrate not only their comfort with AI tools, but also their ability to harness these technologies as proactive problem-solvers and innovators. This is the new generation's biggest advantage in the job market. Invest in apprenticeships and mentorship programs. Create pathways where experienced professionals work directly with newcomers on real projects, not just theoretical training. Career pathing and goal setting can develop internal talent effectively. Support teams can allow engineers to explore different roles within the company, successfully transitioning employees into specialized roles like cybersecurity. Embrace upskilling as a core business function. Teaching current employees new skills is a great start, but that's not even half the challenge here. Let's also approach this by creating new types of roles that didn't exist before. Don't assume competency. (You know what they say about assuming!) Recognize that professionals -- in both new and legacy roles -- need adequate training to use AI tools effectively. Support workforce development initiatives. Creating curricula and engaging with educational institutions can help address skills gaps while supporting corporate social responsibility efforts. Legislative initiatives that enhance accessibility of cyber training and education through scholarship programs for two-year degrees at community colleges and technical schools can strengthen the talent pipeline. Maintain explicit commitments to workforce retention. Even when specific jobs change, it's important to find new places for affected employees within the organization. Why does this matter? It sends the message that reliable AI requires human oversight, and that the goal should be redefining roles rather than eliminating them. (Big difference!) Individual company programs won't resolve all of this, but collective action can make a difference. Instead of looking at this as a massive problem, why not see this as an opportunity to shape how AI transforms work? We can start now, acting deliberately and with the next generation in mind.

Silicon Valley's graying workforce: Gen Z staff cut in half at tech companies as the average age goes up by 5 years

Gen Z are digital natives raised in the era of YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram, and Facebook; and now, they're some of the strongest AI users in their personal and professional lives. But Silicon Valley tech companies looking to make waves with AI aren't holding onto the digitally savvy generation -- instead, they're actively boxing them out. The percentage of young Gen Z employees between the ages of 21 and 25 has been cut in half at technology companies over the past two years, according to recent data from compensation management software business Pave with workforce data from more than 8,300 companies. These young workers accounted for 15% of the workforce at large public tech firms in January 2023. By August 2025, they only represented 6.8%. The situation isn't pretty at big private tech companies, either -- during that same time period, the proportion of early-career Gen Z employees dwindled from 9.3% to 6.8%. Meanwhile, the average age of a worker at a tech company has risen dramatically over those two and a half years. Between January 2023 and July 2025, the average age of all employees at large public technology businesses rose from 34.3 years to 39.4 years -- more than a five year difference. On the private side, the change was less drastic, with the typical age only increasing from 35.1 to 36.6 years old. Millennials are currently ruling the tech industry and clinging to their roles as the economy is rocked by uncertainty due to tariffs, inflation increases living expenses, and AI swipes jobs. Meanwhile, entry-level Gen Zers are just hoping to get their careers off the ground. "If you're 35 or 40 years old, you're pretty established in your career, you have skills that you know cannot yet be disrupted by AI," Matt Schulman, founder and CEO of Pave, tells Fortune. "There's still a lot of human judgment when you're operating at the more senior level...If you're a 22-year-old that used to be an Excel junkie or something, then that can be disrupted. So it's almost a tale of two cities." Schulman points to a few reasons why tech company workforces are getting older and locking Gen Z out of jobs. One is that big companies -- like Salesforce, Meta, and Microsoft -- are becoming a lot more efficient thanks to the advent of AI. And despite their soaring trillion-dollar profits, they're cutting employees at the bottom rungs in favor of automation. Entry-level jobs have also dwindled because of AI agents, and stalling promotions across many agencies looking to do more with less. Once technology companies weed out junior roles, occupied by Gen Zers, their workforces are bound to rise in age. And experts tell Fortune that spells a lot of trouble for innovation and long-term business stability. The rapid disappearance of Gen Z at large technology companies is a dog whistle to what's really going behind the scenes -- AI is automating roles, from entry-level upwards. But what's worrying about their presence disappearing faster at large public companies is the fact that early career pipelines are being completely disrupted. And they're often the businesses with enough equity to invest in these Gen Z-targeted talent initiatives in the first place. "Most public companies have fleshed out training programs that are squarely centered around new grad programs and university recruiting," the Pave CEO, with early-career experience at Facebook and Microsoft, explains. "A company like Meta, their whole talent thesis was to go after universities, get the smart 21-year-olds, and then train them up. It's just not as relevant as a paradigm for private companies." Jeri Doris, chief people officer at software company Justworks, tells Fortune workforce reductions have created a difficult barrier for Gen Z. Businesses are striving to do more with less, cutting entry-level roles and striving for AI automation to save on headcount costs. Mass firings have wiped whole corporate departments across the U.S., as companies announced more than 806,000 job cuts from January through the end of July this year, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. It's a 75% spike from the approximately 460,000 reductions announced through the first seven months of last year. "Mass tech layoffs and a reduction in entry-level jobs means it's harder for Gen Z to find open roles to apply for," Doris explains. "On the flip side, Gen Z is prioritizing flexible working, job stability and work-life balance -- something the tech industry may not be able to offer -- so they're applying to roles in different industries." As thousands of Gen Z are shut out making a name in the industry -- even just getting a foot in the door -- there could be serious long-term impacts. In the near future, many CEOs may espouse the money-saving potential of automating entry-level jobs. But looking 10 or 20 years ahead, when technology companies' current millennial workers progress towards senior roles, there's the question of who will take over their mid-level jobs. If Gen Z don't have the opportunity to learn from the bottom-up, there presents a major issue of stifled innovation and a lack of talent ready to step into those positions. Pave CEO Schulman uses sales roles as an example: "There's a very linear, structured path that exists across like almost every tech company. You start doing the junior-level outbound sourcing work, then you become a mid-market account executive, then you become an enterprise seller. Enterprise sellers, in my opinion, will not be disrupted by AI anytime soon." "Enterprise sellers are still needed, but you're removing the roles beneath them on that career hierarchy. How are we going to train the future of enterprise sellers, if they aren't going through the conventional steps to get there?" While the situation looks scary for Gen Zers looking to get a job at a tech firm, experts tell Fortune they should leverage the assets they have. Being new to the industry can even work to their advantage. "[Companies] can hire a 21, 22-year-old that has not been brainwashed by years of corporate America. And instead, can just break the rules and leverage AI to a much greater degree without the hindrance of years of bias," Schulman says. "I do think there is a new crop of these young ones that are just really leveraging AI maximally." To be a highly sought-after worker in this AI-automated era, that means being "manically" focused on all the new models that come out. Gen Z should study how to prompt chatbots extremely effectively, and even create bespoke models for their lines of work. Priya Rathod, workplace trends editor for LinkedIn, also tells Fortune that the young professionals shouldn't give up on the tech industry. Instead, they should rethink their path within it -- upskilling and taking on new career pathways can be a strong point of entry. Lucky for Gen Z, they don't have to go back to college to get an upper-hand in the talent market. "Building skills through certifications, gig work, and online communities can open doors," Rathod recommends. "Roles in UX, AI ethics, cybersecurity, and product operations are promising entry points. Instead of waiting for opportunities, they should create them -- through freelance projects, networking, and showcasing work online." "Employers are increasingly rethinking traditional degree requirements. For Gen Z, the right certifications or micro credentials can outweigh a lack of years on the resume. This helps them stay competitive even when entry level opportunities shrink."