By Allison Pohle and Roshan Fernandez
Emma Kanjorski doesn't consider herself an advanced AI user -- at least compared with some of her fellow 2026 graduates. She avoided ChatGPT for much of her time at the University of Vermont because she didn't want to cut corners.
Eventually, though, she figured out how AI could help her parse dense financial reports and process data. By senior year, the business major was advising younger classmates on using AI to gut-check their case study work and showing a professor how to prompt a "sanity check," or getting AI to critique its own output.
Now Kanjorski sees AI as a potential edge when she starts as a financial analyst at an insurer in Burlington this summer, a spot she feels lucky to have after applying to around 40 jobs. "I would like to be the person who can help other people understand it better or figure out how it fits into their day-to-day," she said.
Here comes the Class of AI, the most AI-native group of graduates to enter the workforce -- a cohort employers are already trying to figure out what to do with. They started college just a few months before ChatGPT splashed into the world. They're leaving as AI rapidly shakes up the entry-level jobs that were once thought of as solid career launchpads.
More than their predecessors, they have an innate versatility with the fast-evolving technology and little deference for the notion they have to pay their dues with repetitive grunt work. In a recent Gallup-Lumina Foundation survey of nearly 6,000 Americans, 22% of 18- to 24-year-olds with two- or four-year degrees said they felt "very prepared" to compete in an AI-shaped job market, more than for any other age group.
"We're asking for an entire workforce to reskill, but really, only new grads have had the tools to have that exposure," said Allison Shrivastava, education and labor economist at Niche, a college ranking and review site.
Mark Barrocas, CEO of SharkNinja, invited two dozen students to a two-day AI hackathon in April to build tools including one that crunches market-trend data to help identify new potential product lines. "What we're finding is these younger people have an opportunity to make an impact today better than they've ever been able to make an impact before, " he said. "The AI skills that they're bringing are more advanced than the person with 20 years experience."
The appliance maker is hiring about 200 "AI-forward" graduates and interns this year, including about 10 from the hackathon. Companies like IBM, Salesforce and MetLife say they are also ramping up hires of freshly minted grads to take advantage of their AI-native skills.
Yet elsewhere, graduate hires have been some of the first casualties of corporate cost-cutting in the name of AI and its ability to do entry-level tasks, like coding and putting together slide decks. Unemployment among 22- to 27-year-old college graduates stood at 5.6% in March, one of the highest rates since 2013 outside the early pandemic.
A survey of nearly 1,500 employers published by Strada Education Foundation last week reflects an ambivalence about hiring college grads: Among companies investing in AI, three times as many said they expected it to boost entry-level hiring this year than decrease it. Still, the share cutting back on junior hires grew to 17% from 13% in 2025. The survey didn't ask companies to quantify their hiring plans.
It's a big reason the Class of 2026 has a conflicted relationship with AI. Commencement speakers, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, were met with boos when they invoked AI at graduation ceremonies this month. Even with her job lined up, Kanjorski said she worries about the future, and her mother often emails articles warning of an AI job apocalypse. "I'm like, 'Mom, I am already scared,'" she said.
Leala Hernandez, a new San Diego State University graduate still looking for a job as an accountant, puts her feelings about AI more bluntly: "I wish it wasn't here." If she doesn't find a position soon, she said, she might look for work in another field.
New graduates worry about other aspects of AI, too. In a December Rand survey, about two-thirds of college students who used AI for homework agreed the technology was hurting critical-thinking skills.
"I have two parts of me that war against each other with AI," said Naomi Sato, who graduated last week from Chapman University in Orange, Calif. with a degree in graphic design. The first time she used ChatGPT her freshman year -- for romance-novel recommendations -- she was disappointed: Everything it recommended was obvious, she said. Though her professors warned against using it to cheat on assignments, she wasn't tempted. The graphics it generated gave people six fingers.
