- LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer, Aneesh Raman, said artificial intelligence is increasingly threatening the types of jobs that historically have served as stepping stones for young workers who are just beginning their careers. He likened the disruption to the decline of manufacturing in the 1980s.
As millions of students get ready to graduate this spring, their prospects for landing that first job that helps launch their careers is looking dimmer.
In addition to an economy that’s slowing amid tariff-induced uncertainty, artificial intelligence is threatening entry-level work that traditionally has served as stepping stones, according to LinkedIn’s chief economic opportunity officer, Aneesh Raman, who likened the shift to the decline of manufacturing in the 1980s.
“Now it is our office workers who are staring down the same kind of technological and economic disruption,” he wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed. “Breaking first is the bottom rung of the career ladder.”
For example, AI tools are doing the types of simple coding and debugging tasks that junior software developers did to gain experience. AI is also doing work that young employees in the legal and retail sectors once did. And Wall Street firms are reportedly considering steep cuts to entry-level hiring.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for college graduates has been rising faster than for other workers in past few years, Raman pointed out, though there isn’t definitive evidence yet that AI is the cause of the weak job market.
To be sure, businesses aren’t doing away with entry-level work altogether, as executives still seek fresh ideas from young workers, he added. AI has also freed up some junior employees to take on more advanced work earlier in their careers.
But changes rippling through certain sectors today are likely heading for others in the future, with office jobs due to feel the biggest impact, Raman predicted.
“While the technology sector is feeling the first waves of change, reflecting A.I.’s mass adoption in this field, the erosion of traditional entry-level tasks is expected to play out in fields like finance, travel, food and professional services, too,” he said.
To fix entry-level work, Raman called for colleges to incorporate AI across their curricula and for companies to give junior roles higher-level tasks.
There are some signs that companies are adapting to the new AI landscape. Jasper.ai CEO Timothy Young told Fortune’s Diane Brady recently that “the commoditization of intelligence” means hiring the smartest people is less important than developing staff to have management skills.
“There is a lot of power in the junior employees, but you can’t leverage them the same way that you would in the past,” he said, noting that he looks for curiosity and resilience when hiring.
Indeed CEO Chris Hyams said at Fortune’s Workplace Innovation Summit in Dana Point, Calif. on Monday that AI can’t completely replace a job.
But Indeed’s findings show that “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.”
Still, language-learning app Duolingo and fintech app Klarna have recently walked back aggressive stances on replacing humans with AI.
Some studies have also shown AI isn’t panning out as much as hoped, so far. An IBM survey found that 3 in 4 AI initiatives fail to deliver their promised ROI. And a National Bureau of Economic Research study of workers in AI-exposed industries found that the technology had next to no impact on earnings or hours worked.
“It seems it’s a much smaller and much slower transition than you might imagine if you had just studied the technology’s potential in a vacuum,” University of Chicago economics professor Anders Humlum, one of the NBER study authors, previously told Fortune.