“After two years of replacing junior roles with AI tooling, IBM concluded the strategy hollowed out its talent pipeline.”
IBM ran the experiment every CEO is currently running. Cut the entry-level hires, replace them with AI-augmented seniors, watch the productivity numbers go up. The numbers did go up. Then they discovered they had nobody to promote into the senior roles five years from now and the senior people they kept were doing junior work because the AI tools cannot do it well enough. The whole industry is about to relearn the lesson IBM is paying to learn first.