Dispatch: AI Is Gutting the Next Generation of Talent

2025.08.24

The Corporate World’s Entry-level Door is Slamming Shut

For today’s graduates—many of them gifted, hard-working, and ambitious—opportunity is drying up faster than ever.

Why?

The accelerating adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is eliminating the very roles that once trained the next generation of leaders.

This isn’t a future problem. It’s happening now.

Key Stats Parents Need to Know

• Tech hiring collapse: Among the 15 largest tech companies, new graduate hiring has dropped by over 50% since 2019. Before the pandemic, grads made up 15% of hires. Today? Just 7%.
• AI directly tied to layoffs: In the US, over 10,000 jobs were cut in the first seven months of 2025 explicitly because of AI—ranking it among the top five reasons for workforce reductions.
• Fewer entry-level postings: Career platform Handshake reports that entry-level corporate job postings fell 15% last year.
• Internships no longer a sure bet: Only 51% of interns now convert to full-time roles—the lowest rate in more than five years (NACE).

The “stepping stones” parents once counted on—internships, analyst programs, junior staff tracks—are disappearing.

Stories from the Frontline

Take Kenneth Kang, a computer science graduate who applied for 2,500 jobs, received just 10 interviews, and only landed a position after leveraging a past internship.

“Honestly, I thought that having a 3.98 GPA, getting recognition letters, and having interesting experience in the past, perhaps I could get a full-time job offer easily. But that was not true.” — Fortune

Many of his peers are still searching two years after graduation. (Yikes!)

What’s Really Driving This Shift

AI isn’t just replacing senior workers. It’s replacing the grunt work—data cleaning, summarization, basic QA—the very tasks junior tech hires used to cut their teeth on.

That means companies increasingly demand “work-ready” hires, skipping over training and pipeline building. But experts warn this short-term mindset may backfire:

“If firms are cutting at the entry level, they might actually miss out on the talent that becomes their pipeline for managers and executives.”
—Tristan Botelho, Yale School of Management

The irony? In chasing efficiency, companies risk starving their own future leadership.

The Emerging Skills Gap

The long-term risk isn’t just economic—it’s educational. A recent MIT study suggests that heavy use of large language models (LLMs) can reduce neural engagement and impair learning, especially for younger students.

As junior roles vanish, so does the apprenticeship effect—that slow, invaluable process of learning through mistakes, mentorship, and repetition.

Stella Pachidi, King’s Business School:

“Traditional career development and expertise-building could easily vanish as junior roles disappear.”

Preparing the Next Generation

For parents raising gifted and talented kids, this isn’t a call for panic—it’s a call for strategy.

• Specialization > Generalization: As McKinsey senior partner Rob Levin warns, “The middle ground of knowledge workers is likely to become less important.” Depth, not breadth, will matter.
• Entrepreneurial pathways: With fewer doors opening, many grads are creating their own. Kang, for instance, launched a tech consulting startup with peers to build résumés and credibility.
• Reskilling & vocational shifts: Experts predict new models of vocational training will emerge—yet families can’t afford to wait for institutions to catch up.

The Takeaway for Parents

AI is not just disrupting jobs—it’s reshaping the very pipeline of talent and leadership. The world our kids are entering is not the one we grew up in.

The winners will be those who:

• learn to adapt fast,
• build deep skills, and
• aren’t afraid to create their own opportunities when traditional ones vanish.

At GiftedTalented.com, we’ll keep spotlighting the shifts that matter most—so you can help your child not just survive but lead in an AI-driven economy.

Question for you: If the “entry-level” path keeps disappearing, how would you prepare your child to build their own?