Graduate Jobs Shift Toward AI Work, Raising Training Questions
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AI is blamed for fewer graduate jobs. A different group of graduates is landing roles built around it, and employers disagree on whether that helps a career.
PwC data on entry-level roles
PwC's 2026 AI Jobs Barometer looked at 2.4 million entry-level jobs in the US. The entry-level roles most shaped by AI are seven times as likely to demand traditionally senior skills, such as leadership and strategic decision making.
Those more demanding roles have grown 35% since 2019. Other entry-level roles have shrunk by 10%.
Graduates working with AI agents
Cian Clinton, 23, joined the consultancy Valliance last September. He uses around 10 AI agents a day. He says he now carries responsibilities that would normally take him four or five years to reach.
Dillan Patel, 24, began as an intern at the engineering software firm Stride 18 months ago. His first project was an internal chatbot that captured the knowledge of a senior colleague heading into retirement. Today he is an AI automation analyst. He builds more internal agents and hunts for repetitive tasks that AI could take over.
Lotte Underwood, 25, is an "AI associate" at the London PR agency Fight or Flight, hired in November last year after a degree and a masters in marketing. Her team has built around 30 agents for research, client reporting, interview preparation, clearer client briefs and image generation. She checks what they produce and passes it to colleagues who deal with clients and the press. She also tracks how clients appear in answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and similar tools.
An employer rethinks its graduate intake
At the contact centre company ArvatoConnect, CEO Debra Maxwell says it has paused its regular graduate hiring this year. She plans to restart next year with more emphasis on AI. One recent graduate there uses AI to research specific markets ahead of contract bids.
Maxwell argues that a bigger, more central role can make a workforce more loyal and engaged.
The case for learning the trade first
Claire Reed, PwC UK's chief technology and innovation officer, says graduate roles that lean too heavily on AI may not give long-term career progression. AI skills alone will not carry a career, she says. They must be paired with sector knowledge.
Simon Pratt, chief operating officer at Portman Finance Group, sees graduates becoming too AI-centric as a problem. Its two-year programme moves graduates through four areas at six-month intervals, working beside senior relationship managers.
Underwood says she has not yet pitched to the media directly, which is a traditional PR task. She plans to.
Our view
The two camps are describing different jobs. In one, AI work is the entry point into the business, as in Patel's case; in the other, it takes the place of learning the trade. The answer may depend on whether a graduate's AI duties still put them near senior staff and real clients. The evidence here is a handful of employers and one PwC dataset from the US, so it does not show how common either path is in the UK.
Source: BBC News