New data on AI startup humanity could cause fear of ZZ's future career. Companies use technology primarily to automate tasks, which can put the quality and quantity of entry-level jobs at risk.
The latest Human Economic Index report released Monday found that 77% of companies using the company's Claude AI software do so for automation such as “full-task delegation”, while only 12% use the technology for joint purposes such as learning. Humanity used data selected from 1 million application programming interface transcripts, primarily from companies and software developers, for its reporting.
The surge in task automation (most commonly used to code tasks and teach writing and teaching) is likely a result of AI bots improving task completion and users becoming accustomed to technology, according to Peter McCrory, the head of human economics. For businesses that integrate AI into their workplace, automation can help to increase efficiency.
“Companies are thinking about how to build embedded infrastructure to unlock productivity benefits,” McCrory said. luck. “And it could also be the labor market impact.”
McCrory said the purpose of the report is not to draw conclusions on how AI will affect the labor market in the future. Still, as AI automation tools become more readily available, so are evidence of the future impact of labor, especially for those just entering the job market. The first Stanford University study, published last month, showed signs that AI “has a significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the US labor market.”
Dario Amody, CEO of humanity, is well aware of the risks of this change in the labor landscape. He warned in May that AI could wipe out almost 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years.
“Most of them don't know this is going to happen,” Amodei said. axios. “It sounds crazy, but people don't believe it… As producers of this technology, we have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what's coming.”
The fear of Gen Z's AI has come to fruition
For Gen Z, the fear that AI will knock them out of their career path is already prominent. According to a survey by Zety, career platform of 1,000 Gen Z workers, 65% of respondents say their university degrees do not protect them from AI-related unemployment.
Generation concerns about AI-related unemployment are “on the right track,” said Christopher Stanton, an associate professor of business management at Harvard Business School. luck.
According to Stanton, Jobs is not fully automated, but the task raises more questions about what employees are asked of and how they are trained. For example, an AI bot may be able to generate marketing copies for advertising, but you still need a writer or editor to enter the prompt and edit the output.
However, task automation has a major impact, Stanton said, especially on entry-level jobs. Workplaces begin to prioritize providing worker apprenticeship-like experiences.
“You can imagine AI doing a lot of what the entry-level workers were doing, but they still need those people to get the context,” he said. “You might imagine their wages going down so that they can accumulate experience.”
There is another shift that Stanton can imagine for the young. Switching to a profession that requires physical labor that AI cannot currently perform. According to a 2024 Harris poll commissioned by Intuit Credit Karma, about 78% of Americans said they noticed a surge in young people pursuing trade jobs such as carpenters, electrical work and welding.
“The generative AI revolution is going much faster than the physical AI or robotics revolution,” Stanton said.
Cash register or consultant?
Stanton said it is still too early to predict the impact of AI on the labour market, but there is a wealth of data showing that young people can suffer from long-term professional and economic outcomes when they graduate into a weaker labour market.
The 2016 groundbreaking research entitled “Casher or Consultant?” The entry conditions for the labour market were used to measure how the data from the 1974-2011 graduation class affected the wages of university graduates over ten years after graduation. In this study, entering the workforce during a recession is associated with a decline in wages of about 10% in the first year of employment, with a nearly decline effect of seven years after graduation. For high-income majors like finance, these effects were less pronounced. They were even more prominent for low-earning majors like philosophy.
This decline in income for those graduating from the recession is because to get jobs, recent graduates have found jobs on the bottom edge of occupational revenue sharing, such as working as baristas and restaurant servers where less payments are more readily available. Today's budding young experts are not trying to join the workforce during a recession, but due to the changing AI landscape, they are entering weak labor markets. So there are some unfortunate parallels between young Gen Z, who need to sacrifice wages to shake up employment opportunities, and millennials graduating into the Great Recession.
“At least there is some past empirical evidence that signal us. Some recent college graduates who graduated into a recession have historically been pretty extreme for people's careers,” Stanton said.
