New data from AI startup Anthropic may stoke Gen Z’s fears about their future careers: Companies are using the technology primarily to automate tasks, potentially jeopardizing the quality and quantity of entry-level jobs.
Anthropic’s latest Economic Index report published on Monday found 77% of businesses using the company’s Claude AI software are doing so for automation purposes like “full task delegation,” while just 12% are using the tech for collaborative purposes such as learning. Anthropic used data selected from one million application programming interface transcripts from mostly businesses and software developers for its report.
The proliferation of task automation—most heavily used for coding tasks, as well as writing and educational instruction—is likely a result of both AI bots getting better at completing tasks, as well as users getting more comfortable with the technology, according to Peter McCrory, head of economics at Anthropic. For businesses integrating AI into their workplace, automation may help drive efficiency.
“Businesses are figuring out how to build the embedded infrastructure to unlock the productivity effects,” McCrory told Fortune. “And there are likely to be some labor market implications as well.”
McCrory said the purpose of the report is not to draw conclusions about how AI will impact the labor market in the future. Still, as AI automation tools become more readily available, so does evidence of its impact on the future of labor, particularly for those just entering the job market. A first-of-its-kind study from Stanford University published last month found indications of AI having a “significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the U.S. labor market,” including a 13% relative employment decline for early-career employees in the most AI-exposed jobs since companies began widely integrating the technology into their workplaces.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is well-aware of the risks of this shift on the labor landscape. He warned in May that AI could wipe out nearly 50% of entry-level white collar jobs within the next five years.
“Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei told Axios. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it…We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming.”
Gen Z’s AI fears, realized
For Gen Z, the fear of AI knocking them off their career paths is already salient. According to a survey by career platform Zety of 1,000 Gen Z workers, 65% of respondents said a college degree would not protect them from a job loss related to AI.
The generation’s concern about AI-related job loss is “on the right track,” Christopher Stanton, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, told Fortune.
According to Stanton, jobs won’t be entirely automated, but tasks will, raising questions more about what is asked of employees, as well as how they are trained. For example, an AI bot may be able to generate marketing copy for an ad, but a writer or editor is still needed to input prompts and edit the outputs.
However, the automation of tasks will have an outsized impact on entry-level jobs in particular, Stanton said. Workplaces will start to prioritize giving workers apprentice-like experiences to train them, which will likely hit wages for those positions.
“You can imagine that AI is doing a lot of what entry-level workers used to do, but you still need those people to get context,” he said. “You might imagine that their wages are going to fall so that they can accumulate experience.”
There’s another shift Stanton can envision for young people: a switch to occupations requiring physical labor that AI is currently unable to perform, such as trades. According to a 2024 Harris Poll commissioned by Intuit Credit Karma, about 78% of Americans said they’ve noticed a surge of young people pursuing trade jobs like carpentry, electrical work, and welding.
“The generative AI revolution is proceeding much faster than the revolution in physical AI or robotics,” Stanton said.
Cashier or consultant?
It’s still early to predict the impact of AI on the labor market with certainty, Stanton said, but there’s a wealth of data indicating that when young people graduate into a weak labor market, they can suffer long-term professional and financial consequences.
A 2016 landmark study titled “Cashier or Consultant?” measured how entry conditions of the labor market impacted college graduates’ wages more than a decade after graduation, using data from students from the graduating classes of 1974 to 2011. The study found that entering the workforce during a recession was associated with a roughly 10% reduction in wages in the first year of employment, an effect that mostly faded after seven years after graduation. For high-earning majors like finance, these effects were less pronounced; for low-earning majors like philosophy, they were more pronounced.
This drop-off in income for those graduating into a recession could be because in order to get a job, recent graduates find work on the lower end of the occupational earnings distributions, like working as a barista or restaurant server, which pay less, but could be more readily available, Stanton said. Today’s budding young professionals are not trying to join the work force during a recession, but they are entering a weak labor market, in part due to the changing AI landscape. Therefore, there are some unfortunate parallels between young Gen Z needing to sacrifice wages due to wavering job opportunities and millennials graduating into the Great Recession.
“We at least have some past empirical evidence that does give us a signal, where some recent college graduates graduating into a recession have historically been pretty extreme for people’s careers,” Stanton said.