At London ad agency Catalyst, one junior employee now handles five client accounts. A few years ago that work needed several juniors. Founder Tobias Green told CNBC this week that AI handles the research, the first-pass copy and the data gathering, while the human “comes in and fix[es] it up” — a set-up he described as “a reverse Mechanical Turk.” His conclusion about first jobs: “If AI removes the grunt work, then the grunt work is no longer relevant. They don’t need to learn those skills … They need to learn how to manipulate and utilise AI.”
The piece, published by CNBC’s Work desk on 23 September, is the sharpest articulation yet of a question quietly reorganising white-collar hiring: when the tasks that used to teach juniors how work actually functions are automated, what is the entry-level job for?
🔍 THE BOTTOM LINE
The evidence so far points to redesign more than removal. Employers are cutting some entry-level intake, mostly citing AI — but a larger group reports using AI to make junior staff faster, and some are rebuilding first roles around judgement and oversight. For graduates, the skills ladder has not vanished; it has moved from doing the grunt work to directing it.
What the new surveys say
The Open University’s 2026 Business Barometer, which surveyed 1,500 UK business leaders, found 51 percent said AI was changing how they hire. Nineteen percent said they had reduced entry-level recruitment — and within that group, 42 percent cited AI adoption as a reason. That is a real contraction signal, but a narrow one: it describes about 8 percent of all surveyed firms reducing entry-level hiring because of AI, not a collapse.
The counterweight sits in a separate survey of 500 UK and Irish mid-market leaders by technology consultancy Klarus: 45 percent said AI was being used to help junior employees work better and faster, and almost a quarter said it was creating new roles and opportunities. Both surveys are consistent with what Stanford and King’s College London found last week across 1.25 billion job postings: AI-adopting firms hire more overall but skew senior, leaving junior composition, not total employment, as the battleground.
The pyramid becomes a diamond
Lucy Beaumont, global SVP of product at talent assessment firm SHL, told CNBC that some major graduate recruiters are hiring fewer juniors while they assess whether the roles still exist. “If we’ve had an organisation that’s a pyramid shape, we’re now seeing what we call a diamond, with more people at that mid-level,” she said. Her warning is about the long game: entry-level roles are “your training ground — that’s where you get your training wheels … If you take that away, it has serious implications for every rung of the ladder.”
That concern is not new, but this week it acquired a mechanism. Bloor Research director Cheney Hamilton told CNBC that grunt work was never just work — it was the mechanism through which people accumulated context and judgement. “AI raises the floor of what a junior can produce, but it doesn’t give them the judgement to know when the output is wrong, and that judgement historically came from repetition and consequence,” she said. Her proposed fix is to treat entry-level work as “exposure” rather than “output”: juniors check and correct AI-generated work while senior colleagues deliberately teach the judgement around it.
The positive case: hiring for potential
The more optimistic signal in the CNBC reporting is about who gets hired at all. Beaumont described one large global retail bank now recruiting graduates from psychology and law rather than traditional technical pipelines — reasoning that technical skills can be taught but critical thinking is harder to build from scratch. “It is hiring for potential,” she said. “Have you got re-skilling potential? Could we re-skill you onto different things? It doesn’t really matter where you’ve come from.”
In software, FDM Group COO Sheila Flavell said tools including Claude Code and Codex mean developers increasingly oversee projects completed by both AI agents and people — pushing juniors toward supervising work earlier in their careers, and training them on real business problems with agentic engineering rather than tool instruction.
That pattern — firms reshaping rather than shrinking the first rung — matches what the data on the other side of this debate has shown all year. A Ramp and Revelio Labs study of 21,000 US firms found the heaviest AI spenders grew entry-level headcount 12 percent after adoption, and Cognizant announced 1,500 graduate hires into a new 15,000-person Frontier job family in the same week its research flagged $4.5 trillion of US wages as AI-exposed.
The New Zealand read
New Zealand sits closer to the sharp end of this shift than its size suggests. An SAP-sponsored survey of 5,500 business leaders reported late last year found 34 percent of NZ companies had slowed entry-level hiring and 88 percent expected to further reduce such recruitment within three years, while 76 percent of NZ organisations said on-the-job development for juniors had diminished — the highest of any country surveyed. RBNZ governor Anna Breman told Parliament this month that AI could soften short-run employment growth for young workers, and our coverage traced what happens when the first rung breaks.
But the same NZ data points the same way as the UK surveys: 67 percent of NZ organisations told the same survey they were investing in AI training and reskilling, matching the global average, and SEEK’s August report shows NZ job ads up 9.7 percent year on year with AI skills now in 4.0 percent of ads. The market is not closing the door on juniors; it is raising the doorframe.
FAQ
Are entry-level jobs disappearing because of AI? The strongest new data says the total is holding while the composition shifts. Open University’s survey found 19 percent of UK firms reduced entry-level recruitment, with 42 percent of those citing AI — but 45 percent of mid-market leaders told Klarus AI helps junior staff work better and faster, and nearly a quarter said it creates new roles.
What skills should graduates build instead of grunt-work skills? Judgement and oversight. Researchers argue the tasks AI absorbs — research, drafting, coding, admin — were also the mechanism by which juniors learned context. The firms redesigning entry-level work are training juniors to check and correct AI output, and hiring broadly for re-skilling potential rather than predefined technical roles.
Is New Zealand’s graduate market worse than elsewhere? It is tighter. A survey of 5,500 business leaders found 34 percent of NZ firms had slowed entry-level hiring and 88 percent expected further reductions within three years — but formal AI training investment matches the global average, and NZ job ads overall are still growing.
— CJ Murden, editor of Singularity.Kiwi. Former digital technologies teacher, author of AI-focused books. Writing with a New Zealand focus.
