AI Is Taking Entry-Level Jobs. Who’s Training Your Next CEO?

AI can speed up entry-level work. Cut the training those assignments gave, and the leadership bench thins out.

Picture an entry-level analyst whose forecast just missed. The spreadsheet took her two days. The 20-minute review is where she learns. Her manager walks through each assumption, stops at the one about customer renewals and asks where it came from. She doesn’t have a good answer, and now she knows to look for one next time.

Now give the spreadsheet to an AI tool, and the draft is ready before lunch. If her manager stops asking her to defend the assumptions inside it, the lesson goes too. The savings show up right away. The missing experience can show up years later, when the company needs her to run a team.

Singapore’s president, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, raised the same worry at the IMF and World Bank meetings in Bangkok on October 12. Hiring is slowing at “the first rung in employment, your first job upon graduation,” he said. Governments should work with employers so graduates “get that first foothold in the market, and they can learn from there.”

What The Entry-Level Hiring Data Shows

In the fields AI touches most, the first rung is getting harder to reach, though the wider evidence is mixed. In a September working paper, Census Bureau researchers followed graduates of the college majors most exposed to AI, a group led by computer science and other software degrees. After ChatGPT arrived, those graduates became less likely to land a job right out of school, and their initial quarterly earnings fell about 13% relative to graduates in less exposed fields. The researchers liken that to graduating into a large recession, and the gap narrows over time. About half the earnings drop reflects a shift toward lower-paying industries such as retail and food service.