Artificial intelligence is increasingly handling research, drafting, coding and administrative tasks that were traditionally assigned to junior employees, forcing companies to reconsider entry-level hiring and career development pathways.
At London-based ad agency Catalyst, a single junior employee can now manage five client accounts, up from several previously required, according to founder Tobias Green. AI tools conduct research, write initial copy and gather data, with the human worker then refining the output. "If AI removes the grunt work, then the grunt work is no longer relevant," Green told CNBC. "They don't need to learn those skills. They need to learn how to manipulate and utilise AI."
Open University's 2026 Business Barometer report, which surveyed 1,500 UK business leaders, found that 51% said AI was changing how they hire. Some 19% reported reducing entry-level recruitment, with 42% of those citing AI adoption as the reason.
Lucy Beaumont, global SVP of product at talent assessment firm SHL, said some major graduate recruiters are hiring fewer people as they question whether entry-level roles remain necessary. She described a shift from a traditional pyramidal organisational structure to what she called a "diamond" shape, with more staff concentrated at mid-level positions.
"Those entry-level roles are your training ground — that's where you get your training wheels, your badges, your war wounds, and you learn how to operate in a corporate environment," Beaumont said. "If you take that away, it has serious implications for every rung of the ladder."
Junior roles are not disappearing entirely. A survey of 500 UK and Irish mid-market leaders by technology consultancy Klarus found that 45% said AI was being used to help junior employees work better and faster, while nearly a quarter reported creating new roles and opportunities.
In software development, tools such as Claude Code and Codex are shifting responsibilities. Sheila Flavell, COO of London-based FDM Group, said developers are increasingly tasked with overseeing projects completed by both AI agents and human workers, pushing junior employees toward supervisory roles earlier in their careers.
Employers are adapting their hiring approaches accordingly. Beaumont noted that some organisations are moving away from recruiting graduates into predefined roles, instead hiring for broad capabilities and deciding placements afterward. She cited a large global retail bank that is now looking beyond traditional talent pools toward graduates in subjects such as psychology and law, reasoning that technical skills can be taught while critical thinking is harder to build from scratch.
Cheney Hamilton, director at research firm Bloor, raised concerns about whether junior workers can develop the judgement needed to supervise work they have never performed themselves. "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.
Hamilton argued that companies should treat entry-level work as "exposure" rather than "output," with juniors checking and correcting AI-generated work while senior colleagues deliberately impart the contextual judgement that used to accumulate through experience. FDM Group is experimenting with this approach, training people using real business problems and asking them to find solutions through agentic engineering rather than simply teaching tool usage.
"The real issue isn't 'early careers' time served, but 'early knowledge,'" Hamilton said. "Are we deliberately building the contextual knowledge and judgement that used to accrue by osmosis? If not, you risk a generation with AI-enabled breadth and no depth."
