Founders, Fresh Grads, and AI Are Reinventing the Entry-Level Job

Businesses explain how they find AI-powered 10x employees, and young workers reveal how they automate their own roles to get those precious few jobs.

Omar Haroun, co-founder and CEO of Eudia, an AI-powered legal services company, credits a recent Gen-Z hire with his epiphany about the future of the entry-level job market. The employee, whom Haroun met through a social connection, had a business degree and was working in an unrelated field, assisting homeowners’ associations with record keeping, but they were “obsessed with AI, to the point where they were using it in their personal life,” says Haroun. 

“They had zero experience when they came in,” he continues, “but they took pieces of content that we have and improved them to the point that we could use them for marketing.” 

With the help of AI, the new hire now creates 10 times the output of a more experienced employee working without the boost from the new technology, according to Haroun. 

“I’m suddenly looking for more fresh grads,” he says. “We’ll be looking on Reddit forums and comments on YouTube videos because it’s important to me that we have someone who really is sincere, and not just saying they like AI.”

Welcome to the new world of entry-level work. In a largely stagnant job market, large companies such as Amazon are eliminating 14,000 jobs amid record earnings due to their commitment to using AI to boost productivity, and many small businesses are also being measured by how close they can get to the dream of building a one-person billion-dollar company. 

In this climate, new grads face the worst hiring climate since the Great Recession. Unemployment for workers 16-24 hit 10.5 percent in August, the highest level since the pandemic, while the relative job security enjoyed by new college grads has nearly evaporated. Young people now face the highest unemployment of several sub-groups tracked by the Federal Reserve Bank of NewYork.

In speaking with businesses who are hiring entry-level workers as well as college-age people finding opportunities in this moment of static job growth, you’ll learn: 

• Why CEOs are openly contemplating the destruction of traditional pathways into white-collar careers

• How employers are testing that untrained young people have an AI-first mindset

• The ways in which job seekers are creating their own opportunities

Today’s entry-level employee has more responsibility in the AI era, and effectively becomes a manager of AI tools and their outputs on day one. For job candidates who can show they’re effectively harnessing AI, it’s an interesting, promising time.

Vibe coding takes over

Some of the industries which are currently most affected by the rise of AI include software engineering, law, and finance, fields that rely on large numbers of junior employees doing often rote work such as research and basic data analysis, work that AI excels at. 

Software, though, arguably has seen the biggest impact. For example, about 40 percent of the code at Gaia Dynamics, an AI-powered trade compliance platform, is generated with AI, estimates its CEO, Emil Stefanutti. The company’s developer team started out using Cursor and recently shifted to Claude Code. 

“It would be a huge red flag if a developer these days, especially a younger one, showed up and said ‘I do everything by hand,’” he says.

Across the board, headcount for young software developers has fallen by nearly 20 percent since2022, according to a recent study from the Stanford Digital Lab—a larger impact than even customer-service agents, who saw employment drop about 15 percent. 

In recognition of this change, many companies have overhauled their interview process for software developers. Rather than forbidding new hires from using AI in coding interviews, some potential employers now expect them to use AI but make the task more challenging. 

“We used to have proctoring software and turned your camera on to make sure you’re not cheating,” says Neil Cawse, CEO of fleet manager Geotab. But about five months ago, the company changed its strategy. Now, candidates can use any tool they want to complete small projects within a very limited time, such as writing a marketing brief or analyzing data. “If you can do it faster, better, using ChatGPT, why not?” Cawse says. “It’s kind of silly [not to]. None of us does anything without leveraging AI.” 

At job-matching platform Jobright, candidates are asked to build a gaming website or product from scratch in an hour, says CEO Eric Cheng. “Instead of working as individual software engineers,”he says, “you should train yourself to be a commander of AI employees.” 

About 60 percent of the company’s code is AI-generated, he adds. “To be honest, we just don’t need that many engineers or developers.”

AI is filling jobs once held by new grads 

For now, AI has eliminated the work that sales and marketing reps would do at Sound Coffee, a10-employee coffee roastery, wholesaler, and café operator in Bridgeport, Conn. “I know the roles that I would like to hire for, but our budget doesn’t allow for a big staff,” says co-owner Jeff Roy, who has two Sound locations. “So instead, we are using AI for some critical business functions.” 

He recently used ChatGPT to price out renting an espresso cart for an event, to visualize profitability of different lines of his business, and, recently, for creative input and design feed back on a new beverage label. 

Another tool, Opener, has relieved Roy of the need to drive around to local cafes to pitch his beans. 

Opener, an AI platform for the CPG industry, automates the emailing process, finding potential targets, sending out messages and answering questions via email, handling the interaction until the prospect asks for a sample. 

“This kind of outreach work could justify a $60,000–$80,000 annual role, and we’ll likely still needto hire a full-time sales person as the business grows,” Roy says. ”For now, tools like Opener allow us to start building that part of the business and generate new leads without taking on the full-time expense yet. Some of those automated conversations have already led to real opportunities and sample requests that are moving toward partnerships.”

Without AI, Roy says, “we’d have to be a lot more careful about what we choose to do.” 

