Study: AI Adds Jobs but Cuts Junior Hiring Across 41 Countries

Companies that use artificial intelligence are hiring more than companies that do not, but the gains are flowing to experienced workers. Junior hiring at AI-adopting firms fell 3 percent over five years, while senior employment grew 6.7 percent, according to a working paper released on Monday by researchers at Stanford University and King's College London. The findings are another sign that entry-level work is thinning just as a new generation enters the job market.

The researchers, Bharat Chandar of Stanford and Bouke Klein Teeselink of King's College London, based their analysis on 1.25 billion job postings and 154 million employment records across 41 countries, covering January 2021 through March 2026. Although total hiring rose at firms that adopted AI, the share of junior workers on their payrolls fell by 1.9 percentage points, according to a report on the paper.

The junior share is shrinking

The shift away from lower-level workers showed up in numerous countries, including Brazil, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom. In the paper, the authors wrote that "AI is labor saving for junior workers and labor expanding for seniors in exposed occupations," and added that junior employment losses run somewhat deeper in richer and more digitized economies.

For recent graduates, the pattern matters because the first job has always been the training ground for the rest of a career. Entry-level roles have traditionally taught new workers how to research, write and manage information before they were asked to make decisions. Those early assignments were also how managers spotted promising employees and decided who to promote. A separate survey found 62 percent of workers say they are overloaded as they juggle heavier workloads. As software takes over more of those routine tasks, junior hiring shrinks even as overall hiring grows, and companies say they need more experienced staff to oversee the work that remains.

Even AI-exposed jobs tilt toward seniors

The same tilt appeared in computer-related and mathematical roles, which are among the occupations most exposed to AI. Employment in those roles increased by 0.8 percentage points at companies that adopted AI, the researchers found, but the growth also favored senior workers. The jobs most shaped by the technology are not the exception to the trend; they follow it.

Earlier research from Stanford's Digital Economy Lab, published in August, offered a possible reason. That work found that AI replaces "book learning" but is weaker at reproducing tacit knowledge, described as "the idiosyncratic tips and tricks that accumulate with experience." Skills that come from doing a job for years are harder to automate than skills that come from reading a manual. More detail is available in the lab's canaries in the coal mine research.

How Gen Z is answering back

Young workers are not waiting for the traditional ladder to come back. A LinkedIn poll of 1,000 U.S. respondents aged 18 to 29, reported earlier this month, found entry-level hiring slipped 6 percent year over year. About 21 percent of respondents said they had started a business or side hustle to begin their careers, while 22 percent were building apps, websites or personal projects to show what they can do. Another 32 percent said they had taken roles outside their field to build skills that are in demand.

The same poll found 72 percent of young office workers were considering skilled trades. ZipRecruiter's 2026 Graduate Report painted a similar picture: nearly 38 percent of Gen Z graduates were considering starting a business, 32.5 percent were turning to gig work and 28 percent to freelancing. Entry-level postings fell to 38.6 percent of all openings in March, down from 44 percent in 2023. That do-it-yourself streak is already visible here: teen side hustles are replacing the UK Saturday job, and AI side hustlers report nearly double the monthly income of their peers.

What this means for new graduates

The Stanford lab also found that employment among 22- to 25-year-olds in jobs highly exposed to AI sat 19 percent below where it would have been had those roles kept pace with less-exposed ones. Pew Research Center reported that young adults in the United States are growing more concerned about AI-related job losses, and the anxiety is showing up in surveys of how people plan their careers.

One employer survey points to what the new bar looks like. PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer found that traditionally senior capabilities make up 52 percent of the new skills required in the most AI-exposed entry-level jobs. For applicants, that suggests the remaining junior roles ask more of the people who fill them: judgment, communication and experience working with the tools rather than just performing the tasks the tools now handle.

The paper's authors are careful not to claim that AI is the only force behind the shift. Economic cycles, remote work and changing company structures all shape who gets hired, and the study measures correlation across a huge sample rather than a controlled experiment. But the data covers five years, 41 countries and more than a billion postings, which makes the direction of the trend hard to dismiss for anyone planning a career in an office. For students and recent graduates, it is one more reason to treat AI tools as something to learn rather than something to compete with for entry-level tasks.