What people actually want from AI
We ask the workers and communities AI will hit first, and we build our policy work around what they say.
Young Career Entrants
Work, Opportunity, and AI
Windfall Trust and Encode convened young workers, economists, and policy experts in Washington, DC in June 2026 to discuss AI's impact on this generation.
This is what they said.
June 2026, Washington DC: We sat down with a group of early-career professionals to talk about what they're actually walking into, in their own words.
This piece pairs what they told us with the research that's emerged since.
So far, the case that AI is behind what young workers are experiencing isn't fully borne out in the broader numbers. It isn't even clear how much of this is AI itself, versus uncertainty about AI. And separately, AI is creating new jobs, not only displacing old ones.
However: early-career workers don't have the luxury of waiting for the numbers to catch up. They're investing real money and their most formative working years into this moment now.
What's actually happening
Companies aren't firing young workers. They're just not hiring many of them, and the shortfall keeps growing. Stanford's Digital Economy Lab has tracked this since 2025 in its "Canaries in the Coal Mine?" research, and finds no evidence of mass layoffs tied to AI. What's changed is how many new early-career openings companies are creating in the first place — especially in roles built on "codified knowledge," the kind of documented, repeatable work AI now handles well, versus roles built on tacit, mentorship-driven knowledge, which are holding steady or growing.
That shows up inside the job, not just in who gets hired. A software engineer at the Windfall event described spending most weeks reviewing and correcting AI-generated code rather than writing it. She also noted there have been no net new graduate hires since she joined six years ago.
Grad school is increasingly a hedge, not a plan. Several participants described applying to graduate programs to sit out a difficult market. Many expressed fears they will emerge with more debt to a shrinking pool of entry-level roles. Currently one in 4 US adults under 40 have student loan debt.
Where policy comes in
None of this is fixed by individual effort alone. Our Policy Atlas lays out some concrete interventions including wage insurance for workers who take a pay cut to get reemployed, standardized AI-exposure measurement to target support where it's needed, expanded apprenticeships and vocational training, and employer tax incentives for retraining investment.
Explore the Labor Market Adaptation section of the Policy Atlas
Watch the conversation
Watch the full conversation with our Young Career Entrants panel, and explore the policy options we think deserve more attention.
March 2026 Global Dialogues Survey
What 1,000 people across 60 countries want from the AI economy
Technological progress has always promised prosperity. But as AI moves from abstract promise to daily reality, the focus must shift to the human experience. We surveyed 1,023 people across 62 countries to bridge the gap between technical progress and human priority—exploring what the world truly needs, expects, hopes for, and fears from the AI economy.
