IBM looks beyond short-term AI gains, tripling entry-level hiring

In a time when companies are reducing headcounts in favor of adopting AI tools, IBM is doing something completely different: The tech giant is tripling its entry level hiring, not easing up on it or indiscriminately slashing jobs.

This initiative, according to SVP and chief human resources officer Nickle LaMoreaux, not only includes hiring software developers, who are considered by some to be obsolete, outperformed by advancing AI coding tools, but adding juniors in other roles that AI could capably handle, such as those in HR and in employee and customer support roles.

“The companies three to five years from now that are going to be the most successful are those companies that doubled down on entry level hiring in this environment,” LaMoreaux said at a recent conference. “Not [the companies] that held the status quo or reduced it.”

Rewriting every job

Ultimately, in this AI age, enterprises must “rewrite every job,” LaMoreaux noted. It’s true, entry level jobs that existed just two or three years ago can now be handled by AI, she acknowledged, but those can evolve.

For example, in 2024, IBM developers would have spent 34 hours a week coding, she said. Now, in 2026, they’re still coding, but with AI assistance. They may continue to do testing, but they’re also spending more time talking to marketing teams and consulting with and getting feedback from clients to accelerate “milestone roadmaps,” LaMoreaux said. They’re also building new products and accelerating existing ones, not just maintaining them.

Secondly, LaMoreaux sees a repositioning of HR roles. Rather than performing the old world role of merely handing inquiries, now they are working alongside AI and getting real-time feedback on its performance throughout the organization, enabling them to find and fix problems they never knew existed.

IBM is looking beyond initial gains

 

IBM is making a “smart long-term bet here,” noted Wyatt Mayham of Northwest AI Consulting. Across his company’s client base, he’s seen firsthand that companies that treat AI as a replacement for people end up with “brittle operations and a hollowed-out talent pipeline.” The companies getting the best results are using AI to accelerate their employees’ work, not to eliminate them.

The real risk of cutting entry-level hiring isn’t what happens in the next quarter or two, he noted, it’s what happens five years from now when enterprises don’t have anyone ready to step into senior roles. “IBM clearly understands that,” said Mayham.

In fact, he noted, junior developers bring a lot of value in this AI era: Notably, fresh eyes and a willingness to ask questions. When a senior dev is given an AI coding tool, most likely they’ll use it to do what they’ve always done, just more quickly.

Junior developers, by contrast, haven’t developed those habits yet. They’re more likely to ask “why are we doing it this way at all?”, which is exactly what enterprise teams need to be doing right now, said Mayham. Further, someone (or several someones) in an organization must learn how to manage AI-assisted workflows, validate outputs, and identify when AI is confidently wrong.

“That’s a new skill set, and entry-level hires who grow up with these tools will develop an intuition for it that you can’t just bolt onto a 20-year veteran’s workflow,” said Mayham.

Ultimately, senior and junior developers can work off each others’ strengths in what he called a “multiplier dynamic.” That is, senior developers bring domain knowledge, architectural judgment, and the ability to spot when an AI-generated tool looks right but could fall apart at scale. Junior developers, for their part, bring facility with AI tools, adaptability, and the energy to experiment with new approaches.

“Pair them together and you get quality and velocity,” said Mayham. Instead of the old mentorship model of ‘watch me do it, then you try,’ the new model is more collaborative. For instance, a junior developer may generate five possible solutions with AI in the time it used to take them to write just one, and the senior developer’s job shifts toward evaluation, pattern recognition, and teaching younger developers how to exercise judgment.

“Both sides get better at what they do,” Mayham noted.

The productivity story is played out

By now, enterprises are well aware of the benefits and capabilities of AI tools: Time saving, automated processing, information available at users’ fingertips. But LaMoreaux says it’s time to move beyond that narrative.

“It’s amazing, but I think that the productivity story has probably played out,” she contended. Instead, leaders should start thinking about AI as a growth driver, not just throughout the organization, but for individual employees. “What skills are they picking up that are more enduring as you go forward?”

One critical question is: “Where will middle managers come from four or five years from now?” The traditional route is to hire from competitors, LaMoreaux pointed out, but when it comes down to it, they don’t know corporate culture, and there are costs in getting them up to speed.

Ultimately, “[hiring entry level employees] is an investment for the future,” she said.