“AI is just allowing me to do more. I’m still booking the same amount of hours, but I’m able to work across four different business units and tackle a lot more stuff.”

Marketing is also among the most disrupted fields as AI moves on from back-office tasks, such as internal communication, summarizing, and scheduling. It can now, increasingly, take over creative work — copywriting, image mock-ups, planning early campaigns. As a result, the trade publication MarTech reported in September that fewer junior marketers are being hired.

At Gaia Dynamics, AI prototyping tools have sped up the design process. “We still have a human designer and human product person, but things are moving a little faster,” says CEO Stefanutti. He’s also leaning into AI for some content, although, he emphasizes, always with a human supervisor. 

“We are hiring less rapidly than I thought we would be, and AI is definitely playing a role,” he says.“We are getting a lot more done with the people we have, more than I thought we would be at this point.”

More work and a shorter on-ramp 

The advent of AI has steepened the ramp from entry-level to experienced hires. At UK-basedPersonnel Checks, a background investigations company, recent hires are expected to get up to speed faster. “Rather than just filling the bulk of their shift sorting documents, completing data entry, responding to queries, or generating simple content,” says human resources director Tracey Beveridge, “they may now be tasked with learning more complex processes earlier in their employment, and working at what was previously considered a more experienced role.” 

That can mean they should show more “adaptability and ambition” in the recruiting process, “so they can hit the ground running and aid the streamlining of processes.” 

Pavel Shynkarenko, founder and CEO of Mellow, an HR tech company, says his company doubled its headcount last year, to 140 employees, but only 10 percent of the hires were entry-level. “Hiring entry-level people has become really tough lately. Budgets are tighter and new employees are expected to hit the ground running. The people we chose were those who could grow into mid-level roles quickly and show independence early on.” 

Bonus points for automation

Along with more on-the-job independence, many companies take new employees on board with the understanding that a new hire will automate parts of their own job without being prompted. 

Shynkarenko expects employees to automate any task they repeat, such as checking email. As he says, “You shouldn’t waste your time doing routine tasks.” The company regularly hosts ‘hackathons’, with cash prizes, to encourage the team to come up with new applications for AI.

“If … my designer used Midjourney to create a design instead of doing it manually, I would be very happy, because it means that we increased the speed of production,” Shynkarenko adds. “I cannot imagine another way.” 

Anya Sikri, a University of California, Berkeley, senior majoring in public health and data science, automated away a big part of her recent internship at a pharmaceutical company. She was tasked with conducting market analysis on pharmaceutical companies, a job she says was “really difficult”because clinical trial data is often scattered across public and private databases and formatted inconsistently. 

Sikri built an AI tool designed to accelerate investment due diligence[ by answering questions in natural language and presenting real-time clinical and regulatory data from financial sources as well as sources like ClinicalTrials.gov and FDA.gov.. “They were impressed for sure,” she says of her supervisors. “It’s cool when a company you work with is open to new ideas.” 

She is currently interning and weighing a full-time job offer from the company alongside a competing offer at another company. 

Even still, Sikri, 21, says she is more fortunate than many of her classmates, who are struggling to get hired as many of their software-specific skills get automated.

“Technically, I just automated some repeatable functions of a data analyst,” she says. But she hopes her unique combination of technical and healthcare knowledge will future-proof her career, up to a point. “The biggest strength is knowing a specific domain really well,” she adds, “and how you can solve problems in this field.” 

From contributor to manager

The opportunity—for both employers who are looking to hire and people seeking a foot in the door—is a job that colloquially one could call “AI wrangler.”

Toby Achebe, a 21-year-old Rutgers University marketing major, spent his summer internship with an appliance manufacturer conducting interviews and analyzing response data multiple times a day, working in tandem with Google’s Gemini AI tool. 

“Gemini was such a helpful tool in enhancing skills I already had,” he says. “It was me and Gemini against the world.” The AI tool polished emails, took notes on his interviews, helped with data analysis, brainstorming, and incorporating colleagues’ feedback. He was cautious of possible“work slop” but avoided it, he says, by being thoughtful and fine-tuning his prompts. 

The AI, he adds, “cut out a lot of the tedious manual cleanup and data analysis. It did allow me to spend more time with my team, having human conversations.” 

He plans to work at the company where he interned full-time after graduation.

Along with an increase in AI work volumes, the shift away from rote tasks means more entry-level jobs call for increased judgment. In some companies, new hires now do analysis or quality control.Essentially, they’re mini-managers overseeing armies of AI bots. 

“A lot of managing AI is managing someone who’s less experienced than you,” says Nich Tremper, senior economist at payroll company Gusto. “I tell young people to think of it as project managing, directing.” 

That’s a tough call for young hires who enjoy the work that AI now does, be it speaking with customers, writing, or creating art. 

As insecure as new grads feel going into this hiring climate, many employers feel the same way. “Idon’t think employers have a very clear picture just yet for the level of depth of skill they’re lookingfor” when it comes to AI, says Christine Cruzvergara, chief education strategy officer at careerplatform Handshake. But “they don’t want to be left behind. Everybody’s talking about it, so [theythink], ‘I’m going to ask for it, and we will figure it out.”