In May, Eric Schmidt told graduates at the University of Arizona that AI would touch everything they did, and that the sensible response was to find a way to say yes. They booed him. A week earlier, an executive at the University of Central Florida called AI the next Industrial Revolution and got the same treatment.
These are the first students to go through university entirely in the age of ChatGPT. They are walking into a job market that is not making room for them, and they have decided who to blame. The question is whether they have aimed at the right target.
The numbers behind the anger are real. UK unemployment for sixteen to twenty-four year olds hit 16.2% in early 2026, up from 14.2% a year before, with the count of young people not in work or education close to a million. In the US, entry-level roles fell to 38.6% of openings in March, down from 44% in 2023.
A Gallup survey found the share of fourteen to twenty-nine year olds hopeful about AI fell to 18%, from 27% the year before. Young people already working were the most sceptical of all. They are not technophobes refusing to engage. Four in five university students use generative AI, and they are nervous about what it means for them.
The damage lands at the bottom of the ladder
A 2026 survey by the Oliver Wyman Forum and the New York Stock Exchange polled 415 chief executives. It found 43% planned to deprioritise hiring for junior roles over the coming year, up from 17% a year earlier. A separate poll found 64% of chief financial officers expected their finance teams to move away from junior roles.
There is a logic to why the bottom rung is most exposed. An agent is reasonably good at the well-defined, repeatable work a junior is hired to do, and poor at the judgement calls that only come from years of doing it. A Harvard study found firms adopting generative AI cut junior positions while keeping senior employment stable.
A detail in the CFO survey changes how you read all this. Only 8% had actually deployed AI tools at scale, yet 64% were already planning to move away from junior roles. The contraction is running ahead of the technology. Companies are reorganising around what they expect AI to do, not what it has demonstrably done.
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AI is an accelerant, not the only cause
Klarna offers a warning. Last year its chief executive boasted that an OpenAI-powered assistant was doing the work of seven hundred support agents. Within months the company was hiring people back, admitting it had gone too far and that customers wanted a human when it mattered. Gartner expects half of companies that cut service staff for AI to be rehiring by 2027.
A lot is being loaded onto AI’s account that does not strictly belong there. The UK market was already weak. Higher employer national insurance and wage costs make a junior hire more expensive whether or not a machine can do the work. Graduate schemes, hospitality and retail have all been contracting.
A growing share of young people counted as inactive are out through long-term sickness and poor mental health, a trend Jonathan Haidt links to rising technology use in The Anxious Generation. Add the Ukraine and Iran wars and the chaos around US tariff policy, and a difficult graduate market was coming with or without ChatGPT.
AI gives a struggling employer a clean story for a decision they might have made anyway. It gives a frightened graduate a single villain to name instead of a tangle of causes that are harder to picture and impossible to boo. A real estate executive is a far easier target than a national insurance policy.
What happens when you remove the first rung
Anticipation has real consequences even when the technology lags. A junior role never created because an executive assumed an agent would fill it is a job a graduate cannot have. The sharper worry is that entry-level jobs are where people have always learned their craft.
Finance, law, consulting and journalism have worked as apprenticeship systems, where juniors absorb judgement by doing unglamorous work alongside experienced colleagues. Remove the bottom rung and you break the mechanism that produces the senior workers companies say they want to keep.
Some firms see this. IBM, having said AI would change its workforce, also announced plans to triple US entry-level hiring in 2026 and rewrite junior roles for an AI era. IBM looks like an outlier, but it shows the collapse of the graduate pipeline is a choice companies are making, not a law of physics.
My own view is that we are in a hard patch before things get better. The working week has fallen over 150 years, and AI may end the recent plateau into a world where people work less and spend longer in education first. The problem right now is that we are running a new technology through an ageing system.
So the boos are aimed at a target that is only partly responsible. AI is screwing young people, but not on its own, and not yet in the wholesale way the panic implies. The real question is whether anyone with the power to shape how it arrives is listening. So far, the people on the stage mostly just look confused.
