New research published in the Harvard Business Review has found that early career workers in roles with high AI exposure are experiencing a 13 per cent relative decline in employment, while experienced workers in those same roles have remained stable or grown.
The finding is significant because it identifies who is carrying the cost of AI adoption most heavily. When businesses and policy discussions focus on whether AI is creating or destroying jobs overall, the headline figures can obscure what is happening at the ground level. This research makes the pattern visible.
Early career workers in high AI exposure roles are not being replaced by AI in the literal sense. The more common mechanism is that experienced workers, augmented by AI tools, can now handle a volume of work that previously required a larger team including junior staff. A senior analyst using AI to draft reports, run analysis, and quality check outputs needs less support from graduate analysts to produce the same result. The jobs do not disappear. The entry point closes.
This has a compounding effect that goes beyond the individual. The practical skills that experienced workers are now contributing were developed over years of doing exactly the kind of work that AI is now handling. If early career workers do not get the opportunity to build that foundation, the talent pipeline narrows. Businesses that dismiss this as someone else's problem will find it is theirs eventually.
For Australian business owners thinking about how to implement AI responsibly, this research raises a practical question. If AI is reducing the number of tasks that require a junior person, are you being deliberate about what you are replacing and what you are preserving? There is a difference between removing unnecessary repetition and removing the developmental work that builds capable people.
The answer is not to avoid AI tools that improve productivity. It is to think clearly about what your junior people need to learn and how that learning happens when some of the traditional entry points are automated.
This is worth reading carefully, particularly if you are in a knowledge-intensive business where the next generation of strong performers depends on the experience they build in their first few years.
Via https://hbr.org/2026/03/research-how-ai-is-changing-the-labor-market
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