BTS: Entry-level jobs are a place to skin your knees. Is AI really eating them up?

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I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t last long in the corporate sphere, but my first job out of college was as a prestigious 😉 “Copywriter II” at Dealer.com, known locally as the Google of Burlington, Vermont. I was one of many entry-level employees, and I worked through the tedium with limited creative breadth. When I wasn’t getting free chair massages in the hall (to offset the low pay), wordsmithing descriptions of new Porsche models was the highlight of my day, only to have overzealous terms stripped from my copy on the editor’s desk.

But that was 2018, and I wasn’t competing with generative AI.

“People are expecting AI to eat more and more into entry level roles,” says Taylor Blake, senior VP of new initiatives at Degreed, a lifelong learning platform for large enterprises. After all, as Dana Simberkoff of data security platform AvePoint said in an interview I conducted for CNBC earlier this year, “AI is like a really good intern.” And it’s better at automating entry-level work than higher-level work, research shows.

The part of me that looks back on that time as a Copywriter II (what I like to call my “factory writer” stage) wonders if that’s a bad thing. It’s possible that “AI will help entry-level workers ‘level up’ their performance,” wrote Bloomberg fellow and Brookings Institute researcher Molly Kinder, noting the “entry-level grunt work” typically associated with fields like law, consulting, media, marketing, tech and the creative industry.

From his own vantage point, Blake can see entry-level work becoming more strategic. “The value proposition of entry level workers is going to have to change,” he said. Strike out the menial shit and substitute it with something like tinkering with new AI processes, which he finds “very capable, [but] extremely frustrating” for the average worker.

He added, “AI is really good at doing research. But which AI tools do you engage, what are the pros and cons, and how do you think of a strategy for conducting research across multiple tools, systems and providers?” This, he said, is something entry-level workers could become stars at.

A career ladder missing its first few steps?

These changes are easy to imagine, but at what cost? 

In her research, Kinder noted, “Younger women and workers of color are currently poised to increase their representation in sectors ranging from law to finance to Hollywood; fewer entry-level roles could slow or even reverse that process.”

Oof.

Then there’s the risk for companies, which currently benefit from organic talent pipelines starting at the entry-level bench. (Just look at Elliott Hill, who went from intern in 1988 to CEO in 2024 at Nike.)

“There's going to be a premium put on a softer skill set,” predicted Blake. “AI can do the technical tasks, but it's not going to know how to navigate an organization, have relationships. A lot of those things are built the more time you spend inside of a company, an industry.”

Today, entry-level workers are generally fresh out of some sort of higher education format, but less available junior roles could necessitate a shift in how we educate people for careers at all. This is particularly true given the shortened half life of job skills as tech evolves increasingly quickly.

“If you're living in a world where there's more stability, it makes more sense to front load your education,” said Blake. “Now, it's harder. We don't really know how AI is going to affect the labor market. What that means is smaller, faster iterations of learning, so there's less risk as things change.” That’s not to mention the potential for apprenticeship programs in more industries, restructured degree systems, college-to-company pipeline partnerships…we’re limited only by our creativity.

Of course, Blake has a vested stake in continued learning. He’s a leader at Degreed and even dropped out of grad school to start his own continued learning company called LearnIn, which Degreed ultimately acquired. But to me, his own experience entering — and then backing out of — a legacy education structure gives credence to his belief that this stuff really works.

Today, entry-level jobs as we know them do seem to be getting more scarce. For people like me and you, that may no longer matter. But our kids, our neighbors, our communities will all feel the impact. That’s not to say it will be bad, but we must shift mindfully in order to maintain thriving communities over time.

The conversation around AI is often about quick ROI, but let’s not forget this is a long game. Early career folks can have more rewarding experiences as long as we don’t push them out of the equation entirely.

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