Firm announces they will not replace grads with ai
In a recent press release a large consulting firm has revealed that its graduate intake will continue as planned, on the grounds that graduates already do what they need AI to do.
"People keep asking if we're worried about AI taking the grads' jobs," said one partner, gesturing at a graduate who was confidently explaining a regulatory framework he had learned about forty minutes earlier. "But look at him. He's already doing it. Extremely confident delivery, occasionally inventing a case citation because there isn’t time in the budget for research. Sometime he even hallucinates! Especially if he’s been working three weeks straight at 20 hours a day! I mean we had all that here before AI came along."
When asked what spurned this change of heart, another partner reported, “when we heard you actually had to train the AI to get the best output from it, that was a real turn off. Our grad program is all about dropping them into unchartered territory and then ensuring the ones that remind us of ourselves can swim.”
One partner reported he had voted no to the change, “Surely the AI is faster and doesn’t need to run to the toilets to cry every time another change comes through for them to do at 10pm without any context. I don’t know if this is the best choice.”
We found Marty Stephenson yelling at ChatGPT and asked him if he had any thoughts on those who voted no to the AI initiative. Marty huffed and explained, “Look AI has nothing on grads, sure it sucks up to me, tells me all my ideas are good and organises my wife’s birthday presents - but it’s just not the same dynamic without a bit of old fashioned fear for their career.”
The firm's Head of Talent framed the decision as one of pure operational logic. "We costed it out. A large language model costs millions to train and run, and still occasionally tells a client something that isn't true," she said. "A graduate costs us their salary, a laptop, and the occasional pizza party. The margins speak for themselves."
Where the firm has chosen to get ahead of the market, however, is sustainability.
"We're proud to announce graduates as part of our renewable resource strategy," said a representative from Corporate Responsibility. "Unlike a server farm, a graduate doesn't need to be cooled to nineteen degrees around the clock, the water we’re saving! Grads will continue to be fuelled by UberEats and the vague promise of promotion every six months."
The firm has since added a line item to its ESG report crediting graduate headcount with a measurable reduction in Scope 2 emissions, a metric one junior analyst in Sustainability described as "the first KPI I've ever seen that I might actually ‘meet expectations’ for! Promotion to Consultant here I come!"
WHAT TO MAKE OF ALL THIS
Graduates are not a cost line to be optimised away, they're the pipeline every senior hire eventually comes from.
AI can genuinely support human effort at every level, grads included - but it can't do their apprenticeship for them. The judgment an experienced employee uses to make a fast, right call under pressure was built over years of making slower, wrong calls first. If AI quietly absorbs that stage, organisations haven't saved anything in the long term, it's just deferred the cost to a future where they have to rely on external talent rather than internal mobility. Grads deserve a skills strategy that treats AI as something to learn with, not something that starves them of the basics that will help them grow into the next leader.
