It’s not a good time to be looking for your first job, and AI could be part of the reason why.
The numbers paint a bleak picture, especially for young jobseekers. Economy-wide, job vacancies have fallen by 45% since 2022. More than one-in-three employers have reduced the number of entry-level jobs in the last 12 months, according to research from the Work Foundation at Lancaster University. Graduate recruitment has slumped and data last month from Indeed, the job search website, indicated that postings for “summer jobs” had fallen to a four-year low.
This can’t all be pinned on AI. The rise of remote working almost certainly deserves some of the blame: it’s harder to monitor junior employees if they’re at home, and they don’t learn as much from their colleagues, so businesses hire fewer of them. There’s also the fact that government policy decisions – most obviously on employer national insurance and the minimum wage – have made it more expensive to employ young people. And for some firms, AI might simply provide helpful cover for lay-offs they’d have made anyway.
Yet it does look as though AI is part of the story. A recent analysis by the Bank of England found that the number of online job adverts has fallen fastest in occupations most susceptible to AI automation, such as customer service and administrative roles. Businesses are reporting that AI can increasingly perform tasks – such as summarising meetings and producing routine reports – that might previously have been performed by a junior member of staff.
To take one example, Jeannie McGillivray, co-founder and CEO of Remote, a Shropshire-based technology company, says that because her firm “increasingly operates as an AI-enabled business, we are able to absorb a significant amount of work through technology that, in a more traditional business model, could have led us to recruit additional junior administrative, coordination or support roles”. In other words, the tasks that might once have represented someone’s first foray into the world of work are now being done by AI.
Traditionally, the internal organisation of firms has been that of a pyramid, with many junior staff at the bottom and fewer seniors at the top. That pyramid could now shift to more of a diamond shape, with fewer junior workers joining at the base and a bulge of more experienced staff in the middle.
This could produce short-term efficiency savings and make firms more productive, which would be no bad thing. It does, however, raise some important questions about the future of the workplace.
For one, what does this mean for the pipeline of future talent? Where will tomorrow’s experienced leaders come from if firms stop hiring today? Plus, AI systems require experts to supervise their output. But where do the experts of the future come from if AI performs the tasks that people traditionally spent years doing to develop their expertise?
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Firms may eventually decide that the hiring freeze was short-sighted and they need an influx of junior staff to refill the talent pipeline – but that won’t be of much relief to the unlucky cohort hunting for a job right now.
Even as AI grows more capable, there will still be roles for humans. That could be because we collectively decide that some jobs should be – in Bill Gates’s terminology – “human reserved”. Gates likes the phrase because it reminds him of nature reserves: “places where we could put buildings and roads, but we choose not to because the loss would be too great”. He uses the example of a healthcare worker telling you that you have an incurable disease – something a robot technically could do but shouldn’t.
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Alternatively, it could be because human involvement is an intrinsic part of what makes the service valuable. Think about the human warmth provided by a member of the clergy, the value we place on the human ingenuity that goes into a piece of art, or the status that comes from having a meal handcooked by a top chef and a suit handmade by a tailor. Job opportunities in these areas may even expand, as people look to spend their AI-enhanced income on things that bring them meaning. Amid the well-justified concern, that provides some grounds for hope in the future of work.
Photograph by Getty Images