The Journal. - The ‘Class of AI’ Enters the Workforce

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

The class of 2026 is the most AI-native group of graduates to come out of college, with ChatGPT debuting their freshman year. WSJ’s Allison Pohle reports on how this cohort used AI in school and what future employers expect from them. And we hear from various college students and recent graduates about their hopes and fears when it comes to AI and their careers. Ryan Knutson hosts. Further Listening: - AI Is Coming for Entry-Level Jobs - Is the AI Boom… a Bubble? Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A funny thing has been happening at college graduations this spring. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution. I struck a chord. May I finish? A lot of commencement speakers are getting booed when they bring up AI. This time, it was the architects of artificial intelligence. Interesting. This reaction is happening all over.

the place, from Florida to Tennessee to Arizona. Why are all these college students booing commencement speakers when they bring up AI? Well, you're expecting people to have a positive reaction to something that's an existential threat, kind of, to their careers. Our colleague Alison Poli covers the workplace. You have a commencement speaker and you're waiting for them to say something inspiring. And then they tell you that AI is the future and it's this inevitable thing that you need to accept and it's going to radically change the world, while that message isn't really going over with a bunch of people who have been told that AI is going to take away entry-level jobs and going to change their entire future. They have no clue how it's going to shape their careers because employers themselves

don't even know how AI is going to shape their workforces. And for people who are just getting in at the bottom level, yes, that can be an opportunity, but it can also be really anxiety-inducing, too. Hi, my name's Bella. I'm going into my junior year of college. I'm studying economics with a minor in journalism. We asked college students in recent graduates,

beyond the booing, how are they really feeling about AI? and we got a lot of responses. I am both nervous and optimistic about AI. Hey, journal team. My name's Elon Rosenbaum. Hi, this is Michael. I'm a recent grad. I am a first-year medical student at the University of Arizona. I graduated from Cornell University one year ago,

and personally I'm very excited about the possibilities and capabilities of AI in my own career. I have some complicated feelings on the subject. My name is Ben Cole. I'm a recent grad from NC State. Overall, I'm feeling pretty optimistic about AI and feel confident heading into the workforce full-time. AI is going to lock a lot of people out of entry-level jobs, which might mean locking a lot of people out of the job market entirely. Being a medical student in this age of easy AI access has been amazing for education. It has also opened my eyes to how incorrect it can be. It's important to understand how to use AI to your advantage and get the most out of it.

Do I remain a little scared? I think that's on everyone's mind. There's still so much uncertainty, and that is what's somewhat terrifying. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Friday, May 29th. Coming up on the show, the class of 2026 confronts. their AI futures.

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AICloud ERP for any size business. SAP.com. When ChatGPT was released, the class of 2026 were freshmen. They're the first class to have had access to AI for almost their entire college career. Allison calls them the class of AI. And so people start experimenting with it. They're like, what is this? What can it do?

Some students I talked to were using it to do some last-minute study prep. Others were just playing around with it, looking for recommendations for books and movies. Nothing related to finals, they said. And pretty quickly, college administrators realized, okay, this is a really powerful chat bot or

research tool that can provide answers very quickly. And that can write essays. And that can write essays. And so colleges pretty quickly put into their syllabi, you cannot use chat GPT. This is plagiarism. This is cheating.

Don't use it. One of our colleagues spoke to a student named Emma. Emma studied finance and marketing, and she was pretty skeptical of AI when it first started rolling out her freshman year. I honestly feel like I was pretty disillusioned for a while, I think. Like, I was not very quick on the uptick. So Emma is a student at the University of Vermont, And when chat GPT first came out, you know, she really avoided it.

She did not want to use it. Some of her peers were using it for assignments. She was like, this feels like cheating. Most professors either wouldn't say anything or they would say like no AI, don't use it for assignments. There's a lot of being lockdown browsers or whatever for all exams. So it was just like was not something that was part of the curriculum at all. colleges and even a lot of students like Emma worried that using AI would make them dumber because they wouldn't have to think for themselves anymore.

