AI Takes Over Entry-Level Grunt Work, Forcing Companies to Rethink Hiring

At London-based advertising agency Catalyst, one junior employee can now handle five different client accounts, founder Tobias Green told CNBC. Several junior staff were needed before. AI tools handle research, write the first pass of copy and gather data. 'Then you need someone to come in and fix it up,' Green said, describing the setup as 'a reverse Mechanical Turk.' AI works behind the scenes while the human remains the face presented to the client.

Green said the shift has changed how the agency views entry-level roles. 'If AI removes the grunt work, then the grunt work is no longer relevant,' he said. 'They don't need to learn those skills ... They need to learn how to manipulate and utilise AI.'

AI is becoming increasingly adept at research, drafting, coding and administrative work, the tasks traditionally given to junior employees across industries. The productivity gains can be significant, but experts have raised concerns about career advancement and how young workers develop required skills in the first place.

Open University's 2026 Business Barometer report, which surveyed 1,500 business leaders in the U.K., found that 51% of respondents said AI was changing how they hire. Some 19% said they had reduced entry-level recruitment, and 42% of those cited AI adoption as a reason.

Lucy Beaumont, global senior vice president of product at talent assessment company SHL in Surrey, England, said some major graduate recruiters are hiring fewer people as they assess whether they need the roles at all. 'If we've had an organisation that's a pyramid shape, we're now seeing what we call a diamond, with more people at that mid-level,' Beaumont told CNBC. It is a short-term solution that can create a crisis for employers when they look to the future, she added. 'Those entry-level roles, they're your training ground — that's where you get your training wheels, you get your badges, get your war wounds, make mistakes and learn how to operate in a corporate environment,' Beaumont said. 'If you take that away, it has serious implications for every rung of the ladder.'

Junior roles are not disappearing altogether. In a survey of 500 U.K. and Irish mid-market leaders by technology consultancy Klarus, 45% said AI was being used to help junior employees work better and faster. Almost a quarter said it was creating new roles and opportunities.

The trend is particularly visible in software development. Sheila Flavell, COO of business and technology consultancy at London-based FDM Group, said tools including Claude Code and Codex mean developers are increasingly responsible for overseeing projects completed by both AI agents and people. 'The skillsets that will be incredibly important are understanding how to work with others,' she told CNBC. AI could push junior workers toward overseeing work much sooner in their careers.

Hiring for this new way of working can be challenging. SHL's Beaumont said some employers were moving away from recruiting graduates into predefined roles, instead hiring for broad capabilities and deciding where to deploy them afterward. 'It is hiring for potential,' she said. 'Have you got re-skilling potential? Could we re-skill you onto different things? It doesn't really matter where you've come from.' Beaumont gave the example of one large global retail bank she works with that is looking beyond traditional talent pools toward graduates in subjects such as psychology and law. The bank reasons that changing technical skills can be taught, while capabilities such as critical thinking are harder to build from scratch.

For Cheney Hamilton, director at research firm Bloor, the question is whether junior workers can develop the judgement to supervise work they have never learned to do themselves. She argues that 'grunt work' was never just work, but was instead the mechanism through which people accumulated context and judgement. 'AI raises the floor of what a junior can produce, but it doesn't give them the judgement to know when the output is wrong, and that judgement historically came from repetition and consequence,' Hamilton, who runs Bloor's research into workplace transformation, told CNBC.

That does not mean preserving menial tasks for training's sake, though. Hamilton said companies can instead treat entry-level work as 'exposure' rather than 'output,' with juniors checking and correcting AI-generated work while senior colleagues deliberately teach them the judgement around it. Consultancy FDM Group is experimenting with something similar. Flavell said it now trains people using real business problems and asks them to find solutions using agentic engineering, rather than simply teaching them how the AI tools work, which could leave companies short of experienced workers in the coming years. Hamilton added that the real issue is not 'early careers' time served, but 'early knowledge.'

Editor's Summary

AI is automating research, drafting and administrative tasks that once formed the training ground for junior employees, leading some companies to reduce entry-level hiring while others use the tools to make juniors more productive. Surveys cited by CNBC show the shift is widespread in the U.K., and experts warn it could weaken the pipeline of experienced workers unless firms deliberately teach judgement and oversight. Companies such as Catalyst and FDM Group are adjusting roles, with juniors increasingly asked to check, correct and supervise AI-generated work.