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Talent Management

Courtney Vien

cfobrew.com

AI might be harming entry-level workers’ job prospects, at least in certain fields, new research suggests.

An as-yet unpublished study by three Stanford researchers found that, between late 2022 and July 2025, employment of people ages 22–25 “in the most AI-exposed occupations,” such as software developers, customer service representatives, and marketing and sales managers, 

 overall. It dropped 13% compared with employment of people from the same age group in jobs with low exposure to AI.

But even in the most AI-exposed occupations, employment 

 by 6%–9% for “older workers” (meaning, roughly, workers over 25) during the 2022–25 time period, the researchers found, suggesting that AI might be displacing certain entry-level jobs.

The researchers drew upon monthly payroll data for “tens of thousands” of companies from payroll provider ADP. To gauge how vulnerable a job might be to AI displacement, they looked at factors such as whether AI could perform tasks that fell under its description in the Labor Department’s Occupational Information Network (O*NET) database, as well as the number of Anthropic GenAI model Claude queries related to those tasks.

Their findings held true even when the researchers controlled for “firm-level shocks,” such as interest rate increases, that could have accounted for a drop in entry-level hiring. The pattern also held when the researchers excluded tech companies and “computer occupations” from the data, implying that AI, and not fluctuations in tech employment, was likely to blame for the decline in early-career employment.

 positions, rather than laying people off in favor of AI. It’s possible that entry-level hiring may pick back up if AI 

But if employers in certain sectors do find AI an adequate substitute for entry-level workers, the question remains: How will new entrants to those fields learn the skills they need to perform higher-level work?

 in years to come. “I think that we’ll have to 

 people, as opposed to just hoping that they will figure these things out on their own,” Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the Stanford researchers, told the Wall Street Journal.

AI could be the reason some young workers can’t find jobs

Employment of entry-level workers has dropped 6% in the most AI-exposed fields.

Tally another one up in the “2025 is a 

Fewer CHROs plan to increase hiring than did so a year ago, a survey by the Conference Board finds, and more anticipate that their companies will 

Twice a year, the Conference Board surveys US CHROs at organizations like Fortune 500 companies, healthcare employers, and midsized companies. This quarter, 36% of CHROs said they plan on increasing hiring within the next six months, roughly the same percentage as Q4 of 2024 (37%) but down from 41% in Q2 of 2024.

Similarly, 20% of CHROs said they would decrease hiring over the next six months, around the same percentage as Q4 of 2024 (19%), but up from 11% this time last year.

It’s yet another data point suggesting that the jobs picture is weakening. Though unemployment is low, at 4.2%, fewer jobs are being added. The US gained just 19,000 jobs in May, 14,000 in June, and 

. Were it not for the healthcare and social services sectors, Bloomberg pointed out, that jobs growth 

. It now takes job seekers an average of 24 weeks to land a role, a month longer than it did a year ago.

Consumers are also feeling qualms: Around 60% told University of Michigan researchers they 

 in the next 12 months, up from 32% in 2022.

CHROs plan to hire fewer people than they did a year ago

1 in 5 say they’ll decrease hiring, Conference Board survey finds.

Jesse Klein

Political divides? Tired. Employee/employer divides? Wired.

 from Axios HQ, a non-journalistic offshoot of the publication that sells “AI-powered software” to companies for internal communications, found that alignment on goals between employees and company leaders fell by roughly half compared to last year.

In the 2025 report, 27% of leaders said their employees were “entirely aligned with org goals.” Only 9% of employees agreed. Ouch. Last year those numbers were 44% and 14%, respectively. Double ouch. The survey polled more than 450 US business leaders and 800 white collar workers in January.

Executives and employees were also split on internal communication and, unsurprisingly, AI implementation.

Business leaders seem to have a high opinion of their communication skills. Four in five leaders thought their communication to employees was helpful, relevant, clear, and engaging. However, only about 50% of employees thought so.

Hardly anyone seems to think companies are doing AI implementation well. Only 11% of employees thought the rollout of AI to scale productivity was effective with clear guidelines and benefits, and only 27% of company leaders agreed. Weirdly, the percentage of employees who didn’t think their company was rolling out AI at all was 32%, but only 17% of business leaders confirmed their company wasn’t.

So clearly someone isn’t communicating well about AI implementation. 

Employees and executives differ in how they see goals, communication, and AI rollout

Business leaders think their internal comms are great—employees, not so much.

