The bench can be the same size and still form nobody.

The argument about AI and early-career work almost always arrives as a headcount. Graduate intake down a percentage. Entry-level postings falling. A hiring freeze in the function that used to run an intake every autumn. It is the natural number to reach for. Headcount is the one figure about junior staff that every institution already computes, and it reaches a board pack without anyone having to commission anything.

It is also weak evidence, and the weakness shows as soon as you ask what it is being compared with. The most-quoted British figure is Adzuna’s count of entry-level job postings, which fell sharply. Over the identical window, total UK vacancies fell further still.¹ Entry-level postings fell less than the market they sit in. Read against its own denominator, the headline describes a hiring recession that entry-level came through slightly better than average.

The most-cited American figure carries a different problem. The roughly 16 per cent relative employment decline among 22-to-25-year-olds in the most AI-exposed occupations comes from a working paper that has never been published. Several of the critiques answering it have been.²

A board that has read one side of this would be surprised by the other. Serious research groups have run the same question and found no effect at all. One of them found the opposite of what everyone assumes: unemployment rising faster in the occupations least exposed to AI.³

The headcount question will stay contested for years. That is thin ground for a board that has to decide something this year. There is also a reason it may never settle into anything a board can use, and it sits in the theory.

Enrique Ide has modelled how a trade passes its knowledge from one generation of practitioners to the next.⁴ Automate the tasks by which a novice used to sit beside the most productive experts, and the novice is moved: same job title, same seat count, further from the practice that was worth absorbing. Best-practice diffusion slows. Growth and welfare fall even where entry-level employment holds perfectly steady. Ide names investment banking and urological surgery as the illustrative trades.

The bench can be the same size and still form nobody.

The headcount will show none of that, because the headcount is holding. That is why arguing from headcount is a weak move even in the cases where its numbers turn out to be right.

The question of what a junior actually does in a day has better-designed evidence behind it, because it can be tested by taking the tool away. Bastani and colleagues put about a thousand high-school mathematics students through a randomised design with a genuine withdrawal arm.⁵ With access, a standard chatbot tutor lifted performance by 48 per cent, and a version built with learning safeguards lifted it by 127 per cent. Then access was removed. The unguarded group scored 17 per cent worse than students who had never had the tool at all. The safeguarded group did not.

Same model, same task, same students. What separated the group left worse off from the group left intact was how the tool had been built into the work. That turns the subject into something a board can specify: a deployment design, with conditions, and someone who owns them.

The professional version of the same test exists. Budzyń and colleagues examined adenoma detection on standard colonoscopies, the ones performed without AI assistance, across four Polish centres, before and after AI was introduced in those centres. Detection fell six points.⁶ The study is retrospective, covers a three-month window, and has no concurrent control.

A larger trial points the other way on its own question. Dominitz and colleagues found detection rising where AI was available, and their own conclusion states that endoscopist deskilling “remains undetermined”.⁷ The two studies measure different things. Dominitz measures detection across all colonoscopies once the tool was there, which is the direct effect of having it. Budzyń measures detection on the colonoscopies done without it, which is the carry-over. Both belong in the pack.

None of this settles into a number anyone can put on a register this quarter. It moves the question, which is enough for now. Headcount arrives in the pack whether or not it was asked for. The content question has to be asked, and it costs very little: take one entry-level role, take a week of its actual work, and sort the tasks by whether the person doing them found out afterwards which parts were wrong, and why.

A junior who drafts a credit memo and learns within the week which lines were wrong is being formed by the work. A junior whose drafts go into the system and come back approved is producing it. That sort can be run this month, from records the institution already keeps, and it moves independently of headcount, which is the reason to run it. It can also come back clean. If the week’s work is coming back marked, that is good news, and it is worth having on the record while it is still true.