Maybe AI Isn’t Coming for Your Job. Maybe It’s Coming for Your Junior Employees.

Aug 13
We keep asking whether AI is going to replace experienced professionals.

But perhaps we are looking in the wrong direction.

The people most exposed may be the ones who have barely had a chance to start.

Think about what junior employees traditionally do.
  • They prepare first drafts
  • They research
  • They update spreadsheets
  • They take meeting notes
  • They write basic reports
  • They create presentations
  • They process information
And increasingly, AI can do much of that work.

For a business, the logic is easy to understand.

Why hire two graduates to produce reports, research and documentation when an experienced employee using AI can potentially produce the same output?

It saves money. It saves time. It improves productivity.

But there is a problem.
Junior employees were never only hired to do junior work.

They were hired to become experienced employees.

Nobody starts as an expert

The experienced accountant advising management today once spent hours doing basic reconciliations.

The senior developer designing complex systems once fixed small bugs.

The marketing director once prepared reports and drafted social media posts.

The senior project manager once took minutes, updated schedules and followed up on actions.

That work may have been basic, but it served another purpose.

It gave people experience.

Junior employees learn how organisations actually operate.

They make mistakes. They are corrected. They watch experienced people deal with difficult customers, problems, deadlines and decisions.

Over time, they develop something AI cannot simply download into them:
judgement.

This is why automating entry-level work creates a much bigger question than simply whether a business can save a salary.

If nobody starts at the bottom, where do tomorrow's experienced employees come from?

The experience paradox

Imagine a company increasingly decides:
“We don't need a graduate. AI can handle most of that work.”
Instead, it hires experienced people who can use AI to produce even more.

That may work brilliantly today.

But fast-forward ten years.

Those experienced employees leave, retire, move to competitors or start their own businesses.

Now the company needs someone with ten years of experience.

Where did that person get the ten years?
We could create a strange labour market where every company wants experienced employees, but fewer companies are willing to create them.
And we already know how frustrating this sounds to young people:
“Entry-level position. Experience required.”

AI could make that problem significantly worse.

Businesses are not wrong for using AI

The answer cannot be to keep inefficient work alive just so junior employees have something to do.

If AI can prepare a report in ten minutes that previously took three hours, asking a graduate to continue spending three hours on it makes no sense.

Companies should automate repetitive work.
The real mistake would be assuming:
“AI can do the junior work, therefore we don't need the junior person.”

There is another option.

Use AI to change what junior work looks like.
Let AI produce the first draft.

Then let the graduate check it.

Ask them what the AI missed.

Let them investigate the numbers.

Put them closer to customers.

Allow them to sit in on decisions.

Teach them to recognise when the AI is confidently wrong.

Instead of spending three years doing administration before reaching meaningful work, perhaps AI could help junior employees reach meaningful work much sooner.

That would make AI an accelerator of experience, rather than a replacement for the person trying to gain it.
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The decision businesses make now matters

Early evidence is already raising concerns that graduate and entry-level pathways could be more exposed to AI than some experienced positions.

That should not surprise us.

Experienced employees bring context, relationships and judgement.
A graduate does not have those things yet.
Traditionally, they earned them by doing the simpler work first.
And AI is rapidly becoming capable of doing exactly that simpler work.
So perhaps the biggest employment question created by AI is not:
“Will AI take my job?”

It may be:
“Will AI remove the job that someone needed before they could eventually do mine?”

Businesses absolutely need the productivity AI offers.

But they also need a pipeline of people who understand their customers, systems, culture and industry.

The organisations that get this right will not preserve pointless junior tasks.

They will redesign junior roles.

They will automate the repetitive work while deliberately creating opportunities for young employees to build judgement, responsibility and experience.

Because there is something dangerously short-term about saving money today by eliminating the people you may desperately need tomorrow.

Maybe AI isn't coming for your job.
Maybe it's coming for your junior employees.

And if it is, the real question is not whether we can automate their work.

It is whether we can afford to automate away the way people become experienced.
Thank you!
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