Anthropic CEO thinks half of entry-level roles will be eliminated by 2030: How can HR turn this fear into possibility?

Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI company Anthropic, made headlines when he declared that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs within the next five years.

He told Axios that this could cause unemployment to spike as high as 20%.

“We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,” Amodei said.

“You can’t just step in front of the train and stop it,” added Amodei.

“The only move that’s going to work is steering the train—steer it 10 degrees in a different direction from where it was going.

“That can be done. That’s possible, but we have to do it now.”

Amodei is not alone in his viewpoint. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has also stated that AI is beginning to act like junior-level employees.

At the 2025 Snowflake Summit, Altman said: “You hear people that talk about their job now is to assign work to a bunch of agents, look at the quality, figure out how it fits together, give feedback, and it sounds a lot like how they work with a team of still relatively junior employees.”

There’s no avoiding that these statements are worrisome for employers and workers alike. They also pose concern for society and economies as a whole.

As a result, UNLEASH was keen to dig into the role of HR leaders – how should they respond to the potential elimination of entry-level jobs?

We spoke to a range of HR experts – vendors, practitioners and analysts – to find out the answers.

Why HR needs to be the one ‘steering the train’ on AI at work

Anthropic’s Amodei talked about the need to steer the train, and the experts UNLEASH spoke to are clear that HR needs to be the conductor of this train for organizations.

For Sultan Saidov, CEO & Co-Founder at Beamery, shares that the warning from Amodei “is a wake-up call, but not a prophecy”.

“HR leaders are uniquely positioned to help ‘steer the train’ now before disruption becomes displacement”.

Bansk Beauty’s VP of People & Talent, Lacey Zampardo, agrees, and tells UNLEASH that HR leaders need to respond with “both urgency and optimism”.

“Acknowledge the reality that AI will evolve how we work, but make it clear that you are under no hallucination that it will replace the human spark.”

The key for HR is to “turn this fear into possibility”, says Zampardo.

“Fear is often driven by uncertainty. HR’s jobs now is to replace uncertainty with transparency,” continues Saidov.

“Most people don’t fear change – they fear being left behind.”

Zampardo continues that HR needs to “lead this shift, not wait for it”. “As HR leaders, our role is to ensure that as work evolves, opportunity expands with it”.

For Jess Von Bank, Global leader, HR Digital Transformation & Technology Advisory at Mercer, is clear that the “real story isn’t about prediction – it’s the vacuum of leadership around it”.

“That’s the vacuum HR can help fill”; “this is a perfect opportunity for HR to ask all the ways work can and should be done”.

Skills, tasks and jobs in the AI future of work

It is clear that AI is going to fundamentally change the world of work, and the entry level workers are clearly at the forefront that disruption.

“The data shows that generative AI is capable of doing many of the tasks that entry-level workers would do in the past,” shares Ben Eubanks, Chief Research Officer, Lighthouse Research & Advisory.

“The answer to not losing those jobs is to rethink what entry-level work is” – “that’s not a small challenge”.

“These jobs need to shift from repetitive tasks to roles where new hires build judgement, enhance their problem-solving skills, and build their adaptability early, rathe than being siloed into replaceable functions,” continues Lumenalta’s Director of Culture, Natalie Ta.

Beamery’s Saidov adds: “AI doesn’t eliminate job; it eliminates tasks”; it is on HR teams to figure out what tasks “can be automated, augmented, or reassigned”.

“With visibility into the actual work being done, HR can identify transferrable skills, offer targeted upskilling, and create clear internal mobility pathways” for not just entry-level roles, but all levels in organizations.

Kathi Enderes, SVP of Research at The Josh Bersin Company, comes at the conversation from a different angle.

She’s clear that right now “AI can do specific tasks of entry-level jobs, but not entire jobs”.

These entry-level workers have a lot to offer companies in terms of skills – they actually have “a much better grasp of how to use AI because it has become second nature for them”.

“They can reverse-mentor experienced leaders in their company who know more about the business, but often miss the imagination to incorporate AI effectively into workflows”.

“We in HR can redesign entry-level jobs creatively to leverage the power of early career employees for the organization” – forward thinking organizations are already doing this; “rather than reducing focus on early career opportunities, they double down on more interesting, meaningful work, allowing entry level workers to become ‘superworkers’” empowered by AI.

Ultimately, “AI is challenging us to evolve” in the words of Ta.

Now is HR’s “moment to shape workplaces that work for business and for people”, states Zampardo from Bansk Beauty.

“HR teams can build a better track: one that saves jobs and helps their colleagues prepare for the future,” Saidov adds.

Von Bank from Mercer concludes: “The promise and benefit of AI can be more evenly distributed if HR assumes the mantle of responsibility for asking what kind of labor we want to share, what kind of workforce the business needs, and how it will leverage AI to create that future.”