Gen A(I) and the future of work

Issue 126 l Eka’s Weekly Roundup (24 June 2025)

Jun 24, 2025

The Anthropic CEO cast bold predictions in May: up to 10-20% entry-level white collar jobs could be impacted by AI in the coming years, with up to 50% being impacted over time. We are more optimistic and believe in a changing labour market rather than a total bottom-up reshuffling.

We’ve also heard much more anecdotal evidence from young people at top universities preferring to ‘vibe code’ this summer than go to traditional internships (Google, Goldmans?). So, this week, we’re looking through the data to see if we can uncover early signals of an AI job revolution (hint - it’s early!).

Washing out the impact of AI on the job market 🗞️

The WEF posted an interesting article around their predictions for job growth & loss in April. They found that 170m new jobs were projected to be created this decade. On the downside, the rise of AI-powered tools could automate roles traditionally held by white collar workers, in entry-level roles.

Bloomberg finds that AI could replace more than 50% of the tasks performed by market research analysts (53%) and sales representatives (67%), compared to just 9% and 21% for their managerial counterparts.

It is notoriously difficult to predict this accurately, but this felt like a more holistic view than many AI doomsayer reports.

Too early to tell the impact, but the Harvard MBA indicator suggests 1/4 job-seeking MBAs couldn’t find a role in 2024

The Harvard MBA job report is a very soft signal for the health of the white-collar job market.

Cast your minds back to the financial crisis: in 2009, the Harvard MBA indicator showed that 41% of Harvard MBAs in 2008 went into finance (IBD, PE, HFs), while only 28% in 2009 went into similarly ‘market sensitive’ careers. This trend has continued, with over 1/3 of MBAs going into financial services in 2024.

The headline in 2024 was actually that one-quarter of job-seeking Harvard MBAs couldn’t find jobs this year, which is the largest proportion of a graduating Harvard class to struggle in the market in the last decade (which included a pandemic!).

Thirty percent of Harvard's 2024 MBAs did not seek employment, highest in the post-pandemic era. Of those, 14% reported the reason was because they were starting own business, a number in line with recent years.

Tracking youth unemployment during crisis times

The data from Eurostat doesn’t really show any impact on youth unemployment seasonally adjusted. Again this isn’t the best view because it accounts for all jobs rather than just white collar. It will be an interesting one to watch over time, to gauge whether 1) unemployment impacts do happen, and 2) if they happen at enough scale to move the chart.

The US data looks similar. I don’t think we should read much into this but it’s interesting to see a very slight trend in the unemployment rate for recent college graduates (22-27), which looks like it ticks up seasonally at the end/start of the year in ‘24 and ‘25. Still, too early to tell!

The NYC Federal Bank publishes unemployment rate by college graduates - it’s been interesting to see Computer Science and Computer Engineering come much higher in the unemployment rate rankings than they have been in the past (now close to sociology & fine arts in the latest release).

What’s next?

We are realistic optimists about the potential impact of AI on work for young people. We’re excited about the opportunities that AI offers young people, and aren’t the only ones (see Project Europe, EF’s summer retreats, and a number of hacker houses which are setting up in London for the summer). We’ll be looking out for more news on the impact of AI in the months ahead.