MIT AI expert warns automating Gen Z entry-level jobs could backfire—and cost companies their future workforce

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Companies betting against entry-level Gen Z talent by automating their roles may be making a costly long-term mistake. That’s the warning from MIT research scientist Andrew McAfee , who co-leads the school’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. Cutting off talent at its source, he argued, doesn’t just shrink today’s workforce—it disrupts the pipeline that produces tomorrow’s leaders . “How else are people going to learn to do the job except via on-the-job learning and training apprenticeship?” McAfee told Harvard Business Review last month. “That’s how you learn to do difficult knowledge work is by helping somebody who’s good at that with the routine stuff. And when we put too much automation in that too quickly, we lose that apprenticeship ladder.