| IBM is changing entry-level jobs, not killing them |
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| With even some of the best developers barely writing code anymore, what is there left for an entry-level tech worker to do? According to IBM, a lot. |
| Last week, the company announced plans to triple entry-level hiring in the US in 2026. However, these positions aren’t going to look like the early career jobs of the past, Nickle LaMoreaux, the company’s HR chief, said at Charter’s Leading with AI Summit. |
| IBM has overhauled its job descriptions for low-level positions, shifting the focus from tasks that AI can automate to areas that AI can’t. This means less coding and admin work, more person-to-person work, such as customer engagement. Though IBM didn’t reveal specific hiring targets, this workforce expansion will be implemented across the board. |
| “The entry-level jobs that you had two to three years ago, AI can do most of them … you need to be able to show the real value these individuals can bring now,” LaMoreaux said at the summit. “And that has to be through totally different jobs.” |
| The decision is a complete reversal of the common view that AI will demolish the job market for young and early-career workers. It also adds another piece of evidence to the growing pile of conflicting studies and research on AI displacement. For instance: |
| A study from Harvard claims that AI tools actually intensify work, rather than lessen it, as people feel more capable of taking on a broader scope of tasks. Meanwhile, MIT claims that AI can already automate thousands of hours of work, and make certain jobs obsolete. And a study from Gartner splits the difference: While many will lose their jobs as a result of AI-enabled automation, 50% of those workers will be rehired to do similar work. |
| There’s no doubt that AI automation will have “extraordinary repercussions” for enterprises, Luis Lastras, director of language technologies at IBM, told The Deep View. However, businesses that are seeking to use AI to shave staff and boost the bottom line might be thinking about this technology the wrong way, he said. |
| If an individual can now do five times as much in one day as they previously could, enterprises shouldn’t be looking at doing the same amount with less people. Rather, they should be looking at ways to empower people to do more: more exploration, more experimentation, more creation, he said. |
| “If I were a business owner, I would focus a lot on very strong people, not on fewer people,” Lastras told me. “Because I would want to scale my ability to experiment.” |
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| The truth is that AI’s impact on jobs may still be too early to call. No one could predict the employment impact of the printing press, the calculator, the car, the internet, and so on. The difference, however, is AI’s potential to automate work — and even, to some extent, thought — in its entirety. In a perfect world, all employees with automatable jobs would be given the opportunity to experiment, build, learn and try new things. However, we live in an economy dominated by public companies focused on both growth and profits. As shareholders breathe down enterprises’ necks for returns, companies constantly feel the tug to cut costs. Many, if they see the opportunity to save money today by cutting staff, will take it, even if it means compromising the opportunity to make more money tomorrow. |
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