The potential of AI to take people’s jobs has been a hotly debated topic lately. With the rise and evolution of generative AI, agentic AI, and now shifting to digital labor, employees have reason to be concerned about their future employment prospects and longevity. However, are these fears justified? Is AI really going to take your job?

Early Indications Show Young People Being Increasingly Replaced By AI

One recent study on the fluctuating job market by researchers at Harvard University indicated that employers across the board have been hiring significantly fewer junior (entry-level) people over the past 3 years since generative AI was developed (Lichtinger & Hosseini Maasoum, 2024).

A second study that evaluated ADP payroll data showed that the demand for junior-level roles, such as customer service reps and software developers, was down by as much as 20%.

So how do we interpret these findings? One potential take is that companies are foregoing hiring entry-level candidates due to the high cost of training and onboarding. From the company’s perspective, hiring and retaining more senior-level workers may be easier, less expensive, and less risky…or the company can just replace entry-level employees' necessary work functions with AI tools. If true, this notion represents another significant shift in the labor market away from young, entry-level talent. The bottom line is that companies seek greater efficiency and prioritize cost savings and immediate productivity over the risks of developing raw talent. In other words, they will almost always choose a known quantity over an unknown, unproven one.

Your Three-Step AI Gameplan

If you are a young person seeking entry-level work, or any person for that matter, who is concerned about AI making you replaceable, then consider the following three immediate steps you can take.

  1. Upskill your AI knowledge – One report found that a worker with AI skills in the financial sector, for example, makes about $22,000 more per year than someone who doesn’t possess those skills (NPR, 2025). Ignoring the AI revolution is not an option and may prove to be a perilous mistake for future employment.
  2. Determine where you add value – In your current job or future career field, you must first be honest with yourself and assess the risk that AI poses to the tasks you currently spend most of your time doing. If many of your tasks are low-level output-based deliverables, you must figure out how to pivot toward creativity and innovation-based outputs as soon as possible. Relegate tasks that can easily be done with AI to AI (see step 1 above). Existing human work that can be enhanced or made more efficient with AI should be. Tasks that AI cannot do or cannot perform efficiently (there are many) are the sweet spot of where you should be skillfully applying yourself regularly.
  3. Redefine your role in efficiency terms – Firms of the future (and the present, quite frankly) seek efficiency above all else. To remain relevant in the efficiency era, you must prioritize and articulate the productivity/value gains you create for the organization. There are many ways to do this, varying from company to company and job to job. Still, you need to continuously demonstrate through the quality and excellence of your work how replacing you with AI would be an efficiency and productivity loss for the firm.

Reflection Questions:

  1. What research and/or prompt can you develop to explore the potential exposure of your industry/role to being replaced by AI?
  2. What specific action steps can you take right now that align with the three-step AI game plan outlined in the post? Write them down.
  3. How will this information inform your career selection process now and in the future?