"Blue giant" IBM uses recruiting ambitions to alleviate "AI panic": Entry-level positions in the United States are expected to triple by 2026

At a time when investors' concerns about the disruptive impact of artificial intelligence (AI) technology on various industries globally are escalating, IBM, the "Blue Giant" of the United States old-school tech giant, announced that it will expand its entry-level hiring in the United States to three times its previous scale by 2026. The company refused to disclose the specific number of hires, but stated that this expansion will be "comprehensive," impacting a wide range of positions across multiple departments. Around the same time on Thursday, US tech giant Microsoft Corporation released a completely different signal regarding the impact of AI on the labor market. Mustafa Suleyman, head of Microsoft Corporation's AI business, stated in a media interview that tasks for white-collar professionals such as lawyers, accountants, project managers, and marketers who work on computers will be completely automated by AI in the next 12 to 18 months. This timeline, released by Microsoft Corporation's AI business leader, is much earlier than the general expectations of the business community and Federal Reserve policymakers, sounding an alarm for the global labor market. The recent turmoil in the global stock market, particularly in the "Software-mageddon" sector, has been significant. The launch of a series of AI tools/agent-based AI intelligence collaboration platforms by Anthropic, known as the "OpenAI rival," has triggered a widespread sell-off in the SaaS subscription software sector as well as the broader software sector in the stock market. Under the influence of this severe concern, the S&P 500 software and services index has fallen by about 13% since late January and wiped out nearly $1 trillion in market value in the week leading up to last Thursday. This week, the expectation of AI disruption is shaking various industry sectors like a domino effect, from software, SaaS, and PE to insurance, even extending to labor-intensive sectors such as real estate, property management, and logistics, causing fluctuations. AI seems to be sweeping through each industry sector one by one in the past one to two weeks, with investors accelerating the sell-off of potential "losers." "AI taking away entry-level jobs"? IBM chooses to swim against the tide "Yes, and it's against the jobs that we've been told AI can do," said Nickle LaMoreaux, Chief Human Resources Officer at IBM, during a meeting in New York this week. LaMoreaux emphasized that she has thoroughly reshaped the responsibilities of entry-level positions such as software developers within the company, in order to establish evidence for this recruitment initiative. She stated at the Leading With AI summit hosted by Charter: "The entry-level jobs you had two or three years ago, AI can now do the vast majority of them." "So, if you want to persuade business leaders that you need to make this investment, then you must be able to show the real value these people can bring now. And this must be achieved through completely different work." LaMoreaux emphasized that as a result, the responsibilities of early entry-level employees at IBM have undergone significant changes. Since AI tools can handle most routine coding tasks, the company's junior software developers now spend less time on this, focusing more on deep communication and collaboration with customers. In the human resources department, entry-level employees now intervene in chatbot conversations when they are not performing well, correct outputs, and actively communicate with managers when necessary, rather than personally handling every issue as before. As IBM, with the halo of cutting-edge technologies like AI and quantum computing, announces its latest decision, questions are on the rise regarding whether AI will wipe out opportunities for recent graduates. Last year, CEO of "OpenAI's strongest competitor" Anthropic, Dario Amodei, warned that by 2030, half of entry-level office jobs may disappear. The rapid progress of AI large models in recent times has also increased anxiety among college students - they are worried about being completely replaced in an already difficult job market. LaMoreaux stated that cutting back on early career recruitment may save money in the short term, but it will pose significant risks of a shortage of mid-level managers in the future. This may force companies to continuously "poach" talent from competitors, which is usually more expensive than internal promotions. She mentioned that external recruitment like this usually takes longer to adapt to the company culture and systems, while talent cultivated internally is more likely to integrate into daily operations. Some tech industry executives and economists believe that recruiting young employees is a better investment for companies amidst the global technological revolution. Melanie Rosenwasser, Chief People Officer of file-sharing platform Dropbox Inc, stated regarding the use of AI technology, "They're like riding a bike in the Tour de France, while the rest of us still have training wheels." "Honestly, they have lapped us in proficiency in using AI tools and agent-based AI intelligence." She mentioned that in order to leverage the proficiency of young employees in AI skills, Dropbox is currently expanding its internship and recent graduate programs by 25%. IBM strives to "transform" junior engineers into frontline forces of the AI era while also cooling down the "AI panic narrative" On one hand, IBM explicitly acknowledges that "many entry-level jobs over the past 2-3 years can now be done by AI," therefore reshaping the responsibilities of junior positions and shifting new employees towards frontline strategic tasks such as customer communication, collaboration, and AI output correction; on the other hand, it still intends to expand its entry-level hiring threefold in the United States by 2026, which objectively helps to reduce the narrative of AI directly eliminating entry-level positions and the "AI disrupting everything" AI panic - provided that the positions are reshaped. In IBM's view, AI is not linearly eliminating positions, but shifting the value focus of positions from "content production/coding/writing tables" to "taming AI into a controllable production line." Undoubtedly, AI is primarily consuming "task-level" type of repetitive labor, and companies will redefine "role-level" positions. According to Suleyman from Microsoft Corporation, the majority of tasks in many professional positions will be automated, possibly exceeding market pricing speed; IBM's move is to acknowledge this premise, continue to invest in talent supply by rewriting the responsibilities of entry-level positions, and migrate human resources to higher value areas (such as customer collaboration, AI anomaly handling, quality control and delivery). From the underlying technological logic of agentic AI workflows, this "reskilling + hiring" approach is actually very engineering-focused: agents are good at breaking down processes into sub-tasks and automatically executing them (coding, document generation, initial screening, reporting, running experimental scripts, etc.), but once in a production environment, the real bottlenecks often shift to permissions and data connections (identity/RBAC and system interfaces, data lineage relationships), tool reliability, evaluation and regression, governance and auditing, as well as the inevitable long tail exceptions. This means that companies need more entry-level talent who can "run the process with AI": they no longer create value through "manual output," but through orchestrating, verifying, monitoring, correcting, and collaborating with business partners to transform AI capacity into efficient and scalable results. In recent years, IBM has clearly focused on "enterprise-scalable large AI project implementation" - not just selling AI models or other AI tools, but focusing on selling comprehensive capabilities to integrate AI into existing systems and efficiently govern and utilize them in multi-cloud/hybrid cloud environments. IBM's recently released Enterprise Advantage (asset consulting services that expand agentic AI to enterprises) emphasizes: helping customers quickly build, govern, and operate internal AI platforms, connect AI to existing systems, and expand the application of agent to scenarios without changing clouds/models/core infrastructure. To replicate this methodology at scale, "people" themselves are part of the delivery capacity, and expanding entry-level hiring may be preparing in advance for the delivery and management teams in the next 2-5 years.