WeWork CEO John Santora's warning to senior leaders on Gen Z: “AI is not going to provide empathy and leadership and mentoring and all those skills that you need to lead a company for a company to be successful.”
If you graduated two or three years ago, the job market is probably nothing like you were told it would be. Landing an entry-level job in areas such as marketing, finance, and media is harder than ever. Large-scale layoffs, hiring freezes, and the creeping spread of AI tools have left a lot of young professionals asking themselves whether there’s even a seat at the table for them anymore.
There is genuine anxiety, but some people who run big companies say the doom-and-gloom may be getting ahead of the facts.
The entry-level crunch is real, but familiar
“There's no question that the entry-level hire is under pressure,” WeWork CEO John Santora said plainly at Fortune's recent Workplace Innovation Summit. Santora, who rose from building engineer to COO at Cushman & Wakefield in 47 years before taking the helm at WeWork in 2024, knows something about long careers shaped by disruption. His opinion? History repeats itself.
“We go through these cycles and have,” he said, “and every time there's a new technology change or an industry change.” His pitch is that AI, like every other technological change before it, will eventually force companies to grow, and grow means hiring.
That view isn’t going to soothe every nervous 25-year-old, but it’s worth sitting with.
Companies may be using AI as cover
Upwork President and CEO Hayden Brown summed it up more harshly: a lot of what’s being called “AI-driven job cuts” is actually something else. Companies, she said, are “AI-washing” their decisions to cut headcount in a difficult economy, using AI as the excuse for cuts that aren’t really about automation but about volatility.
