The AI economy is rewriting the American Dream -- and blue-collar workers are poised to win

"I empathize with early career workers, especially new graduates that are trying to get hired or just starting sort of their first rung on the career ladder," Tucker told CNBC in an interview. "It is true that it is tough out there, and the data really do back that up." The advent of generative and agentic AI, and the technology's ability to take over some entry-level work, has raised questions about the future of the junior consultant, the investment banking analyst and the first-year associate at a white-shoe law firm. Should senior leadership keep recruiting large classes from top schools and devote the time and money needed to train them, knowing those workers will form the bedrock of their future talent pipeline, or should they invest elsewhere and let AI do those jobs? In a recent interview with Derek Waldron, JPMorgan Chase's chief analytics officer, CNBC asked if the bank has any plans to cut its recruitment classes. He said he didn't know the firm's specific strategy, but acknowledged "there may be some rightsizing." "It'll depend on the pipelines, the opportunities. In some cases, bigger [classes], in some cases, frankly, could be smaller as well," said Waldron. Waldron suggested the nature of work could shift for junior employees who do make it through the door -- toward managing AI systems instead of doing the underlying work themselves. "The world is moving to a paradigm where every employee becomes a manager, but a manager of AI systems," said Waldron. "So whereas a new joiner in the past was basically primarily the worker doing the work, the expectation is that they would be able to come in and begin to act as a manager of sort of AI tools." In some ways, that shift could be good news for entry-level employees, because they're AI natives and may be more tech savvy than their older colleagues. "I want more of them," WHP Global CEO Yehuda Shmidman said of entry-level employees at his firm, which counts brands such as Toys "R" Us, Vera Wang and Express among its portfolio. "If you've been using AI to help you with that final paper at school, we're probably going to want to know how you're going to use AI to help us with the next contract negotiation. So I'm all in favor of it." But the shift also highlights how necessary it is for students to be graduating with skills in AI that go beyond using it to write an email or replace a Google search. "If a kid comes out of school now and is like the expert in Claude and OpenAI ... and is able to then say to even, like, an accounting team, 'Hey, look, I can come in and I can do the job of three people versus you hiring them, because I can use AI,' OK, that person will still get a job," said Omair Tariq, the founder and CEO of startup Cart.com, which provides logistics, fulfillment and other services for retailers such as Adidas, Guess and Eddie Bauer, and has about 1,400 employees. If they can't, Tariq said, he's not interested in hiring them. "When you're in college, all you know is what's in your curriculum. The curriculum is available in a book or online. It's all tangible, it's all ones and zeros. It's all the sh-- that AI can read in 30 seconds that you took four and a half years to read," said Tariq. "So tell me again what you can do that AI can't do, because you don't have any real-world experience." Already, college campuses are feeling the pressure to change their curriculums and even their approach to higher education to adjust to an AI future. "For graduates to compete effectively, they're going to need to know how to do at age 22 what they used to do at age 27," said Matt Sigelman, the president of the Burning Glass Institute, a think tank that studies the future of work. "They're going to need to be able to start their careers in the middle and not the beginning." How quickly colleges can adjust could determine how much AI will disrupt the careers of graduates in the future. Tobias Sytsma, an economist at the think tank Rand who studies AI and the future of work, said recent graduates, those paying off college loans and students getting ready to enter college will likely face the most issues during this transition period. If the data continues to show an impact on early career workers, they could become victims of economic "scarring," leading to unemployment, underemployment and lower incomes throughout their lifetimes. If there's a major disruption to the middle class pipeline -- the route young adults take from college to higher-paying jobs -- that could have an enormous impact on the economy. Consumption could shrink, housing demand could fall and existing inequality issues could grow. "The size of that transition cohort is important. If it takes 20 years and ... basically everyone that was thinking about going to college or just finished college is really struggling, then that's a huge chunk of the future workforce that's going through this scarring process," said Sytsma. "If the transition is really quick and we're able to kind of rapidly adjust the institution of higher learning so that we maintain value, then maybe the scarring cohort is a little bit smaller and the aggregate effects are a little bit smaller. But at this point, I think it's pretty hard to tell."