Influencer warns AI is shutting young people out of work

Influencer and law student Simona Coppola says artificial intelligence is making it harder for young people to enter the workforce. More than 1,000 students and young workers shared their concerns with her in two days, SRF reported.

Coppola, 25, asked her online community about AI and their career prospects for SRF’s Club programme. Many said they were applying for jobs but receiving rejections despite their degrees. “It is demotivating when you are not needed,” Coppola said.

Some respondents fear less that AI will take a job they already have than that it will make it harder or impossible to get one. A student of business psychology said they could barely find part-time marketing work despite having professional experience. As AI becomes more common at work, the student felt their skills were valued less than those of ChatGPT and similar tools.

AI is also changing recruitment, Coppola said: applicants use AI to improve their applications, then an AI system reviews them and sends a rejection generated by AI. One social work student said they deliberately included a few awkward sentences in an application so it would not sound machine-written, despite writing well having once been one of their greatest strengths.

According to an analysis by jobs.ch, the share of advertised entry-level positions in 2025 was 32 per cent below the average for 2019 to 2022. The analysis compared the period before the AI boom, from 2019 to 2022, with 2023 to 2025. It is not possible to say clearly whether AI alone caused the decline.

Some young workers said AI was taking on tasks that had previously helped newcomers learn. A junior consultant in Coppola’s community said companies could use AI to do without interns and other junior staff, warning that this could leave them short of experienced specialists in the long term. “Every partner was once a junior,” Coppola said. She added that experience is needed to check AI’s results.

A person completing a rotational internship at a bank said AI was used in human resources, finance and communications. It saved time on tasks people did not enjoy, but could also remove learning opportunities for people starting their careers.

Coppola, who has more than 70,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok, said she was taking courses to keep up with AI’s rapid development but still felt a step behind. “We are doing our best to meet expectations,” she said. “But we also need a chance to show what we can do.”