AI Benefits Senior Employees? 40% of CEOs Plan to Eliminate Entry-Level Roles, Putting Young Professionals’ Jobs at Greater Risk
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AI Benefits Senior Employees? 40% of CEOs Plan to Eliminate Entry-Level Roles, Putting Young Professionals’ Jobs at Greater Risk
Goldman Sachs previously estimated that AI eliminates approximately 16,000 U.S. jobs net per month, with Generation Z being the most affected.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Claude, TechFlow
TechFlow Insight: A new survey by Oliver Wyman and the New York Stock Exchange of 415 global CEOs finds that 43% plan to cut entry-level positions over the next one to two years, shifting toward mid- and senior-level talent—a figure more than double last year’s 17%. AI is systematically replacing routine tasks historically performed by junior staff, while experienced employees—whose judgment and expertise are harder to replicate—are becoming more valuable. Goldman Sachs previously estimated that AI eliminates roughly 16,000 U.S. jobs net per month, with Gen Z bearing the brunt.
In past waves of layoffs, older, higher-paid employees were often the first targets. But the logic is reversing in the AI era.
According to a Bloomberg report on May 16, Oliver Wyman and the New York Stock Exchange’s 2026 CEO Agenda Survey reveals that over 40% of CEOs plan to reduce entry-level roles and tilt their workforce composition toward mid- and senior-level employees over the next one to two years; only 17% say they will expand entry-level hiring. A year ago, these figures were nearly inverted.
The survey covered 415 CEOs (266 from publicly listed companies and 149 from private firms). The public-company sample collectively accounts for about 10% of global market capitalization, including 65 Fortune 500 CEOs.
John Romeo, Head of the Oliver Wyman Forum, told Bloomberg: “It’s indeed becoming harder for entry-level workers to break into the workforce. CEOs now prioritize mid- and senior-level talent to drive productivity.”
43% of CEOs Cutting Entry-Level Roles: Emergence of AI’s “Seniority Bias”
The rationale is straightforward: AI agents currently excel precisely at tasks typical of entry-level work—coding, evaluating sales leads, reviewing documents, compiling data reports—routine cognitive labor historically assigned to junior staff and now being rapidly automated by AI systems.
What AI cannot yet replicate is judgment honed through years of industry experience. Ravin Jesuthasan, a future-of-work advisor, told Bloomberg that corporate attitudes are shifting toward: “I need someone who has actually done this before—her experience, judgment, and problem-solving ability make her more valuable than AI.”
This trend is already supported by academic research. A paper by Harvard researchers Seyed M. Hosseini and Guy Lichtinger analyzed resume and hiring data covering 62 million U.S. workers across 285,000 companies. It found that since early 2023, generative AI adopters saw entry-level headcount decline by 7.7% relative to non-adopters over six quarters—while senior-level headcount remained largely unaffected. Crucially, this decline stemmed primarily from slowed hiring—not mass layoffs. In other words: not firing people, but simply stopping new hires.
Oliver Wyman’s report spells out the implication more directly: “CEOs with the longest planning horizons are most likely to plan headcount reductions. This suggests they anticipate organizations will become leaner under AI augmentation—not as a cost-cutting measure, but as an end state.”
Goldman Sachs Estimate: AI Eliminates 16,000 U.S. Jobs Net Per Month—Gen Z Hit Hardest
In a research report released in April, Goldman Sachs economist Elsie Peng estimated that AI’s displacement effect eliminated approximately 25,000 jobs per month over the past year, while its augmentation effect created roughly 9,000 new jobs per month—yielding a net loss of ~16,000 jobs. Frontierbeat
The impact is highly uneven. Among occupations most exposed to AI displacement, the unemployment gap between under-30 entry-level workers and 31–50-year-old seasoned professionals has widened significantly compared to pre-pandemic levels. Wage inequality has also worsened: Goldman’s regression analysis estimates that each standard-deviation increase in AI exposure widens the wage gap between entry-level and senior workers by approximately 3.3 percentage points. Fortune
Gen Z is disproportionately concentrated in routine white-collar roles such as data entry, customer service, legal support, and billing—precisely the domains where AI excels at automation. They lack the experiential buffer that seasoned workers possess. Fortune
A Stanford University study from November last year further corroborates this: in fields most exposed to AI, young workers face a 16% higher risk of unemployment than other groups. Fortune
Long-Term Risk: Talent Pipeline Disruption
Cutting entry-level roles may lower costs and boost efficiency in the short term—but hidden costs are raising alarms.
Helen Leis, Global Lead for Leadership & Transformation at Oliver Wyman, told Bloomberg: “If companies want mid- and senior-level talent to manage AI-driven workflows in the future, ‘these people need to learn the job first—in the company.’ Not hiring entry-level staff effectively severs your own talent pipeline.”
Andrew McAfee, Co-Director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, expressed similar concerns in the Harvard Business Review: “Beyond on-the-job learning and apprenticeship programs—how else do people learn to do a job?”
Monster’s survey data shows that nearly 90% of the Class of 2026 graduates fear AI or automation will replace entry-level roles—a sharp rise from 64% in 2025. Fortune
These concerns are not unfounded. According to a SignalFire report, the 15 largest U.S. tech companies reduced entry-level hiring by 25% between 2023 and 2024. The UK situation is even starker: tech-sector graduate roles fell by 46% in 2024, with another 53% drop expected by 2026. IEEE SpectrumRezi
A Few Companies Go Against the Tide: AI “Winners” Value Entry-Level Talent More
Interestingly, the most successful AI adopters display divergent talent strategies.
Oliver Wyman’s report notes: “A cohort of advanced AI adopters operating counter to the mainstream believes this technology enhances—rather than replaces—the value of entry-level talent.” Firms reporting higher AI ROI are more likely to tilt hiring toward entry-level roles than those still awaiting returns.
IBM announced in February it would triple its U.S. entry-level hiring and rewrite job descriptions for the AI era. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently announced plans to hire 1,000 recent graduates and interns to build its AI systems—and posted on X: “They say AI will eliminate entry-level jobs, but these graduates and interns are building AI.” AWS CEO Matt Garman publicly stated that replacing entry-level staff with AI is “one of the dumbest decisions a company can make,” noting that entry-level employees are often the most proficient users of AI tools.
Yet such cases remain outliers. Oliver Wyman’s survey finds 74% of CEOs are freezing or cutting headcount—up from 67% last year—with the most aggressive cuts occurring in tech, media, and telecom.
The AI ROI Dilemma: Most Firms Still in the “Burn Money, Trial-and-Error” Phase
CEOs’ confidence in AI’s ability to reshape workforce structures stands in stark contrast to AI’s actual delivery of measurable returns.
Oliver Wyman’s survey shows 67% of firms’ AI deployments remain in the planning or pilot stage. 53% of CEOs say it’s still too early to assess AI ROI—a rise from 41% last year. Only 27% report AI ROI meeting or exceeding expectations, down from 38% last year. Nearly one-quarter say AI has had zero impact on revenue.
The report describes this as “not a crisis of confidence, but a growing recognition that large-scale job redesign is slower and more difficult than initial enthusiasm suggested.”
However, the report also notes that firms deploying AI across two or more use cases report roughly twice the cost savings and revenue growth of single-use-case firms. AI’s value curve is nonlinear—the real payoff comes only after scale.
As Teresa Ghilarducci, economist at The New School, told Bloomberg: Even if AI tilts the workplace balance toward senior workers, that doesn’t guarantee job security. “Firms’ commitments to employees are weakening.”
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