logo
College grads are lab rats in the Great AI Experiment

College grads are lab rats in the Great AI Experiment

Business Times9 hours ago

COMPANIES are eliminating the grunt work that used to train young professionals – and they don't seem to have a clear plan for what comes next.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is analysing documents, writing briefing notes, creating PowerPoint presentations or handling customer service queries, and – surprise! – now the younger humans who normally do that work are struggling to find jobs. Recently, the chief executive officer of AI firm Anthropic predicted that AI would wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. The reason is simple. Companies are often advised to treat ChatGPT 'like an intern', and some are doing so at the expense of human interns.
This has thrust college graduates into a painful experiment across multiple industries, but it doesn't have to be all bad. Employers must take the role of scientists, observing how AI helps and hinders their new recruits, while figuring out new ways to train them. And the young lab rats in this trial must adapt faster than the technology trying to displace them, while jumping into more advanced work.
Consulting giant KPMG, for instance, is giving graduates tax work that would previously go to staff with three years of experience. Junior staff at PwC have started pitching to clients. Hedge fund Man Group tells me its junior analysts who use AI to scour research papers now have more time to formulate and test trading ideas, what the firm calls 'higher-level work'.
I recently interviewed two young professionals about using AI in this way, and, perhaps not surprisingly, neither of them complained about it. One accountant who had just left university said he was using ChatGPT to pore over filings and Moody's Ratings reports, saving him hours on due diligence.
Another young executive at a public relations (PR) firm, who'd graduated last year from the London School of Economics, said tools such as ChatGPT had cut down her time spent tracking press coverage from two-and-a-half hours to 15 minutes, and while her predecessors would have spent four or five hours reading forums on Reddit, that now takes her only 45 minutes.
A NEWSLETTER FOR YOU
Friday, 3 pm Thrive
Money, career and life hacks to help young adults stay ahead of the curve.
Sign Up
Sign Up
I'm not convinced, however, that either of these approaches is actually helping recruits learn what they need to know. The young accountant, for instance, might be saving time, but he's also missing out on the practice of spotting something fishy in raw data. How do you learn to notice red flags if you don't dig through numbers yourself? A clean summary from AI doesn't build that neural pathway in your brain.
The PR worker also didn't seem to be doing 'higher-level work', but simply doing analysis more quickly. The output provided by AI is clearly useful to a junior worker's bosses, but I'm sceptical that it's giving them a deeper understanding of how a business or industry works.
What's worse is that their opportunities for work are declining overall. 'We've seen a huge drop in the demand for 'entry-level' talent across a number of our client sets,' says James Callander, CEO of a Freshminds, a London recruitment firm that specialises in finding staff for consultancies. An increasing number of clients want more 'work-ready' professionals who already have a first job under their belt, he adds.
That corroborates a trend flagged by venture capital firm SignalFire, whose State of Talent 2025 report pointed to what it called an 'experience paradox', where more companies post for junior roles but fill them with senior workers. The data crunchers at LinkedIn have noticed a similar trend, prompting one of its executives to claim that the bottom rung of the career ladder was breaking.
Yet some young professionals seem unfazed. Last week, a University of Oxford professor asked a group of 70 executive Master of Business Administration students from the National University of Singapore if Gen Z jobs were being disproportionately eroded by AI. Some said 'no', adding that they, younger workers, were best placed to become the most valuable people in a workplace because of their strength in manipulating AI tools, recounts Dr Alex Connock, a senior fellow at Oxford's Said Business School, who specialises in the media industry and AI.
The students weren't just using ChatGPT, but a range of tools such as Gemini, Claude, Firefly, HeyGen, Gamma, Higgsfield, Suno, Udio, NotebookLM and Midjourney, says Dr Connock.
The lesson here for businesses is that sure, in the short term you can outsource entry-level work to AI and cut costs; but that means missing out on capturing AI-native talent.
It's also dangerous to assume that giving junior staff AI tools will automatically make them more strategic. They could instead become dependent, even addicted to AI tools, and not learn business fundamentals. There are lessons here from social media. Studies show that young people who use it actively tend not to get the mental-health harms of those who use it passively. Posting and chatting on Instagram, for instance, is better than curling up on the couch and doom-scrolling for an hour.
Perhaps businesses should similarly look for healthy engagement by their newer staff with AI, checking that they're using it to sense-check their own ideas and interrogating a chatbot's answers, rather than going to it for all analysis and accepting whatever the tools spit out.
That could spell the difference between raising a workforce that can think strategically, and one that can't think beyond the output from an AI tool. BLOOMBERG

