An MIT researcher says cutting entry-level jobs to save on AI costs could quietly wreck a company's future

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Andrew McAfee, an MIT research scientist who co-leads the school's Initiative on the Digital Economy, is warning that companies automating away entry-level roles risk a costly long-term mistake, one that goes well beyond just shrinking today's headcount. Cutting off talent at its source, he argues, disrupts the exact pipeline that produces a company's future leaders

How else are people going to learn to do the job except via on-the-job learning and training apprenticeship, McAfee told Harvard Business Review in April. That's how you learn to do difficult knowledge work, by helping somebody who's good at that with the routine stuff. And when we put too much automation in that too quickly, we lose that apprenticeship ladder

The risk isn't just about training gaps either. McAfee points out that Gen Z reports the highest standalone AI tool usage of any generation, 76 percent according to a November 2025 Deloitte study, making young hires uniquely valuable specifically because of how fluently they already use these tools. There is a big demographic falloff, he said, as people get older we tend to be more set in our ways and less willing to try crazy new things like AI. Pull back on entry-level hiring, and you're also turning off the spigot of your organization's most enthusiastic power users of the very technology you're trying to adopt

The warning lands at a genuinely anxious moment for young job seekers, entry-level postings on Handshake are down 2 percent year over year and 12 percent below pre-pandemic levels, unemployment for college graduates aged 22 to 27 sits at 5.6 percent according to the New York Fed, and nearly 9 in 10 members of the class of 2026 say they're worried AI or automation could replace entry-level roles, up sharply from 64 percent just a year earlier. Not every employer is pulling back though, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said last year he expects to hire more people out of college over the next 12 months than in several prior years combined, Salesforce is bringing on 1,000 new graduates and interns specifically to help build its AI systems, and Amazon plans to bring on 11,000 software engineering interns in 2026, in line with prior years. A separate Goldman Sachs analysis offers a somewhat more reassuring counterpoint too, finding college-educated young workers historically experience earnings losses roughly half as large as other displaced workers after a job loss, adjusting more flexibly through switching occupations and picking up new skills rather than simply falling out of the workforce

MIT AI expert warns automating Gen Z entry-level jobs could backfire-and cost companies their future workforce | Fortunefortune.com