As companies adopt AI, the shift isn’t showing up in layoffs but in hiring. Entry-level roles are quietly disappearing, raising questions about how the next generation of workers will enter the workforce.
AI industry insiders, however, want workers to code smarter, think harder, and lean into their humanity, but they still dodge the question of how many jobs artificial intelligence will destroy.
The reassurance echoed across HumanX, a four-day conference that drew about 6,500 investors, entrepreneurs and tech executives. Yet a stark message on display captured a different mood: “Stop hiring humans.”
That tension between public reassurance and private recalibration is increasingly visible in how companies are approaching hiring.
For now, the most immediate impact of AI may not be job cuts, but the absence of new roles.
Entry-level hiring has dropped sharply in recent years. A study by venture firm SignalFire found that hiring of candidates with less than one year of experience fell by nearly 50% between 2019 and 2024. The decline comes even as companies accelerate the adoption of AI tools across functions.
At the same time, some of the work traditionally assigned to junior employees is already being absorbed by AI systems. Salesforce has said that AI is now handling a major share of its customer support workload, a function that has served as a key entry point for early-career workers.
Together, these trends point to a shift that is less visible than layoffs, but potentially more consequential, with lesser roles being created at the bottom of the workforce.
Not all of this is necessarily driven by AI. Some economists argue that companies may be pointing to AI to rationalise layoffNbs that are really about past overhiring or cost-cutting ahead of massive infrastructure investments. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has described this tendency as “AI-washing”, invoking the technology as an explanation for changes that may have multiple causes.
Even at HumanX, many speakers pushed back against the idea that AI is already responsible for widespread job losses, while acknowledging that disruption is likely.
There is also a clear divide in how industry leaders are framing what comes next.
AI is going to “transform every single company, every single job, every single way that we do work,” said Matt Garman, chief executive of cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services.
Others have taken a more radical view. Two years ago, Nvidia chief Jensen Huang said the ultimate goal was to make it so “nobody has to program” or code.
That argument has not gone unchallenged.
“We will look back on that as some of the worst career advice ever given,” Andrew Ng, founder of DeepLearning.AI, said in response. In his view, coding is not an obsolete skill; AI has simply made it more accessible to a wider group of people.
But even as the debate continues, hiring patterns suggest companies are already making practical decisions.
The implications extend beyond immediate hiring cycles. Entry-level roles have traditionally been a key pathway into the workforce, enabling employees to build skills and advance to more advanced positions over time. A slowdown at that level could weaken the longer-term talent pipeline.
For India, where large numbers of graduates enter the workforce through entry-level roles in IT services and technology firms, these shifts could have significant implications.
There are already signs that hiring patterns are changing. Fresher intake in IT services has dropped sharply from 70-F80% of total hiring in 2021 to around 25% in 2025, according to staffing firm Quess Corp, reflecting a shift towards mid-level and specialised roles.
In absolute terms, hiring has also slowed. India’s top IT firms hired just 60,000-70,000 freshers in FY24, a two-decade low compared to roughly 200,000 annually before the pandemic.
Some projections suggest a recovery in hiring intent, but firms are becoming more selective and aligning fresher intake more closely with demand.
