Automate the bottom rung and nobody climbs

Have you quietly stopped hiring juniors because a tool now does most of what they used to do?

Nobody announced it. A graduate left and wasn't replaced. The admin role became a subscription. The numbers look better every month.

You are not alone in it. A Forbes report in May pointed to Harvard research that tracked résumés across hundreds of thousands of US companies.

At firms that adopted generative AI, junior hiring fell away from 2023 onwards, while senior employment barely moved. The pullback started almost as soon as ChatGPT arrived — before the tools were actually doing the work.

That last part is the uncomfortable one. Much of that pullback wasn't a response to what AI could do. It was a bet on what it might.

The cost doesn't show up this year. It shows up when your operations manager resigns and you look down the organisation for a replacement. There is no one standing there.

Almost every owner I talk to is running the same experiment without having decided to.

Hire the junior anyway, and change the job

Keep a deliberate junior intake, even where AI could technically do the task. Then redesign the role so the machine does the grunt work and the person does the learning.

Here is what most owners miss. The bottom rung was never really about the task. The task was the tuition.

Doing it a hundred times is how someone learnt what normal looks like and where the numbers hide things. Remove the rung and you save a salary. You also delete the only training programme you ever had.

So the fix is not to preserve the old job. It is to build a new one around the things AI does poorly:

• Put them in front of customers early. Calls, complaints, site visits. Judgement about people is learnt from people, and no tool hands that over.
• Make them check the machine's work. Let AI draft the report, the reconciliation, the quote. The junior's job is to find what's wrong with it and explain why — that is where they learn what right looks like.
• Give them a decision they own. Small, real and theirs: a supplier call, a roster, a refund limit. Responsibility is what turns a processor into a manager.
• Sit them next to someone senior. AI can answer questions. It cannot show how a good operator thinks on a bad day.

There is an honest objection, and it's right. Some junior roles really were just repetitive processing — data entry with a desk attached. Keeping them out of sentiment is not kindness.

It's a cost with a nicer name. Let those go.

But don't let the headcount go with them. Move it to a role that actually teaches. Cut the task. Keep the rung.

Shopify made AI the default and still hired a thousand interns

In April 2025, Shopify's chief executive, Tobi Lütke, sent a memo to staff and then posted it publicly on X. Using AI was now a baseline expectation.

Before asking for more people, teams had to "demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI". It was reported everywhere as AI replacing hiring.

The part that got far less coverage came from the same company. The previous September, Shopify's head of engineering, Farhan Thawar, had announced a thousand engineering interns for 2025 — far more than it had ever taken on before.

The memo didn't cancel it. The intake went ahead, and The Logic reported in May this year that Shopify planned another thousand for 2026.

Thawar's reasoning, in interviews since, is that today's graduates have grown up with AI, and Shopify wanted them inside helping it work out how to build with it.

The memo is not permission to stop hiring juniors. Lütke's test asks whether a piece of work needs a person. The intern numbers answer a different question — who will be running that work in ten years.

The company most associated with making teams prove AI can't do the job still chose to bring in the next generation, and in bigger numbers than before. It automated the task. It kept the rung.

Why I do it this way

I keep junior hiring deliberate, and I have for a long time.

It's personal. My first job was washing cars at fourteen.

I studied hotel and tourism management, went into hotels and worked my way up from the bottom. At twenty-five I was the general manager of a hotel in Melbourne's Docklands.

That doesn't happen without a bottom rung. Every step I climbed was a job someone could have decided wasn't worth a person.

Most juniors cost more than they're worth in their first year. I would have been no different.

So in my own businesses I've treated the junior intake as a line in the plan, not a leftover. Not as charity — because the person who has done the small jobs properly is the one who will be ready to run the building.

AI makes this easier, not harder. The grunt work that used to eat a junior's first year is now cleared in an afternoon, which frees the year for the part that builds a manager.

Do this before Thursday

List every role that has gone unfilled or been handed to software in the last two years. Next to each, write what the person in it used to learn.

Pick the one whose lesson nobody is learning now. Before Thursday, write a one-paragraph brief for a junior version of it — AI does the processing, the person does the customers and the checking. Then put a start date on it.