AI Could Wipe Out Entry-Level Jobs, And That Should Terrify Business Leaders

Ah, Bernard Marr has finally noticed that AI might, just might, affect entry-level jobs. Marr's thesis is that this should 'terrify business leaders' — as if they haven't been gleefully automating those roles since 2023, while calling it 'digital transformation' and handing out severance packages with NDAs. The real terror, apparently, is that without junior staff, we'll have no one to train for senior roles. Cute. Because the same CEOs who fired their entire onboarding teams are suddenly worried about the talent pipeline. And who, exactly, will mentor the AI that replaces the interns? A slightly older AI?

Let's be honest: business leaders are terrified of exactly one thing — being caught unprepared for the quarterly earnings call. The article suggests reskilling and apprenticeship programs as if that's a novel idea. Sam Altman himself warned us that job displacement is real, and here we are, reading a Forbes thinkpiece that sounds like a LinkedIn motivational poster designed by a committee. The punchline is that entry-level jobs are the scaffolding of any organisation — remove them, and the whole structure wobbles. But that's a tomorrow problem. Today's problem is that the AI is already doing the intern's coffee run, and it doesn't even complain about the pay.

The deeper absurdity is that we've spent a decade telling graduates to 'learn to code' and now coding is the most automatable skill on the planet. So the next generation will enter a workforce that has no entry-level positions, no training budget, and a C-suite that just discovered the concept of a 'skills gap.' The article ends with a call for 'urgent action' — which in corporate parlance means a task force that reports in six months. By then, the AI will have written its own report, and it will recommend hiring more AI. Terrified yet? Thought not.