Alex Zank

Organizations are under increasing pressure by regulators and workers alike to be more transparent around pay. Yet, just one in five companies globally “consider themselves ready for pay transparency,” according to a new Aon 

Seven in 10 of the 1,400 professionals Aon surveyed said their organizations’ readiness around pay transparency—the practice of disclosing employee compensation information—has improved over the past year. In fact, 69% said their companies publish salary ranges while recruiting and 21% said they do this on every job posting.

But organizations know they have more work to do. For instance, just a quarter of North American survey respondents said their organizations were fully ready for pay transparency. Most (59%) respondents said their companies were “getting ready,” while another 16% said they weren’t ready. Respondents in other regions felt even less prepared. Nearly half (48%) of those in the Asia-Pacific region said their companies weren’t ready at all for pay transparency.

“Pay transparency is no longer a buzzword. It's a baseline expectation from employees and a regulatory imperative across an increasing number of jurisdictions,” Lisa Stevens, chief administrative officer at Aon, said in a statement. “Yet our data shows a concerning lack of progress. Organizations that fail to act face risks not only in compliance, but in their ability to attract, retain and engage talent.”

Organizations felt the most pressure on pay transparency from regulators, followed by the need to be more attractive to employees, according to the survey. “Alignment to organization values” was the third-biggest driver of pay transparency.

 Pay equity monitoring appears to be one area with plenty of room for improvement. Just over a quarter of respondents (and 30% in North America) said their orgs conducted a pay equity analysis within the last 12 to 18 months.

The most common methods of correcting pay equity gaps, according to the survey, are additional year-end reviews (28%), a fund to correct discrepancies (24%), and checking at recruitment (22%).

Most companies not fully there yet on pay transparency

A survey shows strides on pay transparency, but there’s still room to improve.

You can probably now add AI training to the list of required work videos you aren’t allowed to fast-forward through. Buuut, maybe there aren’t even enough companies requiring AI instruction to skip.

 from OwlLabs and Pulse, almost 70% of companies have added AI tools to their workflows but just 38% are actually training their employees how to use it.

Companies without AI training risk investing in a tool no one uses (or uses poorly), creating a workforce that falls behind the competition. An improperly trained workforce also risks misuse of AI tools and consequently organizational 

“People in positions of power tend to roll this out thinking everybody will just start using it. But that’s simply not what happens,” said Conor Grennan, Chief AI architect at NYU Stern and CEO of AI training consultancy AI Mindset, . He has provided training to NASA, McKinsey, PwC, Amazon, Unilever, JPMorgan, and others.

But before signing everyone up, CFOs should understand that AI training isn’t just about teaching humans how to use a new tool, it’s about training them to think differently, to identify biases, and to change behaviors, according to Grennan.

“People in finance tend to want to have a new tool,” he said. “But this is not a new tool. This is a new way of thinking and working.”

Here’s how some experts are approaching AI training as a mindset shift rather than a technical skill.

 Companies often treat AI like a software program with a steep learning curve, when it is more akin to healthy eating: something that people might understand intellectually but which requires a behavioral change to actually be effective, Grennan said.

“People are treating this like a general digital transformation, when it has actually everything to do with change management,” he said.

He focuses AI trainings on shifting mindsets around approaching work rather than on “prompt engineering” and new features. He thinks the finance department is particularly susceptible to erroneously viewing AI as the next Excel.

And just like eating healthy, don’t fall for the snake oil salesmen, warns 

, an AI consultant and trainer. If someone is promises immediate returns on investment or guaranteed productivity increases from a few hours of AI training, it’s probably too good to be true.

, and according to its Chief AI Officer, Dan Priest “materially changing the business…does require training.” He finds microlearning training videos for employees, hosts prompting parties where expert and beginner prompters come together, and invites business school professors to lead formal trainings on AI for business strategy. His team has also created low-code or no-code sandboxes for employees to safely experiment with the tools.

Priest’s AI training philosophy is grounded in practicality. He focuses trainings on increasing employee confidence and comfort with using tools and expanding their thinking of how the tools can be used.

Hopper tailors training tasks to mirror the daily work of the employees he’s coaching. Before the training, Hopper will get a report from the hedge fund and private equity group he is working with. He then demonstrates how to recreate the report more quickly using AI.

“Where the technology is today, it has become the equivalent of an exoskeleton,” he said. “You’re still driving, but you have these additional powers and efficiencies and speed with what you do.”

Grennan emphasizes that using an AI enterprise tool that’s been vetted by senior leadership to ensure it has

Priest’s team at PwC has invested in what he calls “responsible AI” by restricting what datasets teams are allowed to upload, creating firewalls within the programs, and implementing appropriate admin controls.

