Artificial intelligence has become one of the biggest sources of anxiety for workers entering the job market.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 (1), 41% of employers plan to reduce their workforce by 2030 as AI automates certain tasks. Meanwhile, venture firm SignalFire reported (2) that Big Tech companies hired fewer recent graduates in 2024 than they did before the pandemic, suggesting entry-level opportunities may already be shrinking.
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Even so, not everyone sees AI as a threat.
Jiaona Zhang, chief product officer at AI timekeeping company Laurel and an adjunct lecturer at Stanford University, believes AI is creating an entirely new career path that could become one of the most valuable jobs for young professionals. She calls it the “AI workflows” role.
“I think every company should be hiring for this,” Zhang told Business Insider (3). “That’s the role I’d really push every single new grad to be going into.”
What is an “AI workflows” role?
According to Zhang, the role involves finding areas inside a company that can be improved with AI, then building or implementing systems that make those improvements real.
That could mean helping a sales team automate cold emails, setting up AI agents to prepare demo calls or creating internal tools that save employees hours of administrative work.
“If you could start proving to everyone in the world that you’ve saved a group of people this much time and you created this much leverage, that is the way to scream your worth to every employer out there,” Zhang told Business Insider.
At Laurel, Zhang said a recent graduate hired into this kind of position built an AI agent that acts like a personal chief of staff for salespeople. The employee became “the most celebrated person” at the company, she said, and Laurel has since expanded its AI Ops team.
The idea is already showing up elsewhere. Box recently advertised an “AI business automation engineer” role with a salary range of $146,500 to $183,000. CEO Aaron Levie described (4) it as similar to a forward-deployed engineer for internal business functions and said he expects most companies to have versions of the role going forward.
Box did not respond to Moneywise’s request for comment on incorporating AI into the workforce.
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Is this really the next big entry-level job?
Zhang believes AI workflows could become a common entry point for new graduates, but the role is still in its infancy.
A search of major job boards shows relatively few openings using that exact title. However, many companies are hiring for similar positions under names such as AI automation engineer, AI operations specialist, AI transformation analyst and AI enablement manager.
And although companies are pouring money into artificial intelligence, many are still struggling to figure out how to use it effectively. McKinsey’s latest State of AI survey (5) found that organizations are increasingly deploying generative AI tools, yet many are still working to capture measurable business value from them.
Given this, employers are likely to look for candidates who can demonstrate practical experience using AI tools to solve business problems. That could mean learning platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Zapier or Salesforce’s AI tools, then using them to automate real-world tasks.
In other words, the position may be less about mastering artificial intelligence itself and more about proving that you can save people time and money. The workers who thrive may not be those competing against AI systems, but those helping employers figure out how to use them.
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Article Sources
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World Economic Forum (1); Signal Fire (2); Business Insider (3); X (4); McKinsey & Company (5)
This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: A Stanford lecturer says ‘every company should be hiring’ a rare new AI role, and ‘every single new grad’ should want it
This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.
