"Artificial intelligence is accelerating workplace disruption, and younger employees are bearing the brunt. A new working paper from Stanford economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen finds that early-career workers in AI-exposed fields have seen employment drop by 13% since 2022. In contrast, older workers in the same sectors are faring better."
"That's the kind of book learning that a lot of people get at universities before they enter the job market, so there is a lot of overlap between these LLMs and the knowledge young people have," Brynjolfsson told CBS MoneyWatch."
"Older workers have a lot of tacit knowledge because they learn tricks of trade from experience that may never be written down anywhere," Brynjolfsson explained. "They have knowledge that's not in the LLMs, so they're not being replaced as much by them."
Early-career workers in AI-exposed fields have experienced notable employment declines, with a 13% drop since 2022 for those in early stages of their careers. Entry-level roles in software engineering and customer service fell nearly 20% between late 2022 and mid-2025, while employment for older workers in the same roles increased. Other affected fields include accounting and auditing, secretarial and administrative work, computer programming, and sales. Overall employment for workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed sectors dropped by 6%, while older employees in the same fields saw employment rises of 6% to 9%. Generative AI overlaps heavily with formal-education skills, increasing competition for younger professionals, whereas older professionals retain tacit knowledge and soft skills less present in large language models.
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