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The AI Transformation 100: 100 Concrete Ideas for Fixing How We Work
Is cutting off your left leg to loew weight a good idea? After all, you can attach an artificial limb that weighs half as much and still walk. Most people would call that line of reasoning stupid.
So why are companies hiring fewer entry-level workers on the belief that AI can do their jobs?
Sure, they'll see immediate savings. AI can handle the grunt work typically assigned to recent college grads (report drafting, research synthesis, coding fixes, scheduling …) at a fraction of the price. The CFO is happy. The board is happy.
Meanwhile, their talent pipeline quietly empties.
Short-Term Savings, Long-Term Damage
"AI can't assess its own output, think critically or know when to override the results," Michele Capra, senior client partner and global VP of talent acquisition at Korn Ferry RPO, told Reworked. For that you need humans who know the company. And the way humans learn to know a company is by starting at the bottom.
When you cut entry-level hiring, you don't just lose a few junior employees. You cut the pipeline that produces your next generation of managers, directors and executives. The savings show up in this quarter's numbers. The damage shows up five years from now.
The numbers on external hiring are ugly. Wharton research shows external hires cost 18% more per year than people promoted from within and are 61% more likely to be let go. They also take up to two years to develop the organizational knowledge that internal candidates already have. In the first month they operate at roughly 25% productivity. If things don't work out, SHRM puts the total loss at 50% to 60% of annual salary, before accounting for what slipped through the cracks while the seat sat empty.
Liz Eversoll, CEO of Career Highways, is direct. "If the new hires aren't there [to begin with], your talent pipeline is empty," she said. That void isn't readily apparent. It shows up when you need to promote someone into a senior role and realize nobody's ready. Then you're back in the expensive external market. Multiply that across a few leadership roles and the savings from cutting entry-level hiring starts to look like a bad trade.
The Real Consequences of Missing Talent Pipelines
This isn't hypothetical. Coca-Cola had a decade to prepare for CEO succession when Roberto Goizueta was at the top of his game. Yet when he died suddenly from lung cancer in 1997, the wheels came off almost immediately.
Goizueta had spent 27-years rising through the ranks, starting when he answered a help wanted ad in a Cuban newspaper. The company promoted his COO, Doug Ivester, a man Goizueta had personally mentored. Ivester lasted 26 months. Return on shareholder equity dropped from 56% to 35%. Earnings declined for more than two years. The board eventually had Warren Buffett deliver the news in a private meeting. A brilliant COO was not the same thing as a leader. Nobody had built that into him, because building it takes years, and it starts at the bottom.
Starbucks tried three times. Howard Schultz returned as CEO in 2022 because the board couldn't find a successor despite having a year to look. It was his third time back. Shareholders filed a formal proposal demanding the company begin succession planning at least three years before any CEO transition. A company with 50 years and 34,000 stores to develop its next generation of leaders kept reaching for the same one guy. That's not a Schultz problem. That's a pipeline problem. And pipelines don't start at the VP level. They start with an intern doing the grunt work nobody else wants.
What Entry Level Jobs Should Look Like Today
New hires also see things veterans stopped seeing years ago. Experienced employees protect the status quo. They stop noticing the gaps. A new hire hasn't learned to ignore them yet.
That said, hiring junior employees to do what their predecessors did is also wrong. The jobs have changed. "AI is here to stay," Eversoll said. Her recommendation: use a skills-based framework to define what a role actually needs, which tasks belong to AI, which belong to humans, and hire for that from day one instead of backfilling jobs that AI is already doing.
Capra described how Korn Ferry now thinks about job design: AI and human sharing the role. "AI can help with the majority of general tasks, but humans are needed to understand and address unique situations," she said. The entry-level worker in that human role accumulates something AI can't. Knowledge of the formal and informal workflows. Knowledge of the customers. Knowledge of what actually happens when things go wrong. In time, that's the person who can tell leadership what's working and what isn't. “Bring the new hire on board and let them lead in creating agents," said Capra.
A recent Korn Ferry report is worth quoting directly: "Entry-level and back-office positions aren't just about getting routine work done. They're where people learn your culture, understand your processes, and develop the institutional knowledge that makes them valuable leaders later." And then this: "Your board loves the cost savings today. They'll hate the leadership crisis it brings on its tail."
The 'Apprenticeship Dividend'
Some companies already knew this. IBM announced that it will triple entry-level hiring in the United States in 2026. Chief HR Officer Nickle LaMoreaux, speaking at Charter's Leading With AI Summit, was clear about why the old jobs are gone: "The entry-level jobs that you had two to three years ago, AI can do most of them. You have to rewrite every job."
IBM rewrote them. Junior developers now spend less time on routine coding and more time with customers and supervising AI outputs. Dropbox is expanding internship and graduate programs by 25%, with Chief People Officer Melanie Rosenwasser pointing to younger workers' comfort with AI as the driver. LaMoreaux's prediction: "The companies three to five years from now that are going to be the most successful are those that doubled down on entry-level hiring in this environment."
A September 2025 HBR piece, "The Perils of Using AI to Replace Entry-Level Jobs" by Amy C. Edmondson and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, calls it the "apprenticeship dividend." Junior employees who lean too hard on generative AI produce more output but understand less of it. That gap surfaces years later in bad calls made by people who can't tell you why they got it wrong.
AI doesn't fix bad judgment. It scales it. Companies cutting entry-level hiring to save money today are betting that they can buy wisdom later. They can't. Build the pipeline now or pay later.
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Editor's Note: How else is AI affecting jobs?
- The Disappearing Entry Level Job — Entry-level jobs are disappearing , but we can't leave it to recent grads to figure out next steps.
- How to Save Entry Level Jobs From AI Extinction — As AI takes on tasks once reserved for interns, companies must rethink how to preserve entry-level roles that build future talent.
- Is Generative AI Actually Freeing Workers From Low-Level Work? — Take AI evangelists' promises with a grain of salt. But that doesn't mean AI success is out of reach, just that you might have to switch goals.