AI is changing the world of work. Do we still need junior hires when AI agents can do so much?

In part one, we looked at what the research says about AI and jobs overall: change is real, but it is arriving unevenly, and for most occupations it looks more like reorganisation than removal.

This piece is about the sharper question. Where is the pressure actually landing - and what can you do about your own career?

The group I would watch most carefully: people at the beginning of their careers

Stanford's Digital Economy Lab found no evidence of widespread economy-wide job displacement from AI. Beneath that relatively calm headline, however, younger workers in highly AI-exposed occupations showed a meaningful employment gap.

The effect seems to be happening mainly through lower hiring rather than mass firing, and it is strongest where AI is being used to automate work rather than support the person doing it. The relationship is descriptive rather than proof of causation, but the pattern is becoming difficult to ignore.

Why would junior jobs be hit first?

A lot of junior professional work consists of exactly the kind of work AI has become rather good at:

• The first draft
• The basic analysis
• The desk research
• The document summary
• The standard presentation
• The first version of the code
• The routine customer query
• The tidy spreadsheet

Experienced people once handed this work to junior people partly because someone needed to do it, and partly because doing it was how juniors learned.

Codified knowledge can be documented and learned from manuals, databases and examples. Tacit knowledge comes from experience: knowing when technically correct numbers still feel wrong, or which stakeholder needs a call before the meeting. AI is much better at the first kind.

Experience may become more valuable at exactly the same time that some traditional routes for acquiring experience become smaller.

Denmark is moving fast

If you work in Denmark, this is not a distant Silicon Valley story. Denmark currently has the highest business adoption of AI in the European Union.

More than 60% of Danish workers are in occupations with relatively high AI exposure. Around two-thirds of those workers are in jobs where AI is expected to complement people, including teaching, science, engineering and healthcare.

Denmark may experience AI quickly. But not uniformly.

What does this mean for your own career?

If you are already established in your work, the challenge is different. You are less likely to be competing for an entry-level role, but parts of your job may still become easier to automate, while other parts become more valuable.

Do not start by trying to predict whether your profession will exist in ten years. Instead, take your current job apart and ask four questions.