Marc Benioff says the people building Salesforce's flagship AI products right now are grads and interns. That's a strange thing to be true if AI is supposed to be eating entry-level jobs.
"You are right, they said AI would kill entry-level jobs. Meanwhile these grads & interns are building it — powering Agentforce & Headless360 at Salesforce," Benioff posted on X, defending the company's plan to hire 1,000 new graduates and interns this year. It's a clean rebuttal to the headline story that AI has already gutted the bottom rung of the corporate ladder.
That story isn't made up. A widely circulated Stanford paper found that employment for 22-to-25-year-olds in the most AI-exposed jobs has dropped roughly 16% since generative AI took off. IBM's HR chief Nickle LaMoreaux said the quiet part out loud at a recent summit: "The entry-level jobs that you had two to three years ago, AI can do most of them."
So why is Benioff hiring a thousand grads?
Because the data underneath the doom story is messier than the headlines suggest. A recent University of Pittsburgh paper bluntly titled "AI-exposed jobs deteriorated before ChatGPT" found that unemployment in AI-exposed occupations started climbing in early 2022, months before ChatGPT even existed. Graduate cohorts from 2021 onward were already entering those jobs at lower rates than earlier cohorts. The labor market for the work everyone is blaming AI for was softening before the technology being blamed was actually out in the world.
The Yale Budget Lab reached a similar verdict in April, finding "no sign" that AI exposure is moving employment at the economy-wide level. Their read was stability, not disruption. And a Strada survey of 1,500 senior talent leaders found that 2.7 times as many expect AI to increase entry-level hiring in 2026 as expect it to decrease it. In the tech sector specifically, 60% said AI has actually expanded the analytical responsibilities given to entry-level workers, not shrunk them.
Mark Ma, the Pitt researcher behind a widely watched AI Sentiment Tracker, thinks the real story is the gap between what executives are saying and what employees are feeling. "In almost every case, employees' sentiment of the AI-related issue is much more pessimistic than the overall sentiments towards the firm," Ma said. "The most negative issue is job security concerns."
That gap matters because executives have a reason to credit AI for cuts they were already planning. Jamie Dimon basically admitted it at JPMorgan's China summit in May, saying some companies "may use AI to cover up the fact that they should never have hired those people in the first place." If you're trimming headcount, "we're an AI-first company" plays a lot better to shareholders than "we overhired."
Banking is where the doom story might actually stick, but for a reason that complicates the doom story itself. Debasish Patnaik of McKinsey's QuantumBlack told Fortune that even if AI can do the work of a junior analyst today, getting rid of the junior analyst creates a different problem in ten years. "Banking is an apprenticeship business. Today's junior analysts become tomorrow's managing directors. Senior judgment cannot be manufactured laterally."
The doom story isn't wrong, it's just early and oversimplified. AI is reshaping what entry-level work looks like, and in some industries the bottom rung is genuinely getting thinner. But the softening predates the technology, the survey data is split right down the middle, and the loudest voices announcing the death of entry-level jobs are the same executives who benefit from blaming AI for whatever they were going to do anyway. The companies still hiring grads aren't being naive. They're betting that whoever spends the next five years training a generation on this stuff ends up with the only senior talent that actually knows how to use it.
