Stripe’s head of data and AI said she’s bringing in more new graduates than ever — but she worries about how they’ll grow once they arrive.
Emily Glassberg Sands said on a live taping of “Forward Future” published on Thursday that she largely taps recent Ph.D. holders.
“They have the cutting-edge skills and they come in with fresh ideas,” she said. “They know how to think and they know how to use the latest tools.”
At the same time, Glassberg Sands said she’s concerned about how new hires will gain the experience they need to advance in their careers.
“I’m most worried about mentorship development,” she said. “It would be unfortunate if we woke up in 10 years with no pipeline.”
Her comments come as AI tools automate many specialized tasks handled by junior employees. Glassberg Sands said that the shift is changing what companies value in workers.
“Increasingly, people are going to be rewarded for being able to think and ask the right questions and work with others, more so than they’re rewarded for kind of the hard skills they have,” she said.
“The part I’m sweating is, what does entry level look like?” she added.
Glassberg Sands and Stripe did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
AI coming for entry-level workers?
Glassberg Sands’ comments come amid a wider debate over whether AI is endangering entry-level jobs.
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Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said last month that AI is probably a factor affecting the job market for recent college graduates, but it is “hard to say how big it is.”
“It may be that companies or other institutions that have been hiring younger people right out of college are able to use AI more than they had in the past,” he said. “That may be part of the story. It’s also part of the story, though, that job creation more broadly has slowed down.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said this summer that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs within the next one to five years.
But others have pushed back on that dire outlook.
McKinsey said last month that AI isn’t killing entry-level jobs. In fact, the firm is planning to hire more junior workers.
Winston Weinberg, CEO of legal AI startup Harvey, told Business Insider last month that he’s betting big on junior lawyers — even as AI takes over much of the work once reserved for them. He said he’s “100%” committed to hiring and training young lawyers.