The message from her professors and administrators shifted as she moved through school. Students were encouraged to experiment with AI; for one assignment, Sato incorporated an AI-generated food truck into a logo design. Now she regularly uses AI-powered tools like Photoshop's "erase" function to speed up her work, and she knows AI skills are in high demand.
She still worries about relying on AI too much but believes it can't replace human precision or creativity. As a part-time designer at a clothing company this year, she offered to look into using AI to help with the monotonous work of resizing product images. But she said that the decisions she had to make in editing were too specific for AI to understand. "You want something that leans into that humanness," said Sato, who has since accepted a full-time offer at the company she interned with.
AI's inevitability has prompted new grads like Tommy Lee to learn as much about it as they can. Lee, who got a business degree from Villanova University this month, didn't delve deep into AI until last fall when he took a course on emerging technologies. Since then, he estimates he's spent over 800 hours experimenting on personal AI projects, learning from YouTube videos and trying different models.
He automated his own job-application process, creating nine subagents to search for openings, tailor résumés and fill out forms so he could focus on networking. (The system saved hundreds of screenshots of the applications that he reviewed before submitting).
It paid off: Next month, he's joining a soon-to-launch private-equity firm as an AI and systems analyst. Lee recently led a vibe-coding workshop (creating custom software with AI) in Philadelphia and hopes to hold similar-style workshops for his new firm's portfolio clients.
Some new grads landing jobs will have more responsibilities than entry-level hires just a few years ago. Salesforce, for example, says it is recruiting and fast-tracking 1,000 AI-native graduates and interns this year for "hands-on, high-impact positions" in engineering, product, sales and other areas.
Day to day, they will delegate more administrative tasks to AI, much like 26-year-old Elizabeth Awad currently does in her role as a senior product manager. Awad, who recently completed a two-year entry-level rotational program, uses an AI agent, Slackbot, to organize her day and automate tasks. By delegating meeting prep and drafts of product-requirement documents to AI, she said can spend more time doing strategic work.
She recently led a demo on a Slackbot skill that drafts messages in her writing style (it doesn't capitalize words, unless she's chatting with a senior executive). Within a week, she says, other project managers, designers and engineers had cloned her repository to spin up their own agents.
New expansive roles also mean new ways of training and overseeing graduate hires. At SharkNinja, the company's AI-native workers are working on high-level projects, such as using the technology to synthesize data signals to make real-time adjustments to its supply chain.
Bosses are implementing morning and evening check-ins to help inexperienced employees course-correct and ask questions, said Barrocas, the CEO.
"We have got to put some guard rails around them," Barrocas said. "So, if you're off track, you're off track for a day, you're off track for a couple of hours."
Working alongside AI tools has made critical thinking even more important than AI literacy, according to Strada's survey of employers.
AI is fundamentally reshaping work at KPMG, says Tim Walsh, the accounting firm's U.S. chair and CEO, which puts even more of an emphasis on employees' judgement. This summer KPMG is piloting a new training program that focuses more on building critical-thinking skills for its audit interns, with gamified exercises that compel them to figure out accounting scenarios by asking questions, avoiding bias and using professional skepticism.
At the University of Vermont, business management professor Rocki DeWitt said she has shifted from wondering how to police her students' AI usage to helping them harness it as a tool so they can be prepared for their careers. This spring, she asked Kanjorski and others to submit their chatlog history with each assignment, so she could evaluate how they interacted with AI.
DeWitt then marked up the conversations with feedback on prompt-phrasing, questions about what information they chose to omit versus include, and critiques about how they fact-checked the AI responses.
"I wanted them to be able -- in an employment interview -- to explain how they were using the technology as a tool of discovery, and creating value for a company," DeWitt said.
Kanjorski recalls a speech DeWitt gave the class: "What you guys can do is go into these smaller companies...and bring the same solutions to them. You can be the ones to lead that process."
Write to Allison Pohle at allison.pohle@wsj.com and Roshan Fernandez at roshan.fernandez@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 25, 2026 20:00 ET (00:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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