Older Workers Could Benefit as AI Takes On Junior Tasks

New research shows artificial intelligence-related job cuts could begin to favor older workers.

Upwards of 40% of chief executives plan to reduce junior roles in the next year or two, and change the composition of their staff to mid-level and senior workers, according to a recent survey by management consulting firm Oliver Wyman .

The findings, released last month and flagged in a report Saturday (May 16) by Bloomberg News, showed that just 17% of CEOs plan to make junior roles a larger part of the mix. Last year, those numbers were basically reversed, with companies planning to shift their workforce to more junior roles.

“I think the junior level is definitely finding it harder now to enter the workforce,” John Romeo , who heads Oliver Wyman’s research arm, told Bloomberg “It’s those mid- and senior-level employees that CEOs are now looking at to drive productivity.”

The Bloomberg report added that this is due to the types of tasks AI agents can perform, such as writing code at the level of a junior developer. But agents can’t always make judgment calls based on the insight gleaned from years of experience, the report noted.

Beyond the employment issues, the Oliver Wyman report also found a “deepening” AI divide, with many companies still bogged down in planning how to use the tech. Two-third of the businesses surveyed said their AI adoption was still in the planning and pilot stage, with 53% saying it is too soon to gauge a return on their investment, up from 41% in last year’s report.

“Yet those scaling AI across two or more use cases report roughly twice the ROI, measured in both cost savings and revenue gains,” the report said. “Size is critical, too: Nearly five times as many mega-size companies report AI-driven cost savings above 10% compared with their midsize peers.”

That’s in keeping with research by PYMNTS Intelligence from the report “No Roadmap, No Problem: How Enterprises Are Reinventing the AI Workforce,” which found that large U.S. companies have mostly moved beyond experimentation to embed AI into day-to-day operations.

“Yet the path forward is far from standardized,” PYMNTS wrote last week, with the research showing “that while most executives see AI as essential to future performance, their strategies vary by industry, and their confidence in execution remains mixed.”

Among the findings in the study: half of all surveyed CFOs expect AI to create new roles requiring new skills, even as 47% anticipate job cuts.

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