By Matt Egan, CNN

Las Vegas (CNN) — The president of Cisco rejects the doomsday warnings from some tech leaders that artificial intelligence will make entry-level jobs vanish.

“I just refuse to believe that humans are going to be obsolete. It just seems like it’s an absurd concept,” Jeetu Patel, who’s also the chief product officer at AI infrastructure company Cisco, told CNN.

While Patel acknowledged there will be “growing pains where people will get disrupted,” he strongly pushed back on Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s comments saying AI will spike unemployment to as high as 20% and eliminate half of all white-collar entry level jobs.

He’s one of several tech leaders that have pushed back on Amodei’s narrative; others have said AI is likely to change jobs by requiring workers to adopt new skills rather than wiping out jobs completely. Still, his comments come amid a plunge in entry-level hiring and as tech giants are increasingly using AI in the workplace, raising questions about the future of work.

“Dario is a friend. We are investors in Anthropic. I have a ton of respect for what he’s done. In this area though, I have a slightly different opinion on a couple of different dimensions,” Patel said Wednesday at Ai4, an AI conference in Las Vegas. “I reject the notion that humans are going to be obsolete in like five years, that we’re not going to have anything to do and we’re going to be sitting on the beach… It doesn’t make any sense.”

In particular, Patel said he has a “huge concern” with Amodei’s line of thinking that AI could wipe out entry-level jobs because companies benefit from adding younger workers who often better understand new technologies.

“If you just say, ‘I’m going to eradicate all entry-level jobs,’ that’s the stupidest thing a company can do in the long term because what you’ve done is you’ve actually taken away the injection of new perspective,” the Cisco exec said.

‘A really bad strategy’

Patel argued that for some jobs, having significant experience can be a “massive liability.” For instance, he said people often hold assumptions about things that may not have worked five years ago, but do now.

That’s why Patel said he spends “an enormous amount of time” with younger employees and interns.

“I learn a lot from people who’ve just gotten out of college because they have a fresh and unique perspective. And that perspective coupled with (my) experience makes magic happen,” Patel said. “It would be a really bad strategy to not have early in career people and entry level people injected in your workplace.”

Is AI already hurting entry-level workers?

However, some economists say there are early signs suggesting AI may already be depressing entry-level jobs.

Even though the overall job market has been mostly healthy, the Class of 2025 faces the worst job market for new college graduates in years.

For the first time since tracking started in 1980, the unemployment rate for recent graduates (those 22 to 27 years old with at least a bachelor’s degree) is higher than the national unemployment rate, according to Oxford Economics.

Entry-level hiring has tumbled by 23% between March 2020 and May 2025, outpacing the 18% decline in overall hiring over that span, according to data from LinkedIn.

This is happening for a variety of reasons, some of them unrelated to AI.

But AI does seem to be playing a role, some economists say. For instance, Oxford Economics noted that employment in two industries vulnerable to AI disruption — computer science and mathematics — has dropped by 8% since 2022 for recent graduates. By comparison, employment has little changed in those industries for older workers.

“AI is definitely displacing some of these lower-level jobs,” Matthew Martin, senior US economist at Oxford Economics, told CNN in June.

‘AI can’t buy you a steak dinner’

Economists and AI researchers say the jobs most at risk involve repetitive tasks that can be automated, such as data input.

“The less interesting clerical jobs will go away. They will be automated. And if you don’t automate, you’ll go out of business,” Alan Ranger, vice president of marketing at Cognigy, told CNN on the sidelines of Ai4.

Cognigy would know: It sells conversational AI agents that provide customer support for banks, airlines and other companies.

Ranger said Cognigy’s AI agents came to the rescue when German airline Lufthansa had to cancel every flight due to a strike in Germany earlier this year. The technology allowed Lufthansa to rebook thousands of flights per minute, he said.

Ranger argued that companies won’t massively lay off customer support workers because humans still need to manage the AI agents, design the software and tackle other complex issues.

Yet he did concede that companies will have fewer customer support workers in the future as people leave the industry and retire, and because firms will hire for different roles.

“Account management and sales roles won’t get replaced anytime soon,” Ranger said. “An AI can’t buy you a steak dinner.”

Patel, the Cisco executive, said the onus is on the tech industry and society as a whole to ensure a smooth transition to superintelligent AI.

“In tech, we live in a bubble. We keep thinking, ‘Oh, disruption is just part of it.’ But when a steel mill worker gets disrupted, they don’t become an AI prompt engineer,” he said.

Patel said there is a lot of retraining and reskilling that must be done in tandem with governments and educators.

“The tech community has to actually take some responsibility for this,” he said. “Because if we don’t, you will create some level of pain in society and we want to make sure we avoid that.”

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