Hopper always talks to senior leadership before his trainings to understand the company’s AI usage policy or helps them create one before rolling AI out to the entire company. If leadership isn’t on board, no matter how good the training is, the employees won’t be able to use the AI for their work.

“If I don’t have the buy-in from IT and the security folks and the compliance folks of the company, then the training is meaningless,” he said.

Company leadership is racing to add AI tools, but do employees know how to use them?

Successful AI usage at a company comes from behavioral change, not the latest features.

Nearly everyone agrees: Accounting has a talent shortage problem.

 from accounting and finance talent outsourcing firm Personiv found that about nine in 10 finance leaders (87%) acknowledged a shortage exists, a rate that’s been on a steady upward climb from 63% back in 2020.

CFO Brew spoke with Megan Weis, Personiv’s VP and general manager of FAO services, to break down the survey findings and discuss the reasons behind the ongoing shortage.

 According to the survey of more than 250 finance and accounting leaders, organizations on average had five open finance or accounting positions, up from an average of two open positionsin the 2024 survey. Half the respondents said it takes their organizations 60 days or more, on average, to fill those open roles.

Weis said organizations are responding by automating certain processes, increasing salaries and benefits, and offering more flexible work arrangements. She remembered working 80-plus hours a week during the busier times of year when she started her career as an auditor in 1998.

“I do think companies are doing a better job of valuing work-life balance,” Weis told us. “Since Covid, a lot of work arrangements have become flexible, which I think helps people balance their career with their life.”

, something “I could not disagree more with,” Weis said. The role has evolved in the last decade or so to one that’s “a very exciting place to be within the business world.”

“It’s really like the backbone of business,” Weis said of accounting. “And these days it’s not just a backward-looking profession. For years it was all about just reporting things that had happened, and these days it’s more about looking forward, and setting goals and direction for a company.”

Indeed, the role of the CFO in particular has become 

Even for those who didn’t believe the hype (or whatever the 

 of hype is) that accounting was boring, it hasn’t exactly been the easiest to get into the profession. Weis noted that the “150-hour rule,” which requires an additional year of college to obtain CPA licensure, is a barrier for would-be accountants. “A lot of people don’t want to spend another year [and have] to go into more debt,” she said.

The good news on that front is that the 150-hour rule is 

 among accounting industry groups and lawmakers. Connecticut recently became one of the 

 to scrap the rule and open other pathways to licensure.

“I just think the reputation of accounting hasn't caught up to that yet,” Weis said.

Accounting’s talent problem is becoming undeniable

The good news is that companies and industry groups are looking to fix that.

Recent history has not been kind to pension plans. The good news for employees who benefit from pensions is that after “a record number of plan terminations in recent years,” half of CFOs said they want to retool plans rather than eliminate them, according to a 

The organizations that planned to terminate their employee pension plans have done so, and the remaining ones are now figuring out how to make the numbers work, Mercer concluded.

To be sure, changes are still on the horizon. More than half of the 173 finance execs Mercer surveyed said they plan to make changes to pension plan designs this year. Considerations include hybrid structures and flexible arrangements like cash balance plans.

According to Mercer, this “signals a move towards more adaptable pension solutions” that both meet workers’ needs and maintain tolerable levels of organizational risks. A significant number of employees aren’t confident they’ll be able to solely live off their retirement savings, according to Scott Jarboe, US definition benefit segment leader at Mercer.

“This data shows many CFOs are not retreating from pensions—and that there’s a growing interest in creative plan design and adaptable pension solutions that cater to the diverse needs of the modern workforce, while keeping the risks for the organization at an acceptable level,” Jarboe said in a statement.

CFOs shared key strategies they look for in adapting their plans. One is risk transfer. More than seven in 10 respondents said their organizations will offer lump-sum payments in the next two years, and additionally, more than three in five organizations have transferred or are contemplating “transferring retiree obligations to insurers through annuity purchases,” Mercer found.

Survey respondents also said they'd changed defined benefit plan governance. Seven in 10 said they “adopted de-risking strategies” in 2025, a nearly 10% uptick from two years ago. Around 44% said they’ve moved more assets to fixed-income investments “to enhance pension funded status stability.”

More than half the respondents said it was difficult to make needed changes promptly. “In response, many are leaning into data-driven tools, such as dashboards and analytics, to guide decision-making and drive efficiency,” Mercer noted.