Artificial intelligence may not yet be causing widespread unemployment, but its growing ability to perform routine workplace tasks is beginning to reshape how young people enter the workforce. As companies increasingly use AI to handle basic and repetitive assignments, entry-level positions that traditionally helped fresh graduates build experience could come under growing pressure.
The concern is not simply that AI could replace individual jobs. A bigger challenge is that it may weaken the first rung of the career ladder, reducing the opportunities through which young professionals develop the expertise and judgment needed for more advanced roles.
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For many careers, routine work has traditionally been an essential part of professional development. An IT professional, for example, usually begins with tasks such as writing simple functions, debugging basic problems and preparing documentation before progressing towards system architecture and engineering standards. These early responsibilities help workers understand their field and gradually build the skills required for complex decision-making.
AI, however, can perform many well-defined routine tasks quickly and at relatively low cost. This creates an incentive for companies to automate work that was once assigned to fresh graduates and junior employees. While experienced professionals may benefit from AI as a productivity tool, younger workers could find it harder to get the practical experience needed to reach that level.
Research from Stanford on the US labour market points to the potential scale of the problem. A 2026 study found that employment among workers aged 22 to 25 in occupations highly exposed to AI was around 19% lower than it would have been if their employment had continued to track similarly aged workers in less AI-exposed occupations. Experienced workers did not show a comparable gap, partly because their roles rely more heavily on expertise, judgment and domain knowledge.
Although this evidence comes from the United States, similar pressures could emerge in India as workplace AI adoption accelerates. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index 2026, India is among the fastest adopters of workplace AI, with 34% of organisations having agent workflows, compared with 26% globally.
This makes the challenge particularly important for policymakers and educational institutions. AI could potentially create a paradox in which expertise becomes more valuable while the traditional route for developing that expertise becomes weaker.
One possible response is to redesign apprenticeship programmes and integrate them more closely with higher education. However, existing apprenticeship systems face challenges of their own. India’s two major national apprenticeship schemes are the National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme and the National Apprenticeship Training Scheme.
Under NAPS, the number of apprentices increased from 3.08 lakh in 2020-21 to 9.86 lakh in 2024-25. Yet completion rates have declined. NITI Aayog data shows that the completion rate for male apprentices fell from 92.14% in 2018-19 to 59.6% in 2023-24, while the rate for female apprentices dropped from 82.33% to 60.8%.
Apprenticeships are also not yet widely adopted by Indian companies. The Economic Survey 2025-26 estimated that around 6,100 enterprises were actively involved in apprenticeship training, compared with about 5.2 lakh registered small and medium enterprises.
The solution, therefore, may not be to protect traditional entry-level jobs from AI. Instead, India may need to redesign how young people acquire workplace experience. Apprenticeships could be expanded into cognitive and professional fields and embedded within graduate education.
Students could use AI to handle routine work while learning to verify outputs, conduct research, prepare data, analyse information and solve increasingly complex problems. The goal would be to ensure that AI becomes part of the learning process rather than removing the opportunity to learn.
Ultimately, the challenge posed by AI is about more than employment numbers. If routine jobs disappear before young workers can use them to build experience, the traditional career ladder itself may need to be rebuilt.
