Twenty-two percent of CHROs say at least one business leader in their organization has stopped hiring for entry-level roles because of AI automation, according to a Gartner report released this week.
The survey of 110 HR heads found that 95% of organizations have implemented AI in some form over the past year, and only one in five has seen significant or transformational value from it. That gap is pushing some leaders to assume that if AI is absorbing the tasks entry-level employees used to do, the roles themselves are no longer needed.
Amazon’s hiring numbers
AWS CEO Matt Garman is testing a different bet. In a recent episode of the Platformer podcast, Garman said Amazon plans to hire 11,000 interns and new college grads this year, even as AWS builds and sells AI agents designed to automate recruiting, coding and claims processing. He argued that mass job elimination would undercut the economy AI depends on. “The math doesn’t work out,” he said.
Amazon has cut roughly 30,000 corporate jobs since October. CEO Andy Jassy has written that AI will reduce the company’s total corporate workforce in the years ahead. On the podcast, host Casey Newton asked Garman, given Amazon’s own layoffs, why not just leave open roles unfilled and let AI absorb the work?
Garman answered that the 30,000 cuts came from flattening management layers to speed up decision-making, not from AI replacing the work itself, and that Amazon has more software developers today than it did two years ago despite heavy internal use of AI coding tools.
AI and early-career recruiters
Pressed on Amazon’s new AI recruiting agent, which can schedule, call and conduct voice interviews with candidates without a human involved, Garman acknowledged the tool is automating away part of the recruiter’s job. “I would much prefer our recruiters to focus on going and finding great talent than doing the blocking and tackling,” he said.
His position is that it frees recruiters to spend more time sourcing and vetting talent rather than handling scheduling logistics, and that the same pattern should hold for junior roles more broadly, even as some tasks disappear. On the podcast, he named the one trait he now looks for in employees not as a specific technical skill, but as a willingness to keep learning as the work itself changes.
Read more: Amazon, Microsoft help lead push to reskill workers displaced by AI
An entry-level pipeline
Kaelyn Lowmaster, a director analyst in Gartner’s HR practice, says companies that eliminate early career pipelines outright tend to pay a premium later for experienced talent hired externally rather than developed from within. “Instead of eliminating these early career roles, organizations should redefine them to enable earlier contributions to higher-value work and build the talent they will need in the future,” she said.
Gartner’s recommended alternative is a task-level analysis that maps the workforce capabilities behind critical value streams, then classifies how AI is actually changing each task.
Amazon’s own hiring pattern lines up with that framework better than its layoff headlines suggest. That the company has more software developers today than in recent years supports Gartner’s underlying argument that AI adoption and entry-level hiring are not automatically in conflict.
“Traditional development approaches are no longer sufficient in an AI-enabled environment,” said Meaghan Kelly, director analyst in the Gartner HR practice. “Organizations can’t rely on gradual skill-building through routine work. Instead, they must provide the support structures that allow early career employees to operate effectively in more complex, judgment-intensive roles much earlier in their careers.”
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