Eugenia Kuyda built Replika and Wabi, so her warning about AI and junior jobs is not coming from the outside. When an AI founder says the fear is justified, you should listen carefully.
There is a specific kind of credibility that comes from someone who benefits from a technology admitting what it costs. Eugenia Kuyda has spent years building AI products meant to feel personal, first with Replika and now with Wabi. She is not a critic peering in from the sidelines. So when she told Platformer founder Casey Newton that she thinks “crazy protests around jobs and AI are going to start happening,” the line lands harder than the usual tech-sector hand-wringing.
Business Insider reported on June 20, 2026, that Kuyda made the comments during a recent live episode of the Platformer podcast. Her argument was blunt. People are already struggling to find work, she said, and the pressure can only get worse. That is the part the industry keeps trying to soften. You can call AI a productivity tool, a creative tool, or a new platform. For a graduate trying to get a first engineering job, it can also look like a locked door.
Kuyda's concern is not abstract. She said she is no longer hiring people for junior jobs, adding that she does not know who is. Hiring an inexperienced person, she said, becomes “extremely expensive and completely not sustainable for a startup.” That is a founder talking like a founder. When runway is tight and AI tools can handle more of the basic work, the training role becomes the easiest line to cut.
Frankly, that is the part tech does not want to say out loud. The junior role was never only a cheap pair of hands. It was how people learned the job. It was where someone fixed small bugs, wrote tests, handled routine implementation, watched senior engineers think through messy problems, and slowly became useful in the deeper sense. If AI absorbs that layer of work, you do not simply lose a few entry-level openings. You weaken the route into the industry.
The wider hiring data is already uncomfortable. PwC's 2026 AI Jobs Barometer, which Business Insider wrote about this week, analyzed more than one billion job ads and found that AI-exposed entry-level roles in the U.S. are now seven times more likely than in 2019 to ask for skills previously associated with senior workers. PwC also found that AI-exposed entry-level roles that had added more than 10 traditionally senior skills grew 35% from 2019 to 2025, while comparable roles that had not done so fell 10%.
That is not a clean story of jobs disappearing overnight. It is more awkward than that. The first job is being made harder at the same time that many of the simple tasks are being automated away. You are still called entry-level, but the employer wants judgment, leadership, stakeholder management and technical fluency from day one. That is a strange bargain for a 22-year-old who was supposed to learn by doing the lower-risk work first.
Oliver Wyman's recent CEO research points in the same direction. As TechRadar reported in May, only 17% of CEOs in the study planned to increase junior hiring, while 43% expected to reduce junior roles. In the technology sector, nearly three-quarters of CEOs said they were freezing or cutting headcount. Those figures do not prove that AI alone is causing every cut. They do show that bosses are already reorganizing around fewer beginners and more experienced people.
There is a counterpoint worth keeping because it is real. A Strada Institute survey covered by Business Insider in May found that nearly half of executives expected AI to have a positive impact on entry-level hiring, while 42% said AI increased analytical and judgment-based responsibilities for junior workers. Some companies will still hire beginners, train them differently, and use AI to move them faster. Good. They should. But that does not cancel out Kuyda's warning. It sharpens it.
If the best companies keep training and the leanest companies stop, the industry gets narrower. The people with elite schools, strong networks and enough family support to wait out a brutal first-job market will survive it. Others will not. That is how you end up with a technology sector that talks endlessly about democratizing creation while making the first step into creation harder to reach.
Kuyda also remains an AI optimist. Business Insider noted that she sees AI giving more people the ability to build software and products without depending on developers or designers. She even suggested the iPhone may be more fragile than it has looked for years, because AI could open the door to a different kind of operating system. You can believe that and still accept the cost. In fact, you have to accept the cost if you want the optimism to mean anything.
The protests Kuyda is predicting have not arrived in full yet. But the conditions are visible: young workers facing a weaker entry-level market, companies demanding senior skills earlier, founders admitting they have stopped hiring juniors, and an industry still pretending this is mostly a messaging problem. It is not. It is a labor-market problem, and it is already here.
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