No, AI Shouldn’t Replace Graduate Hires

I recently attended an event where a senior executive told me that they felt sorry for graduates, that the company did not need to hire them as the tasks they usually took on were now largely automated by AI. Many leaders in knowledge work companies have been echoing the same sentiment.

While it’s true that much of this entry-level work has gone away, what they haven’t realised is that the difficulty in accomplishing most knowledge work has dropped due to AI, which means that tasks that previously required several years of experience can now be completed by… graduates. The floor has risen so that every employee can accomplish more than they could before, and work of increasing complexity can be handled further down the chain.

Junior employees are unburdened by years of accumulated industry standards and practices. Of course this means they need training, but explaining these standards from first principles forces you to re-evaluate what is still valuable and what has been unnecessarily slowing you down.

Graduates bring an excitement and energy for work that others are fatigued by, fresh ideas, and an ability to adopt techniques and technologies faster than your existing employees. You need to create leaders in your company by giving them someone to lead, and you need to future-proof your company by building tomorrow’s.

The final point on hiring graduates is not related to the bottom line, but to the responsibility we have to the next generation. For those reading this who are no longer the junior in the room: you are unlikely to have reached this point in your career without someone taking a chance on you, without others investing time to mentor you, and without a team carrying you when you were often a net detractor rather than contributor. Let’s pay it forward.