I don't want to outsource my critical thinking, which is something that we hear from a lot of different students that they're worried about what using AI will do to their ability to really retain information. So how successful were colleges at getting students not to use AI? broadly, of course, it varies by the individual, but they didn't listen, you know, and they were still using it. They're like, okay, well, maybe I won't use it to write my paper, but I'll use it to do all the research, and then I'll write it. Or I'll use it to outline what the paper should say, and then I'll write each paragraph myself. Exactly. Oh, I'm taking a really hard calculus class. Well, let me just see what the answer is, and then I'll figure out how to solve.

the later, you know, that type of thing. I mean, I can imagine just to say, like, it's just, it's so tempting. When you're in college, you're so busy, you've got so many things going on. It's hard to sit there and spend an hour or hours trying to solve a problem or write an essay when, like, there's just this button you can press that will do it instantly for you. Right. And you just take, it takes so much will to resist it. Yeah.

And in the backdrop, there's all this pressure to get an intern. to start working your way toward eventually being able to get a job. And when you're applying for internships, people look at grades. And so if there's something that can help you achieve a better grade or get that outcome, yeah, it is really tempting. It didn't take long for colleges to realize that trying to fight AI was like trying to fight gravity. Students were going to use it and colleges needed to adapt. There are professors who are saying, yes, you can use this, but within reason and with limits.

And so they're changing their coursework. And they have started encouraging students to experiment with AI and really learn how to use the tool in class as part of class assignments. Emma, the University of Vermont student, said she first started using AI when her professors started asking her to. I don't remember actually using chat to the year any kind of LOM until probably my junior year. That's when I think it started to show up in class so by and I was like, okay, like maybe I'm kind of interested in checking it out. Like I don't want to be missing out on the opportunity. So I think I first started using it kind of in a class context. And then since then, especially this past year, I've had professors who are either more forward about how they use AI or

they want to, like, stimulate conversation about it in class. Emma says that one of her professors incorporated AI in class in the way that she found really effective. She knows that everybody is using it. So she requires you to submit all of your chat logs with your assignments. And then she prints them out and literally underlines them and analyzes them and makes comments on, like, what kind of questions you asked, what kind of responses did you get? She was always pushing conversations to be more so about, like, what is the tool, how

are you using it? How are you pushing back against it when it gives you whatever response you're looking for? How can you find queries that are actually going to help you get the job done without erasing the thinking and the learning portion of it? While colleges have been more cautious about AI, businesses, aka these students' future employers, are going full throttle. Employers are saying, you know, when students get to us, we want them to be familiar with the technology, but it's up to the college to teach them how to use it. And so if you're a young person entering the workforce, you need to show you can use AI.

Well, it feels like such whiplash for these college students who are like not that long ago who were sort of told like, don't touch AI, it is bad, it is cheating, it is wrong. And then they're immediately going to this workforce that's like, you need to do this, you need to use it as much as possible, it's the future and it is everything.

Yes, exactly. And so where do you fit? into that as a person, as a future employee. When you're entering your first job, too, it's really overwhelming. Emma, now a college graduate, so she's come around to some of the benefits of AI. And even though she has a job lined up, the stress of what it could mean for a career is still very real. I think everybody is just kind of feeling pretty scared and uncertain. For example, my mom loves to send me, like, scare email messages and, like, articles that she's fine that's, like, everybody's jobs will be wiped out.

I think her point is to, like, motivate me to, like, use it more so I can avoid getting my job eaten up. But I'm like, mom, like, I'm already scared. I don't need to hear it from you with love. So what does an AI future look like at work for the class of 2026? That's next. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this. Cadillac Optic was the number one selling luxury EV in Canada for 2025. Find your rhythm across a seamless 33-inch display and an immersive 19 speaker AKG surround audio system.

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and what it's about to do. So you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit service, As college students and recent grads turn their focus to the job market, some are at least a little bit excited. As a recent college graduate, I think AI is something people need to embrace rather than avoid. I use AI in my everyday life, and I genuinely believe it's meant to make our lives easier when it's used in the right way. I use AI nearly every day in my life, whether it's about ideas up, learn, write code, or to talk through a decision with you.

That being said, I'm very optimistic about AI, but we're not. with a degree of caution. I think it is an incredible tool that makes it so I can get certain tasks done a lot faster. Overall, I think AI is creating many, many job opportunities for young people who are willing to learn these new skills that are not very well mapped out yet. Others are more wary.

