As Corporate America scrambles to fill artificial intelligence jobs, people looking to get their foot in the door of the industry are getting left behind.

New research, shared first with CNN, finds that employment opportunities in the hottest part of the economy are often reserved for those with deep experience, not beginners.

The vast majority – 71% – of AI-related job postings by S&P 500 companies on LinkedIn, like those for data analysts or machine learning engineers, are for senior-level positions, according to the AI-Driven Enterprise (AIDE) Institute, a research organization tracking how companies are deploying the technology.

Just 13% of these AI-related postings are for junior positions, while 16% are considered middle-tier, researchers found after combing through more than 161,000 job postings made in January by major corporations.

The findings underscore the challenge facing younger Americans hunting for jobs in the booming AI field. Big businesses are in bidding wars to land the same experienced pool of talent, raising questions about how they can attract the next generation of talent.

Young jobseekers are already struggling in this job market, as they face concerns about AI replacing human workers. In the past year, companies have slashed headcounts and integrated AI more deeply into their operations.

“The anxiety has been about AI replacing humans. What the data actually shows is a narrowing labor market where the AI opportunity is real, but reserved for those already at the top,” Paul Cheek, CEO of the AIDE Institute and a senior lecturer at MIT, said in the report. “The classic on-ramp into a high-growth field is narrow.”

Cheek explained that companies want senior-level talent to help guide them through the fast-moving AI boom.

“Most of this is very new and changing rapidly. They want people looking at it who are rooted in experience,” he said.

AIDE Institute researchers combed through 161,645 job postings advertised on LinkedIn by S&P 500 companies, and classified them by AI relevance and seniority. Roles were considered AI-related if they contained one of 50 predefined roles, including data analyst, machine learning scientist, AI engineer, head of AI or VP of AI, or if the job description contained one of 125 AI-related terms.

They found 8,140 AI-related job postings, which were “overwhelmingly senior, leaving few openings for beginners.”

“The AI hiring boom is real – but built for experts,” the AIDE report concluded.

However, there is a risk that Corporate America’s focus on experience is short-sighted. If young talent opts to find work elsewhere, such as at fast-growing AI startups trying to steal market share, that could pose longer-term threats to more established corporations.

“CEOs need to prioritize AI talent at every level of the organization,” Cheek said. “They need to not just think about senior-level people, but the middle and junior roles they are grooming for the future.”

The struggle to break into the AI industry reflects the misfortunes of younger workers across the economy.

The unemployment rate for recent college graduates stood at 5.6% as of March, well above the overall unemployment rate of 4.2% that month, according to the latest research from the New York Fed.

The jobless rate for recent college graduates and the overall workforce has widened in recent years, compared with immediately before and after Covid-19, when they were closely linked.

A recent study from Stanford University found that employment for younger workers has been “stagnant” since late 2022, when OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT set the stage for today’s AI gold rush.

In the occupations most exposed to AI, young workers suffered a 6% decline in employment between late 2022 and September 2025, compared with a 6% to 9% increase for older workers.

The Stanford researchers said the results suggest that shrinking employment in AI-exposed jobs is driving the broader struggles of younger workers to get hired.

Entry-level jobs are being ‘structurally removed’

All of this is fueling anxiety among workers about the rise of AI.

“The junior level isn’t just shrinking – it’s being structurally removed,” said Hiro, which is the pen name used by a mid-level professional services worker who writes about the future of work on Medium, and who agreed to speak anonymously told CNN.

Hiro said the problem is that the high-frequency, low-stakes work that used to go to junior people – first drafts, routine processing – is the same work that caters best to AI.

As junior tasks are increasingly given to AI, “what’s left is senior oversight of AI output. That means you now need experience to get in – but the traditional path to getting that experience no longer exists,” Hiro said.

Getting experience outside of work might mean taking training courses aimed at upskilling. Hiro said he paid $4,000 for training – only to find the new skills had a shelf life of eight months before they were made obsolete by the next-generation of AI models.

“‘Keep upskilling’ stops becoming career advice and becomes a treadmill that bills you to stay on it,” he said.

Nela Richardson, chief economist at payroll giant ADP, told CNN that AI isn’t just changing the number of jobs created and destroyed — it’s reshaping workers’ tasks and job responsibilities.

ADP is working with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab to unbundle job responsibilities and use payroll data to assign an economic value to specific job tasks.

Those findings, which are expected to be made public, could help employers transition employees into work that’s higher value and help jobseekers determine education and training paths, Richardson said.

The hope is that these efforts could help ease anxiety over how AI is impacting entry-level workers.

“The task of the employer is not to throw away the career ladder for these young people just because it’s missing the first rung,” Richardson said. “The task at hand is to give young people a boost to that second rung of more complex tasks and responsibilities that are higher value and what the firms are hiring for… The entry point has just shifted upward.”

CNN’s Alicia Wallace and David Goldman contributed to this report.