Leaders are split on how AI will change the entry-level labor market: while some warn of a jobs armageddon, others believe it’ll usher in a golden era of new opportunities for young workers. Some employers like Meta and PwC have already reeled back their hiring of fresh-faced graduates—but Accenture’s global chief diversity officer, Beck Bailey, says the consulting giant is only ramping up its acquisition of Gen Z talent.
“We’ve made a commitment to hire more entry-level people this year than we did last year,” Bailey recently said at Fortune’s Workplace Innovation Summit. “Our reasoning is that if you think about the folks who are graduating college this year, they entered college with ChatGPT…We want them in our workforce now to help us.”
The executive overseeing an employee population of around 786,000 strong is looking to add more college graduates to the company’s massive headcount, echoing Accenture CEO Julie Sweet’s remarks from last month. And the consulting giant isn’t alone in that thinking; other employers like Ford and Nvidia have also expressed the importance of keeping early-career workers in the pipeline.
Bailey appeared on a panel with Indeed Chief Revenue Officer Maggie Hulce and University of Michigan professor Jeff DeGraff. The panel, focused on future-proofing your org chart, was hosted by Indeed.
Bailey sympathizes with young professionals hearing predictions of mass unemployment driven by AI adoption, while he says roles will “shift and change,” new jobs will emerge as others fade into the ether. However, no business leader has all the answers. Only a handful of years into AI’s rapid innovation, workplaces still need to adapt and experiment before drawing long-term conclusions.
“We’re in a place of perhaps the messy middle of this [AI] transformation,” the global chief diversity officer continued. “People still need skilling and relationship-building with the technology, and leadership needs to still figure out where it’s going.”
Meanwhile, Hulce, Indeed’s chief revenue officer, has also seen the “doomsday” headlines. However, she believes there’s not a single path every company is following—while some employers are choosing to hire fewer people thanks to AI’s efficiency gains, others are simply supercharging the work their employees already do. However, she doesn’t believe in a total jobs wipeout.
“The jobs are changing: it’s the human plus AI transformation that’s happening,” Hulce said in the same panel at the Workplace Innovation Summit. “They’re morphing, and the counts of people you need at different types of jobs are changing, but most of the jobs we see will be augmented or aided with AI, not totally done 100% with AI.”
DeGraff, a management professor at the University of Michigan, also noted how workforces change amid their AI planning cycles. Right now, companies are fine-tuning their employee charts in this new transformation era—and down the line, businesses might look a whole lot different.
“In the short term, you’re going to adjust the workforce that you’ve got because you fight with the army you have, not the army you want,” DeGraff chimed in onstage at the Fortune event. “But in the long run there’s going to be massive changes, enormous changes…What we don’t know is what’s going to emerge.”
Indeed is the Founding and Data Partner for Fortune‘s Workplace Innovation Summit.
