NEW YORK – Current CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Antonio Neri rose from call center agent at the company to chief executive officer. Doug McMillon, Walmart CEO, started off with a summer gig helping to unload trucks. It’s a similar story for GM CEO Mary Barra, who began on the assembly line at the automaker as an 18-year old. Those are the kinds of career ladder success arcs that have inspired workers, and Hollywood, but as AI is set to replace many entry-level jobs, it may also write that corporate character out of the plot.

The rise of AI has coincided with considerable organizational flattening, especially among middle management ranks. At the same time, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is among those who forecast 50% of entry-level jobs may be wiped out by AI as the technology improves, including being able to work eight-hour shifts without a break.

All the uncertainty in the corporate org chart introduced by AI — occurring at a time when college graduates are struggling to find roles — raises the question of whether the career ladder is about to be broken, and the current generation of corporate leaders’ tales of ascent that have always made up an important part of the corporate American ethos set to become a thing of the past.

If the notion of going from the bottom to the top has always been more the exception than the rule, it has helped pump the heart of America’s corporations. In the least, removing the first rung on the ladder raises important questions about the transfer of institutional knowledge and upward advancement in organizations.

Looking at data between 2019 and 2024 for the biggest public tech firms and maturing venture-capital funded startups, venture capital firm SignalFire found in a study there was a 50% decline in new role starts by people with less than one year of post-graduate work experience: “Hiring is intrinsically volatile year on year, but 50% is an accurate representation of the hiring delta for this experience category over the considered timespan,” said Asher Bantock, head of research at SignalFire.

The data ranged across core business functions — sales, marketing, engineering, recruiting/HR, operations, design, finance and legal — with the 50% decline consistent across the board.

But Heather Doshay, partner at SignalFire, says the data should not lead job seekers to lose hope. “The loss of clear entry points doesn’t just shrink opportunities for new grads — it reshapes how organizations grow talent from within,” she said.

If, as Amodei told CNBC earlier this year, “At some point, we are going to get to AI systems that are better than almost all humans at almost all tasks,” the critical question for workers is how the idea of an entry-level job can evolve as AI continues to.

Flatter organizations seem certain. “The ladder isn’t broken — it’s just being replaced with something that looks a lot flatter,” Doshay said. In her view, the classic notion of a CEO rising from the mailroom is a perfect example since at many company’s it’s been a long time since anyone worked in an actual mailroom. “The bottom rung is disappearing,” she said, “but that has the potential to uplevel everyone.”

Read more at CNBC