Hybrid AI is making senior workers faster and juniors unemployed

Multiple companies are spending a lot of time testing in agentic but then not going into production as the tech is not quite there, so in the coming months we’ll see companies satisfied with using the elements of agentic that work, and then using AI to speed up workflows, but still using humans to guide the automation. 

One of the biggest shifts we will see however, even bigger than the adoption of hybrid AI, is attitudinal.

The most significant barrier that is going to face us all, and not just in 2026 but for at least the next five years, is a huge employment gap.  Junior people are just not getting entry level jobs, as senior employees are using AI to become quicker and faster, so software engineer and developer graduates are just not getting the roles they need to start their careers. 

This makes economic sense, but it is going to cause a catastrophic gap in three years’ time when there is going to be no-one at that mid-level to promote.

The sort of consultancies in which junior developers cut their teeth are simply not hiring any more.  When I began my career, software engineers would learn on the job, and that is no longer an option.

As a result, juniors need to improvise - start their own projects, open themselves up to collaboration or do anything just to highlight their coding skills in a real life environment, anything that sets them apart from the 10,000 other graduates.

European universities are covering the basics in developer and computer science degrees when in actual fact they should be preparing our young graduates for the market that is out there, and that market involves AI. First assignment of the first year?  That should be 100% manual, but for the next two years, use AI, just as you would in real life.

When we have recent graduates coming to ZenRows for a practical test they ask if it is OK to use CoPilot, an AI coding tool – we say naturally, we want to see real life coding, not theoretical.

We are just not preparing software engineers for the real world and the education system should invest in links and placements with business. 

When you think that huge shifts happen in computing every six months and yet computer science curricula only change every three years, it’s evident that the education sector needs funds to catch up and side projects in AI are essential to fill the looming skills gap.

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Ander Rodriguez is co-founder and CTO of ZenRows, a data extraction company.

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