When McKinsey & Company and the Boston Consulting Group froze starting salaries for 2026 – the third year in a row – it signalled growing pressure on the consulting industry’s traditional “pyramid” model, built on a steady intake of young analysts.
This is not just confined to consulting. Across the wider job market, hiring is still about 20% below pre-pandemic levels, and competition for junior roles has grown significantly as a result, according to LinkedIn. In the UK, each graduate role now attracts around 140 applications – up from 86 in 2022-23, according to the Institute for Student Employers
Artificial intelligence is part of that change. Productivity gains from automation are allowing firms to do more with fewer junior staff, calling into question the logic of hiring large graduate cohorts each year.
At the Big Four professional services firms – Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC – starting pay has not risen since 2022, and senior executives expect graduate recruitment across major service firms to fall by as much as half over the next year.
For students preparing to enter the workforce, the question is becoming hard to ignore: is AI killing the graduate job, or simply redefining it?
“We are still at the early phase,” says Louis-David Benyayer, associate professor at ESCP and AI Initiatives Coordinator. “The dust hasn’t settled yet. But there are clear early signs of evolution.”
Whatever their role – supply chains, finance, customer service – companies are expecting students to have AI-related skills. It shows how quickly AI adoption is rising in companies.
How AI is reshaping entry-level work
According to Benyayer, the most visible sign of AI’s encroachment is in job descriptions. Even roles far removed from software development now demand “AI-literate” applicants, he says.
“Whatever their role – supply chains, finance, customer service – companies are expecting students to have AI-related skills,” says Benyayer. “It shows how quickly AI adoption is rising in companies.”
The change in job specs is not merely semantic. Many of the tasks once given to early-career employees – analysing documents, producing summaries, gathering data – can now be handled by AI systems more quickly and (sometimes) with greater accuracy, according to Benyayer.
“For some tasks that typical early-career workers did, AI can take over,” he says.
This shift appears to be reducing demand for certain junior roles – for example, entry-level data analysts, research assistants or junior consultants – especially where tasks are routine and highly automatable.
The result is not necessarily mass unemployment, but a reconfiguration of the workforce. “Some companies are contracting people rather than putting them on payroll,” adds Benyayer. His point is that jobs are not always disappearing, but they are increasingly moving out of reach for graduates.
New roles, but not all built to last
As some traditional junior tasks disappear, new roles are emerging around generative AI, including positions such as “prompt engineer”. Even so, Benyayer sees such roles as temporary. In his view, they reflect a transitional phase in AI adoption – one that will fade as the technology becomes fully woven into everyday work. “They won’t last,” he predicts.
Still, he notes that job opportunities are also cropping up within fast-growing, AI-driven companies as their overall demand for staff increases. “Technology changes how the market functions, creating disruptors and new models,” he says.
Some of this growth is already visible at generative AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which have grown quickly – drawing hundreds of millions of users and billions of dollars in investment – which naturally means their operations and teams have expanded too.
In particular, these firms are hiring “forward-deployed engineers” – specialists who bridge technology and clients – aggressively. Whether these emerging pathways can offset wider graduate-job losses remains unclear. Many employers now field thousands of applications for a single role, with AI systems often screening candidates before a human ever looks at their CV.
Emotional intelligence, communication, leadership, problem-solving, critical thinking – these are qualities that machines cannot and will not substitute.
The skills AI cannot replace
If automation is thinning out the first rung of the career ladder, even marginally so, Benyayer says the skills that endure are those machines cannot yet replicate.
First is technological fluency: understanding how AI tools work, even if you are not a specialist. “You don’t have to be able to produce the technology yourself,” he says, “but you must understand its logic.”
Second is domain expertise: being deeply skilled in a specific field or role. “Find something – an industry, a company, a role – that you care about,” Benyayer advises students and recent graduates. “Try to be the best at it.”
And third are human capabilities. “Emotional intelligence, communication, leadership, problem-solving, critical thinking – these are qualities that machines cannot and will not substitute,” he says.
Business schools and universities, too, face a reckoning. “We don’t need to be afraid of this change,” Benyayer says. “But we must adapt.” At ESCP, that adjustment means building AI awareness into every course, making it a core skill for students rather than an optional one. “We are revising our curriculum so all students become tech fluent,” he says.
How graduates can find their footing
For graduates entering this uncertain job market, Benyayer’s advice is practical and hopeful. “Find something you care about and be very good at it,” he says. “Meet people and produce things – whether writing articles, organising events, or sharing code online that helps others.”
He also urges engagement with the technology itself: “Go to platforms like Hugging Face to explore open-source models. Learn a bit of Python. Understand both the opportunities and the limitations.”
For new graduates, careers may no longer follow a straight ladder but branch out like a web. But as Benyayer suggests, those who stay curious and keep building skills may yet find that the first rung has not vanished at all. It has simply moved.