To be brief, the thought of AI scares me quite a bit. I see Chatsby-T doing all these things that I've been learning to do, and it does it so easily, and it appears that it does it so much better than I ever could. Being early in my career, there's a very real fear of being replaced by the technology that I'm being told to embrace. If new methods of attaining artificial general intelligence are successful, I'm just going to hope that they come after I get tenure. I think a lot of us are going into the workforce and seeing AI as just this looming threat. I mean, people have been telling us

since it's come out, AI is going to replace you. It's going to replace your job. It's going to replace your function, your utility. And that is a terrifying thing to hear. And some of the college graduates we heard from said they're using AI to try to get jobs.

Now, AI really was helpful in the job application process. So I would run a lot of my application answers through chat GPT. It helped me through best practices of how to write a cover letter. I ran my resume through there and it helped me cut things down, what feels redundant, what's professional, what's helpful, what's necessary.

I think a lot of my interviews when I was job hunting were how have you used AI, how do you plan to use AI? And I think that's something that's exciting because a lot of these companies don't have people that have any AI experience. Our colleague Allison says the confusion grads are feeling makes sense because right now a lot of companies don't even know what they want from AI. Employers themselves don't even know how AI is going to shape their workforces. They're still trying to figure out what positions they need, who they should hire for, what those people should be doing. there's going to be a great reshuffling of the workforce in terms of the way that companies think about their workers. So once these students go on the market for these entry-level jobs, can you talk about what they're seeing?

Overwhelmingly, AI fluency is mentioned in a lot of these entry-level job postings, or they'll mention familiarity with ChatcheeVT, with Claude, with Gemini. it's one of the ideal requirements. They're assuming that students are coming in having used these tools before. They're not thinking that, oh, somebody's going to come in and never have typed something into AI before, have experimented with it before. That's a given for them now. And are they seeing it across the board in all industries? In many industries.

Yes. in finance, of course, in tech, but even in graphic design, and that feeds into the sense of inevitability of, oh, you know, all of these companies are saying that they need to do this. The data on the job market

for recent college graduates is mixed. Employer surveys show that some companies do expect to hire fewer junior workers because of AI. And in March, unemployment for college graduates 22 to 27 years old, rose to one of the highest levels in over a decade.

I talked to a lot of students who have submitted tons of applications, haven't been able to find a job, and are really struggling. And these are students who studied everything from marketing or human resources to even accounting. And especially because in this job market, with tons of layoffs, you have more qualified people who are willing to take a pay cut to keep working and work an entry-level job. But there are some companies that say they're doubling down on hiring more entry-level workers,

specifically because of their ability to use AI. They also want these people to come in and teach everyone else who already works there the best ways to use AI. So in that way, it's putting more pressure maybe on these entry-level roles where people are coming in with more responsibility and less of a sense of,

the company thinking they need to pay their dues before they start contributing. Interesting. So they're actually thinking that these recent graduates are going to have more skills in AI. And so therefore, there's like a reason to actually overindex in that category. Exactly. So there have been a lot of disruptive times to graduate from college. You know, after the 2008 financial crisis, COVID, obviously. How do you think this moment of this kind of AI revolution that we're in compares. If you look at the data, the unemployment is not as high as it was at those times.

So, but that doesn't mean this isn't hard. And it doesn't mean this isn't full of anxiety for a lot of people who, when companies don't even really know what they want from workers, if you're just entering the workforce, how do you pitch yourself to a company when you're just trying to get your first job and make your way in? So data-wise, it's not as severe in terms of finding a job. I think anxiety-wise, it's pretty tough. I should say, not all speeches to graduates have been lauding the revolutionary power of AI.

I'm here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy AI. On Wednesday, as part of Harvard University's graduation ceremonies, comedian Ronnie Chang gave a different take. Can I just say, F-I-I-I. F-A-I. F-A-I. I'm so glad you agree.

I prepared a completely different speech in case you guys turned on me, but I won't be needing that anymore. That's all for today. Friday, May 29th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode

by Rocheon Fernandez. and a big thank you to all of our listeners who send in their thoughts about AI. Congrats on graduating. And good luck out there. The show's made by Evelyn Fahardo Alvarez, Laura Benchoff, Catherine Brewer,

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Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Catherine Anderson, Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, Nathan Singapok, Griffin Tanner, and Blu-Dots Sessions. Fact-checking this week by Mary Mathis and Najua Jamal. Thanks for listening. See you Monday.