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Apple to open up underlying AI technology to developers
Apple to open up underlying AI technology to developers

CNA

time35 minutes ago

  • CNA

Apple to open up underlying AI technology to developers

CUPERTINO, California :Apple said on Monday it will open up the underlying technology it uses for Apple Intelligence and announced an overhaul of its operating systems. Apple software chief Craig Federighi said the company is opening up the foundational AI model that it uses for some of its own features to third-party developers. "This work needed more time to reach our high quality bar," Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said of the delays of some features such as improvements to the Siri virtual assistant. Apple is facing an unprecedented set of technical and regulatory challenges as some of its key executives kicked off the company's annual software developer conference on Monday. Shares of Apple, which were flat before the conference, slipped 1.5 per cent after executives took the stage. Federighi also said Apple plans a design overhaul of all of its operating systems. Apple's redesign of its operating systems centered on a design it calls "liquid glass" where icons and menus are partially transparent, a step Apple executives said was possible because of the more powerful custom chips in Apple devices versus a decade ago. Federighi said the new design will span operating systems for iPhones, Macs and other Apple products. He also said Apple's operating systems will be given year names instead of sequential numbers for each version. That will unify naming conventions that have become confusing because Apple's core operating systems for phones, watches and other devices kicked off at different times, resulting in a smattering of differently numbered operating systems for different products.

Apple faces AI, regulatory challenges as it woos software developers
Apple faces AI, regulatory challenges as it woos software developers

CNA

timean hour ago

  • CNA

Apple faces AI, regulatory challenges as it woos software developers

CUPERTINO, California :Apple is facing an unprecedented set of technical and regulatory challenges as some of its key executives kicked off the company's annual software developer conference on Monday. On the technical side, many of the long-awaited artificial-intelligence features Apple promised at the same conference a year ago have been delayed until next year, even as rivals such as Alphabet's Google and Microsoft woo developers with a bevy of new AI features. Those unfulfilled promises included key improvements to Siri, its digital assistant. On the regulatory front, courts in the U.S. and Europe are poised to pull down the lucrative walls around Apple's App Store as even some of the company's former supporters question whether its fees are justified. Those challenges are coming to a head at the same time U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened 25 per cent tariffs on Apple's best-selling iPhone. Apple's shares are down more than 40 per cent since the start of the year, a sharper decline than Google and also lagging the AI-driven gains in Microsoft shares. Apple has already launched some of the AI features it promised last year, including a set of writing tools and image-generation tools, but it still relies on partners such as ChatGPT creator OpenAI for some of those capabilities. Bloomberg has reported that Apple may open up in-house AI models to developers this year. But analysts do not believe Apple yet has what technologists call a "multi-modal" model - that is, one capable of understanding imagery, audio and language at the same time - that could power a pair of smart glasses, a category that has become a runaway hit for Meta Platforms. Google said last month it would jump back into this category, with partners. Such glasses, which are far lighter and cheaper than Apple's Vision Pro headset, could become useful because they would understand what the user is looking at and could help answer questions about it. While Apple has focused on its $3,500 Vision Pro headset, Google and Meta have seized on the smart glasses as a cheaper way to deploy their AI software prowess against Apple in its stronghold of hardware. Meta Ray-Bans all sell for less than $400. Analysts say Apple needs to answer that challenge but that it is not likely to do so this week. "I'm not trying to replace my phone - this is a complementary thing that gives me more world context, because it's got a camera and it sees what I see, and I can talk to it in natural language," said Ben Bajarin, CEO of technology consultancy Creative Strategies. "Apple is not positioned to do that." To be sure, Apple's rivals are not decisively ahead in smart glasses. Anshel Sag, principal analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, said Meta's Ray-Bans still lack some features and Google has not yet landed its "Gemini" model in a mass-market pair of glasses yet. "Meta has the undisputed lead, but Google is catching up fast and probably has the best-suited AI for the job," Sag said. "Vision Pro is great, but it's a showroom product that developers can use." But Bob O'Donnell, CEO of TECHnalysis Research, said it remains far from clear that smart glasses will gain wide acceptance. O'Donnell also said it is not certain that Apple is at any particular disadvantage if it partners with a company such as Google, OpenAI or even a smaller firm like Perplexity for core AI technology. So far, O'Donnell said, there is not yet strong evidence that consumers are basing major hardware-purchasing decisions on AI features.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store