Entry-level gains

Led by an abrupt about-face at IBM, corporations are rethinking entry-level talent in the age of AI

THE RISE IN AI tech, along with a general (and related) trend of cutting headcount, has had a rough impact on one group of workers in particular: entry-level, junior staff.

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“AI means the end of entry-level jobs,” declared The Wall Street Journal last December — and that’s just one of a raft of eulogies for entry-level work. Privately, though, many have wondered where the limits of that line of thinking are — how deep can a company cut its entry-level talent pipeline and still manage to carry on?

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In one of the first major about-faces of the AI hiring era, IBM may have just conceded it has found the limit. After it laid off 8,000 people at the end of last year, citing the shift to AI, the computer company slammed on the brakes this month and announced it was tripling its entry-level hiring targets for 2026. “It’s for all these jobs that we’re being told AI can do,” the company’s chief human resources officer, Nickle LaMoreaux, told a conference last week.

LaMoreaux wasn’t necessarily saying AI wasn’t working, or there weren’t productivity gains to be realized, but she was arguing that the belief in treating AI as a substitute for human labour was short-term thinking, and that the technology will only be a positive if it’s accompanied by investment in humans.

“The companies three to five years from now that are going to be the most successful are those companies that doubled down on entry-level hiring in this environment,” she said. “Build the business case now; even though it may not seem so obvious to your leaders, because AI is going to make your job easier three years from now.”

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The crux of this approach comes in rethinking the entry-level jobs to include more AI fluency, LaMoreaux explained — a notable divergence from large swaths of the employment market, where AI has led companies to slash entry-level hiring and condense roles, a strategy that critics worry will create a long-term talent shortage and lower overall morale.

Other companies are whistling a similar tune. Dropbox, for instance, said it is expanding its internship and new graduate programs by 25 per cent to try to capitalize on AI. And IT firm Cognizant also said it was expanding, not contracting, the number of entry-level hires.

“I can take a school graduate and give them the tooling so they can actually punch above their weight,” Ravi Kumar S, CEO of Cognizant, told Fortune. “AI is an amplifier of human potential. It’s not a displacement strategy.” Kieran Delamont