The rise of generative A.I. is disrupting entry-level opportunities across industries. Getty Images/Unsplash
The mainstream rise of generative A.I. in recent years has fueled concerns that the technology could eat into human job prospects. A new Harvard study suggests those fears may be justified. Junior workers, in particular, have seen sharp declines in employment since 2023 at companies adopting A.I.—a trend that raises questions about the financial future of young professionals.
The working paper, which draws on datasets from LinkedIn and Revelio Labs, tracked roughly 62 million workers and 285,000 U.S. firms between 2015 and 2025. It found a clear pattern: junior positions have been shrinking at companies integrating A.I. The researchers, who even used A.I. to identify A.I.-adopting firms, determined that 3.7 percent of the companies in their sample embraced the technology over the past decade.
The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 coincided with a turning point in the labor market. From 2015 through mid-2022, both junior and senior employment grew steadily. But starting in 2022, junior employment began to flatten and then decline. Since the first quarter of 2023, headcount for early-career roles at A.I.-adopting firms has dropped 7.7 percent after six quarters, the study found.
Senior staff, by contrast, appear largely insulated. Employment for experienced workers has steadily risen since 2015 and avoided the downturn that hit their younger colleagues.
One possible explanation, according to the paper, is that early-career white-collar jobs often involve “intellectually mundane tasks” such as debugging code or reviewing legal documents—work that generative A.I. can easily automate. Because junior roles are typically stepping stones to senior positions, their decline could erode “the bottom rungs of these ladders” for workers just entering an industry, the researchers warned.
The severity of the impact varies by sector. Industries like wholesale and retail trade, which can automate communication, customer service and documentation, have seen junior hiring fall by 40 percent per quarter compared with firms that have not adopted A.I. These declines are attributed more to slower hiring than to mass layoffs.
The study adds weight to recent warnings about the erosion of early-career opportunities. A Stanford study published last month found that workers aged 22 to 25 have experienced a 13 percent relative decline in employment in A.I.-exposed fields like coding and customer service, while more experienced workers have seen job opportunities increase in those very same sectors. Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and a co-author of the paper, said on X that both his research and the Harvard study show “falling levels of employment for young workers in the occupations most affected by A.I. since early 2023.”
Together, the studies represent some of the first large-scale analyses of A.I.’s impact on the labor market and deepen the uncertainty surrounding junior workers. The Harvard paper’s authors note that college graduates’ lifetime wage growth largely depends on early career advancement that starts with low-paying entry roles. “If A.I. disproportionately affects junior positions, it could have lasting consequences for the college wage premium, upward mobility and income disparities,” they wrote.
