Good morning. Companies are rushing to replace entry-level workers with artificial intelligence – more on that below, along with a G7 warning and the latest on the Israel-Iran conflict. But first:

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• Canada announces $4.3-billion in new aid for Ukraine and more sanctions on Russia’s “shadow fleet”
• The short deadline for Canada-U.S. talks helps to ‘concentrate the mind,’ Carney says

The chief executive officer of Anthropic – one of OpenAI’s main rivals – doesn’t feel great about all the jobs their chatbots will gobble up. In an interview last month with Axios, Dario Amodei said tech leaders and politicians need to stop “sugar-coating” the economic upheaval ahead. He’s even prepared to put a number on the carnage: Generative AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.

It’s not hard to spot early signs of that disruption. The unemployment rate for recent U.S. college grads is closing in on 6 per cent. For young Canadians with a post-secondary degree, the labour market is even tougher. Their unemployment rate averaged 11.2 per cent in the first quarter of 2025 – the worst start to the year in two decades, excluding 2021. Donald Trump’s trade war hasn’t helped matters, but big Canadian firms such as Shopify and Open Text say their plans to scale back junior hires are part of a sweeping new AI-first approach. And yesterday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that AI will reduce the company’s workforce in the next few years, as it rolls out generative tools for routine tasks.

“Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI,” Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke laid out in a memo to employees. He believes that leaning on AI agents “can lead to really fun discussions and projects.” Aneesh Raman, a top executive at LinkedIn, sees it another way. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Raman warned that AI is breaking “the bottom rung of the career ladder.”

Shrinking opportunities

It’s already starting to look bleak out there. Two years ago, British telecom giant BT said it would axe up to 55,000 jobs by 2030 in order to become a “leaner business.” This week, however, CEO Allison Kirkby told the Financial Times that advances in AI presented “an opportunity for BT to become even smaller.” Consulting firm McKinsey is now using its own generative AI platform, Lilli, to draft proposals and make Powerpoint slides – work that used to be handled by junior employees. The company has lost more than 5,000 staff since 2023, the same year Lilli was launched.

“Entry-level hiring is collapsing,” insists the 2025 State of Talent Report from SignalFire, a VC firm that tracks the job movements of 650 million people and 80 million companies on LinkedIn. (You won’t be surprised that this tracking is done by AI.) The report found that the share of new graduates landing gigs at the seven largest tech firms – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Tesla – has plunged by more than half in the past three years. Asher Bantock, SignalFire’s head of research, said there’s “convincing evidence” that AI adoption is a major factor in the decline.

And Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has more bad news: He suspects many mid-career jobs will be rendered obsolete, as well. “Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer,” he told Joe Rogan. Soon after their January podcast – which was first picked up by the digital outlet Business Insider – Zuckerberg said he would cut 5 per cent of his employees. Then, last month, Business Insider laid off a full 20 per cent of its workforce. In a note to the staff remaining, CEO Barbara Peng said the newsroom would go “all-in on AI.”

Race to the middle

It’s worth asking what AI’s office overhaul means for the employees who manage to hold onto their jobs. Microsoft thinks it has the answer, and its latest Work Trend Index report lays out a new organization chart for “frontier firms,” or companies that rely on both human and AI workers. Microsoft – which just let go roughly 6,000 staff – sees this transformation unfolding in three stages. First, every employee will use an AI assistant to speed up their work. Then AI agents will join teams as “digital colleagues” to handle specific tasks. Finally, humans will become the “agent boss” of a fleet of AI bots running entire business operations. Microsoft says this will oblige every worker to “think like the CEO.”

Except companies already have CEOs – they’re the ones who keep touting AI’s productivity prowess as they lay off a bunch of their staff. These chief executives aren’t keen to relinquish their lucrative positions, and they don’t seem much troubled that AI’s stubborn tendency to make stuff up is only getting worse. (Why is it worse? Nobody knows. ) Since chatbots can’t be left to their own devices, humans could be stuck wading through garbled information, correcting basic errors and preventing their digital reports from resorting to blackmail, all while placating bosses hell-bent on cost efficiencies. In an AI-powered office, the future of work isn’t especially tempting. It’s middle management.

Donald Trump demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender” yesterday in a string of social-media posts, including one that called supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “an easy target” whom the U.S. wouldn’t kill “for now.” Israel has expanded its attacks on Iran over the past five days, but hasn’t yet convinced the Trump administration to drop bunker-busting bombs on the heavily protected Fordow nuclear site, south of Tehran. Read the latest on the Israel-Iran conflict here.