For decades, companies relied on a simple bargain to develop talent. Colleges taught students how to think. Entry-level jobs taught them how to work. Junior roles gave early-career professionals room to learn how decisions are made and to take on responsibility before the stakes were high.
That bargain is breaking.
Artificial intelligence is now doing much of the routine work that once defined entry-level employment. As those roles disappear, so does one of the primary ways young professionals learn how organizations function and how leaders exercise judgment.
The scale of this disruption became clear this month at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva described AI “like a tsunami hitting the labor market,” warning that entry-level jobs are often the first to be affected.
“Tasks that are eliminated are usually what entry-level jobs present,” she said.
Her warning reflects what many employers are already seeing. As machines take over the work that once trained college graduates, the traditional path from education to experience is fracturing.
Why Human Judgment Is the Most Valuable Job Skill
The shift is already visible in the data. A 2025 Stanford University study, “Canaries in the Coal Mine?,” found that workers aged 22 to 25 in jobs most exposed to AI, including research, entry-level coding, and design, experienced a 13% decline in employment since late 2022. Older, more experienced workers in similar roles were largely unaffected. Long-standing stepping-stone jobs in software support, customer service, and junior marketing were among the hardest hit.
For employers, this is not simply a story about job loss. It is a capability problem. When early-career roles disappear, organizations don’t just lose headcount; they lose the environment where judgment is learned.
That shift helps explain why some skills are becoming more valuable just as others vanish. AI is increasingly effective at execution. It’s far less reliable at knowing when something is wrong, or why.
“While AI is eliminating routine tasks,” says Jossie Haines, an executive coach and former engineering leader at Apple, “it’s not able to automate human judgment.”
By judgment, Haines does not mean abstract critical thinking. She means the ability to notice when an output doesn’t make sense, understand the implications, and intervene before a small issue becomes an expensive one. It is the difference between completing a task and understanding its consequences.
Haines often illustrates this shift with a familiar scenario inside technology companies. When a product decision raises intellectual-property concerns, it triggers an internal review known as a “copyright ticket.”
“AI could potentially figure out how to process copyright tickets,” she explains. “But it cannot figure out why the product team keeps building features that raise copyright concerns, or how to address that from a process perspective.”
That distinction– connecting decisions across teams and anticipating downstream risk– is the essence of human judgment.
Hiring managers recognize it quickly. The candidates who stand out are not those with the most polished résumés, but those who can explain how they think, challenge outputs that don’t feel right, and adapt as conditions change.
In an AI-driven organization, judgment is the job.
How Colleges Can Prepare Students for the AI Workforce
College can no longer function as a holding pattern before real work begins. In an AI-driven economy, the advantage will go to students who can think clearly, exercise judgment, and take ownership early. Those are leadership capabilities, and they must be developed before graduates ever step into their first job. Higher education can no longer outsource that work; it has to take responsibility for it.
That does not mean lowering academic standards. It means aligning education with how work actually happens. Real business problems rarely arrive neatly defined. They cut across teams, evolve quickly, and require decisions under uncertainty.
“Experience is the name of the game,” says Bari Williams, a startup advisor and former senior legal counsel at Facebook. “Employers are increasingly unwilling to gamble on unproven candidates. Instead, they favor applicants who can point to concrete work they’ve already done and explain how it translates to the role.”
Williams urges students to build that experience while still in school, through internships, contract work, startup roles, or other hands-on opportunities that force them to take ownership and see consequences.
By giving students responsibility for work that matters beyond a grade, colleges can graduate employees who are ready to contribute on day one, bypassing entry-level roles that no longer exist.
The Business Risk of Doing Nothing
The question is no longer whether AI will change work. It’s whether higher education will adapt quickly enough to prepare students for the work that remains.
For employers, the risk is equally clear. Without new pathways to develop judgment early, organizations face a shrinking pipeline of future leaders– people who know how to think, reason and decide, before the stakes are high.
AI may be accelerating execution. But leadership, accountability, and judgment remain human, and more important than ever.