Artificial intelligence is hitting some parts of the job market, the Irish government shared in a report on Wednesday, with a particularly large impact on young workers.
According to the Irish Department of Finance’s Economic Insights paper, Irish sectors with the highest concentration of jobs at risk from AI integration saw “significantly weaker employment growth than sectors with lower relative exposure” over the past two years. The most at-risk sectors were financial services and information and communication technologies, both of which saw only around 4% jobs growth between 2023 and 2025, while the low-risk sectors saw more than 6% growth.
Employment growth was especially worse for young workers. Although the overall employment in these high-risk sectors was lower compared to other categories, it still continued to grow. But for young workers aged 15-29 in high-risk sectors, job growth actually declined by 1 percent.
In the tech sector specifically, employment among 15-29 year olds fell by more than 20%, while employment for 30-59 year olds grew by 12%. Sectors with less exposure to AI did not show a similar difference between young and older workers; in fact, employment growth for younger workers outpaced older workers in some low-risk categories.
The findings are “consistent with international evidence which suggests that AI adoption is having its most pronounced impact on entry-level and junior employees in highly digitalised sectors,” the report said.
The first major evidence pointing towards this trend came in August 2025 in the form of a Stanford study. The researchers found that workers between 22 and 25 years old in the most AI-exposed jobs experienced a 13% relative decline in employment, while workers in less exposed fields or more experienced workers in the same fields enjoyed stable or growing trends.
AI has been deployed to varying degrees of success in many sectors, ranging from tech to medicine and corporate recruitment, even though the jury is still out on how much and how fast it can actually improve productivity.
But early-career workers could have jobs that are easier to automate, leading to a trend deemed troubling by experts.
Entry-level jobs help young workers train in their field, grow their resumes, and build the foundations of their careers and future economic security. When these routes are taken away, not only does this threaten the future of the workforce, but it also widens inequality as those with access to elite internships and networking get an upper hand.
“There is a real fear that I have that an entire cohort, those graduating during the early AI transition, may kind of be a lost generation,” Cornell associate professor John McCarthy told Gizmodo last year.
Still, many experts have voiced their belief that an impending AI-driven job market catastrophe is actually just a selling point for Silicon Valley, and a tool bosses wield against employees. Meanwhile, the companies that have laid off employees and blamed AI have been accused of using the technology as a scapegoat.
But the Irish report finds that “AI-related labour market adjustments have occurred mainly through changes in hiring and entry, rather than through the displacement of existing workers.”
Many companies have been vocal about this hiring slowdown. The CEOs of both Shopify and Duolingo have installed company-wide “AI-first, new human worker second” mandates, while PwC’s global chairman said the company had scrapped previous plans to hire 100,000 people by 2026, because “now we have artificial intelligence.”
“Younger workers are more likely to be concentrated in entry-level or junior roles where tasks may be more easily automated,” the report concluded. “In addition, it is likely that it is easier for firms to manage headcount by slowing or pausing new recruitment, rather than making existing staff redundant, given the potential costs associated with redundancies.”
It’s also likely that the trend is a combination of both cyclical graduate recruitment factors and the impact of AI, the report said, rather than being solely driven by the latter.
Stateside, the young graduate job market is also going through its own trials and tribulations, but American officials have been more hesitant to blame AI than their Irish counterparts. The most overt statement on the matter was in September, when Fed Chair Jerome Powell said in a press briefing that although there is still great uncertainty over the link between AI and unemployment, he believed that AI is “probably a factor,” especially when it comes to the massive unemployment rates faced by young graduates.
But Ireland could be a unique early test case of AI’s impact on the job market. Employment in high-risk sectors like tech and financial services makes up a big portion of the Irish economy, the report said, with roughly 63% of the job market exposed to AI. The report also found that the share of job postings mentioning AI almost doubled since 2024, and is currently around three times the share of mentions in the U.S.
“This rapid pace of growth, combined with the scale of AI-related skills demand, suggests that Ireland’s labour market is at the global frontier of AI adoption, and as such is likely to be among the first countries to face more widespread AI-driven labour market disruption,” the report says.
