09-03-2025
Stanford University researchers looked at the impact of AI on early-career workers. They found that these workers experienced a “13 percent relative decline in employment.” More experienced workers in the same occupations have remained stable or continued to grow. These impacts are concentrated in job areas where “AI is more likely to automate, rather than augment, human labor.”
Young workers in roles like software engineers have seen the most significant impacts. They dropped “considerably” since the introduction of AI in 2022. Software engineers aged 22-25 experienced a 20% drop in employment from 2022 to 2025. Other jobs seeing big drops are customer service and accounting. Early-career individuals working in less vulnerable occupations, like nursing aides, are seeing more opportunities, even more than their more experienced counterparts. Front-line production and operations supervisors have also seen an increase in employment opportunities.
The study looked at payroll records from millions of American employees provided by ADP (the largest payroll software in the U.S.). Researchers ruled out factors that could skew the data by changing hiring decisions, like education level, remote work, outsourced jobs, and broader economic shifts. They concluded that “the AI revolution is beginning to have a significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the American labor market.” This research shows why the national employment growth for young workers is stagnant. AI can replace “book learning” that comes from formal education. It is less successful at replacing knowledge stemming from years of experience in a field, like “idiosyncratic tips and tricks that accumulate with experience.”