The generation companies are ditching is the one that could make AI work

Negativity around the impact of AI on jobs is spreading. Nearly two-thirds (62%) of workers believe companies are lowering entry-level hiring because AI is replacing routine tasks, according to new research from Indeed Flex published earlier this week.

New graduates are feeling the impact.

Divine Jacob is 21. He spent months sending out dozens of job applications and heard almost nothing back. But the hardest thing, he says, is the lack of human connection. "Typing up your motivations for the job just to see at the end that bots will review your application, it's not the most motivating thing."

Unfortunately, Divine's experience is not unusual. Through our work with BossUp Ambassadors, final-year students and young graduates, we constantly hear similar versions of his story.

CVs disappearing into the ether.

Job specs requiring years of experience for supposedly entry-level roles.

And a dominant narrative from big tech and large corporates that graduates are disposable and replaceable with machines.

It is no surprise that many young people feel bleak about their prospects. When we surveyed 500 students through university partnerships, 58% felt the roles they were training for had disappeared and 61% said AI had made it harder to find work.

Why young people are the missing link in AI adoption

Many executives see this as a problem for policymakers or schools and universities.

But those executives are missing something important: this generation that they're ditching in favour of AI is the one they actually need to make their AI investments work.

The companies cutting these entry-level roles cannot get AI to work yet. The most visible sign of this challenge is one most of us have unfortunately encountered: the workslop plague spreading through offices. This is AI-generated output that people know is not good enough but send anyway. More than half of employees admit to it. Which begs the question: if they know the quality is poor, why do they send it anyway? Because when management says "you must use AI" the focus is on compliance box-ticking instead of quality.

Junior employees do not need that mandate.

They are already experimenting, willingly, in ways that show their colleagues what is possible. They arrive without a decade of assumptions about how things "should be done". Experience does not constrain them.

Students of economics, fine arts, history, politics, all curious about AI, all unafraid to play with it and figure out how to build things. They have a huge appetite to experiment, to shape how AI is used, and to bring perspectives from outside the usual tech crowd.

And here is where the magic happens, and where business leaders need to pay attention. Those new graduates become the AI whisperers that help others learn and normalise AI inside their teams. This matters even more when you consider that peer-to-peer learning, learning from those around you, is far more effective than all the formal AI training programmes companies roll out. If you cut these people, you cut the very mechanism that makes AI adoption spread.

Even worse, companies are cutting entry-level roles and focusing on current cost cutting without properly addressing an emerging risk: that they are not developing their future pipeline, the talent that will become their managers and executives in the decades to come.

The way forward

At BossUp we see an alternative path open to business leaders.

One where they rethink the structure and operating model of their organisation, and with that the jobs that their employees do. If the manual and laborious tasks that your entry-level workers normally performed can now be automated, what new opportunities can you provide to them? This requires creativity to imagine new possibilities for your business, but also the willingness to reskill your people. If you'd like to find out more about how BossUp can create personalised pathways for them, get in touch with us.

I am pleased to say that Divine eventually found a job. He says the experience made him more resilient. And this resilience, combined with new AI capability, is the winning formula for his generation.