Heavy AI adopters grew entry-level hiring 12 percent, Forbes reports
New hiring data reported by Forbes cuts against the story that AI is killing junior jobs. An older Stanford study found the opposite. Both can be partly right.
The companies spending hardest on AI are hiring more junior workers, not fewer. That is the headline finding of a study by Ramp Economics Lab and Revelio Labs covering more than 21,000 US employers, reported Tuesday by Forbes. According to that report, firms with heavy AI investment grew overall headcount 10 percent in the two years after adoption, and entry-level roles grew faster still, at 12 percent.
The case for the junior hire
The Forbes piece leans on a vivid example. Brainlabs, a media agency of roughly 1,000 people, grew its entry-level hiring 237 percent, from 19 hires in October 2023 to 64 in April 2026. CEO Dan Gilbert told Forbes that a first-year strategist running an AI workflow can now do work that used to take a team of five. In that telling, agents do not replace the junior employee; they turn the junior employee into a force multiplier worth hiring in bulk. Brainlabs is one agency and one anecdote, but it is the kind of anecdote that recruiting chiefs repeat, because it gives them a growth story rather than a defensive one.
Google's vice president of recruiting, Brian Ong, told Forbes that entry-level hiring has accelerated at the company, though he offered no figures. And a Teneo survey, reported by Fortune via AOL, found 67 percent of public-company CEOs expect AI to increase their entry-level hiring in 2026.
The counter-evidence has not gone away
None of this erases the darker numbers. The Stanford Digital Economy Lab, in an earlier and widely cited study, found a 13 to 16 percent relative employment decline for workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations. Layoff trackers attribute roughly 60 percent of the approximately 157,000 tracked 2026 tech cuts to AI restructuring, a pattern consistent with the nearly 140,000 tech job losses GaaS News covered last week. A Harvard study on agentic AI and entry-level work reached its own sobering conclusions about which rungs of the career ladder agents reach first.
The honest read is that the labor market is bifurcating, not moving in one direction. Companies that treat AI as a productivity layer appear to be hiring young people to operate it. Companies that treat AI as a headcount substitute are cutting, and sometimes getting punished by investors for saying so. Which camp dominates in 2027 is the open question, and one dataset reported through a single outlet should not settle it.
What the numbers do not say
A caution on the core figures: the Ramp and Revelio study has so far surfaced publicly only through the Forbes article, so every number above should carry that attribution. Correlation is also doing heavy lifting. Firms investing aggressively in AI tend to be growing firms; growing firms hire juniors. The study's two-year post-adoption window may simply be capturing companies in expansion mode.
For the agentic AI as a service market, the Brainlabs model is the one to watch. If the winning configuration is one junior human supervising a fleet of agents, then agent vendors are not selling labor replacement at the entry level; they are selling leverage, and the buyers will keep hiring people to hold it. That is a much easier pitch to make to a CEO, a workforce, and a senator. Expect vendors to start quoting these numbers in every enterprise deck, and expect skeptics to keep quoting Stanford back at them.