Every successful career you admire started somewhere less glamorous.

Be it a first internship or junior role, the first rung of the career ladder was never particularly prestigious, but it was there, as a starting point from which young people could climb.

That rung is being dismantled, one automated task at a time, and it requires an urgent, honest, multistakeholder conversation about how to rebuild it before an entire generation slips through the net.

The numbers tell the story. Entry-level job postings in the US have fallen by roughly a third since early 2023, with the steepest declines in precisely the roles most exposed to AI.

Stanford-affiliated research shows employment among 22-to-25-year-olds in AI-exposed occupations has effectively dropped by 19 percent compared to less-exposed peers, and this divergence is widening steadily.

The tasks that once taught young people how work works, from drafting the first version and crunching the baseline analysis, to sitting in the meeting to take notes, are exactly the tasks machines now do instantly.

The polite term for this is “disruption.”

The accurate one is this: we are eliminating the apprenticeship layer of the modern economy while pretending the ladder still works, and with minimal concern for who will be on the ladder to brief the machines in the coming years.

This matters everywhere, but it matters most acutely in the regions where the Digital Cooperation Organization works.

Across our member states, from the Gulf to Africa to Central Asia, the median age skews dramatically young, and the first job is rarely just a career milestone.

It is family income, social standing, and often the difference between a young person who believes the system has a place for them and one who concludes it does not.

In economies already battling youth unemployment, removing the first rung is not an efficiency gain.

It is a potential slow-motion social crisis.

The temptation is to answer this with more of what we already do: another bootcamp, another certificate, another online course.

But skills without experience are credentials without capability.

A young person can complete every AI course on the internet and still never learn how to navigate a difficult client, recover from a failed deliverable, or earn the trust of a team.

Professional judgment, the skill employers actually pay for, has always been learned by doing, alongside people who already knew how.

AI has not changed that. It has simply automated away the opportunity.

So who is responsible for rebuilding the first rung?

That is the question discussed among leaders from business, education and youth development at a roundtable convened by JA Worldwide, McKinsey and Goodwall on the sidelines of the 81st UN General Assembly this month.

The answer that emerged is that no single sector can overcome this challenge alone.

Employers must redesign entry-level roles around what machines cannot teach: mentorship, judgment, client exposure, ownership of real outcomes.

Meanwhile governments must stop measuring youth employment programs by enrolment and start measuring them by transitions into real work.

Most importantly, alignment and long-term collaboration between stakeholders will be key to delivering meaningful impact for our youth.

During the discussion, I observed reasons for optimism.

The same technology that is eroding the first rung can help rebuild it — AI tutors that coach rather than replace, platforms that match young people to real projects across borders, and digital work that lets a graduate in Amman, Riyadh or Nairobi apprentice with a team in Athens.

At the DCO, our work on digital skills across member states has taught us that young people do not lack ambition or aptitude. What they need is the bridge between learning and earning.

We built the modern career ladder over a century, and AI is dismantling its first rung in a fraction of that time.

The question is not whether the next generation is ready for the AI economy, but whether the AI economy is willing to make room for them.