In today’s lectures, the professor stands at the front of the lecture hall, explaining concepts in the same way they did in 1855, when the University of Melbourne was established.

Though now half the room quietly considers whether the concept, model, or framework that originally took decades to develop, and would take each of us hours to understand properly, could be done by ChatGPT in seconds?

This is not necessarily something you say out loud. Indeed, it sounds ungrateful and lazy, as though you are missing the point. Nonetheless, it’s there, this low-level hum beneath our university experience right now:

What exactly are we preparing for? 

Ash Waring, a Unimelb student, put this in a way that stuck with me: "It's scary,” she said, “because they're cutting off the bottom half of the corporate ladder, so there's less grad roles. And then it's hard to understand the purpose behind learning basic content like WACC when AI can do the basics without us."

This is an honest evaluation of what’s happening: the entry-level role, our dream graduate position, the thing we continue to build our CVs toward, seems to be exactly where automation will hit first.

There’s a clear job that used to exist for people like us. Not necessarily the most glamorous job, more so the job before the “job”. The one where you were focused on learning whilst doing the “boring” tasks, while someone more senior decided whether you were worth keeping. Globally, entry-level job postings have fallen 29 percentage points since January 2024 (Randstad, 2025 Global Workplace Blueprint). AI hasn’t just automated the tasks; it has removed the reason to let us in.

When ChatGPT originally launched in late 2022, I remember the reaction being a strange mix of fascination and quiet panic. Here lay a tool which could draft emails, summarise lectures, write cover letters and solve problems in under thirty seconds, which would have taken us weeks to merely half-understand otherwise. 

People keep pointing out that this is not the first time that technology has destabilised industries. For instance, the Internet, spreadsheets, and ATMs. However, these only threatened tasks rather than an entire credential, which is one of the reasons why students find it so unsettling.

The anxiety is real. So is the exaggeration.

I will point out that there is a version of this conversation that spirals straight to doom.

“AI will take all jobs”

“XXX degree is becoming obsolete”

“We are graduating into a world that doesn’t require us.”

I don’t quite buy that, fully.

But I’ve also stopped finding comfort in the rhetoric of ‘don’t worry, everything will be fine’, mainly because this largely comes from people who already have jobs.

Mark McDougall, the Global CIO of Computershare, oversees technology across a global organisation and has watched multiple waves of automation reshape the workforce. However, he remains measured about the integration of AI:

“I see AI as another evolution in process automation. What will be transformative is using AI to perform tasks that were previously out of reach for a human due to sheer volume or complexity. In this case, it compliments humans rather than replaces them.”

It is a useful corrective to the doom spiral. Although what strikes me more is what he has to say about people during this time and who he believes will thrive in such an era. In his words: 

“Working in a global organisation requires the building of human relationships and trust, AI can never replace this. People who thrive are those who deliver business and customer outcomes in a complex global environment with the full trust and support of those around them.”

Trust isn’t exactly something you learn in a class or can achieve via a prompt, yet something Mark made explicit in his answer to me.

The anxiety is about something older than AI.

We have watched the generation above us build careers that, by their own admission, sometimes felt hollow. Full of performance and process, and not enough actual meaning. They felt full of individuals who had optimised for stability and ended up, decades later, facilitating stakeholder alignment across cross-functional work structures.

So, when we are told we must prepare for the workforce, the question that lies underneath this is:

What version of the workforce are we actually preparing for?

If AI is automating auxiliary parts of the profession, such as the formatting and research that needs no human input, then losing them might not be the crisis. It actually might be, in a strange way, a sort of permission for us. What if now, we can consider what we actually want to contribute as opposed to letting a job title answer that for us?

So, what actually holds?

Vanessa Tran, another Unimelb student, has thought more carefully about this than most people I know: 

"From my current perspective, all I can do is keep learning about how the world works and developing my 'soft' skills that are portable, like communication, critical thinking, leadership and my work ethic. I am preparing for the future by staying quite detached from the idea of myself in any one industry." 

This detachment is quite an aspirational ideology, and one which I have actively been trying to adopt. It is not about giving up and accepting the odds are against us; instead it's a bet that adaptability will compound in a way which specific technical skills will likely not be able to.

Hugo McGovern, another student, sees this slightly differently: 

"Negotiation, deals and agreements all fundamentally rely on trust between two parties. I think face-to-face contact and meetings will have a resurgence within business as AI continues to advance."

It may sound counterintuitive until you actually think about it. As the more technical sides of business become automated, it is likely that more weight will fall on moments that cannot be automated, such as managing a relationship or making a call under pressure when you are not able to access data for a clean answer. Although AI is able to do a lot of things, it cannot replicate the credibility that a human employee provides by actually being in these scenarios.

Dana McDonald, a Data Engineer, Atlassian and Founder of the AI Startup, On Me Group speaks from the other side of this equation, as someone who has recently been hired and watched the graduate market shift in real time, saying that“grads now have the tools and resources no other generation before them has had.” 

And her advice is direct: 

“As the new generation is coming into the workforce, I think it is invaluable to be deep in AI tools. You want to be the person that comes in, knows how to use it and can help make an AI positive change in the workplace.”

“Be a sponge. Absorb every bit of information from as many people as possible. Ask questions, stupid ones, but don’t ask them more than once.”

Dana is not describing a generation that is falling behind. She is describing one that is going to be ahead, if it chooses to be: 

“The majority of extremely successful people I know have not had a traditional career and pathway, so it’s important to be open to different things.”

Mark echoes this from the other side of the hiring table:  

“I love graduates who have worked in a café, bar or equivalent as they have had experience in customer service. AI will replace a lot of tasks that are mundane or commoditised, leaving much more interesting and higher value work for the graduate to perform.”

I will not pretend that I have this figured out, I don’t, most of us don’t. In fact, I am increasingly suspicious of anyone who says that they do.

However, I think optimising our LinkedIn profiles for a job landscape that may look entirely different in three years is the wrong game. Though I think, as demonstrated by the students I have spoken to, they’re already understanding the rules of the new game byasking better questions than just “will I get a job?” They are looking beyond this to ask what kind of work is worth pursuing and what skills they need to develop to be good at this type of work.

So, in fact, we might not be doomed, though we might also not be destined for anything in particular.

We started this piece in a lecture theatre, quietly considering if any of it mattered. Here’s what I think: The degree, the grad role, those were always just the door. What is on the other side of that door is still ours to decide. 

Yes, the door may be changing shape, but we are the first cohort that gets to figure out what we are walking towards, rather than blindly following those in front of us.

So, the lecture is still going, we’re just no longer waiting for it to tell us what to do.