AI is quietly wiping out entry-level jobs, experts warn
From ad agencies to banks, AI is replacing ‘grunt work,’ and the training it used to provide
You used to need a small team to run five client accounts. At London ad agency Catalyst, one junior now handles all of them, with AI doing the research, drafting the first-pass copy, and pulling the data.
Founder Tobias Green calls it "a reverse Mechanical Turk": the AI works in the background while the human stays the face the client sees.
In 2026, Business Barometer by Open University, conducted on 1,500 British business leaders, found that 51 per cent said that AI had impacted their hiring practices. Close to a fifth had even stopped entry-level recruitment, and the overwhelming majority had directly blamed the adoption of AI for this.
Green was not mincing words when he stated that if AI takes away the tedious tasks, employees have nothing to learn but how to instruct AI instead.
Lucy Beaumont of talent assessment firm SHL says organisational charts are shifting from pyramids to "diamonds," with more people bunched at mid-level and fewer entering at the bottom.
She warns that entry-level roles are where workers historically made mistakes and built judgement, and removing that rung has consequences up the entire ladder.
Cheney Hamilton of research firm Bloor makes a sharper distinction: AI raises the ceiling on what a junior can produce, but not their ability to spot when that output is wrong. That judgement, she argues, used to come from repetition and consequence, the exact tasks AI is now absorbing.
ders reported that 45% were using AI in order to get juniors to complete their tasks quicker, while almost a quarter believed that it was actually generating entirely new jobs.
According to Sheila Flavell, FDM Group’s director, one example is the software development, where the junior personnel manage the process involving both AI agents and their fellow employees.
Some organisations are actually reconsidering their approach to hiring people. As stated by Beaumont, banks are considering graduates in psychology and law rather than in finance.
