Nearly a Quarter of Business Leaders Have Stopped Hiring Entry-Level Workers Because of AI

Nearly a quarter of chief HR officers (CHROs) say at least one business leader in their organisation has stopped hiring for entry-level roles because of AI. The 22% figure comes from Gartner's 4Q25 survey of 110 HR leaders, published 27 July, and it sits inside a sharper contrast: 95% of organisations have rolled out some form of AI in the past year, but only one in five say they have realised significant or transformational value from it.

"This is a short-term efficiency play that creates significant workforce challenges down the road," said Kaelyn Lowmaster, a Director Analyst in Gartner's HR practice. The same survey finds that the AI work most organisations have actually deployed targets the less complex tasks that entry-level workers traditionally handled. That is the exact slice of work that built the on-the-job learning pipeline.

Entry-level hiring is where organisations historically turn new graduates and early-career hires into institutional knowledge, process fluency, and the relationships that make later work possible. Pull that rung out and the next five-to-ten years of internal promotions thin out at the bottom. The experienced talent those companies then try to buy back at a premium on the open market is the same talent they stopped training. The premium shows up in this quarter's budget. The thinner internal pool shows up two or three hiring cycles later, when the experienced cohort stops being replenished and the external market catches up to the same shortage.

Gartner frames the choice explicitly. The survey names three CHRO-priority moves: identify the tasks that can safely shift to early-career roles, redefine entry-level roles for higher-value work rather than lower-complexity work, and map AI's impact on critical value streams before cutting headcount in them. One path assumes AI can absorb the work and the people can be cut. The other assumes the work can be reshaped and the people can be trained into it.

"Many of the tasks early-career talent can safely take on are not being performed by AI today, and are unlikely to be anytime soon," said Annika Jessen, also a Director Analyst in the HR practice. Jessen's framing is the constructive pivot the survey itself is offering: companies do not have to choose between AI productivity and a junior pipeline. They have to choose which tasks they hand to the model and which they hand to the people they are still hiring.

The 22% figure is small-sample CHRO-reported data. It captures what 110 HR leaders say they are observing inside their own organisations, not a market-wide hiring tally. Gartner is a commercial vendor with a stake in shaping how HR leaders respond. The wider read on US entry-level hiring, from Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLTS data, Indeed Hiring Lab, and LinkedIn's Workforce Report, will land separately and may either reinforce or soften the 22% signal.

What to watch next: whether the organisations reporting entry-level freezes also report external experienced-hire cost spikes in the next two budget cycles, and whether the second-half 2026 CHRO surveys show Gartner's three moves being adopted or shelved. The freeze is a decision. The bill is a delayed line item.