AI is eating the apprenticeship layer. The first drafts. The admin bits. The boring reps.
Two signals this week told the same story from opposite ends.
Matt Shumer, CEO of HyperWrite, published an essay on X called “Something Big Is Happening”. It hit tens of millions of views in days and The New York Times and others picked it up.
His argument is that we are in the equivalent of February 2020, just before everything changed. Nothing that can be done on a computer is safe in the medium term. Law, finance, engineering, coding. All exposed.
Then IBM announced it is tripling its entry-level hiring in the US this year.
Not despite AI. Because of it.
IBM’s head of HR explained the thinking at a summit in New York. They’ve rewritten what “entry-level” means.
Junior developers spend less time writing code and more time sitting with clients. Junior HR staff step in when the AI chatbot gets it wrong. AI writes the first draft. Humans carry the liability when it’s wrong.
A caveat: IBM didn’t share the baseline number, so “tripling” could mean a lot or not much. But the signal is worth watching. They’re redesigning jobs around client trust and AI supervision, not eliminating them.
I’m afraid this isn’t reassurance. It’s a clue about where the work is moving.
The years you used to spend learning by doing routine work are being compressed, because the machine does the routine work now. IBM’s logic is blunt: stop hiring juniors today, and you rent managers later.
Displacement is real. But so is the redesign.
Entry-level is an escalation job now. You start where the AI stops.
The first two years of every career are being rewritten. Quietly.
♻️ Repost if you’re building teams. The bottom rung is changing shape. 🔔 Follow Fas Felix Ghauri for future signals, not noise.
