The AI Shift In Junior Hiring Is Landing In Consulting And Design, Not Only In Tech

Photo: Planning work of the kind junior consultants and designers do. (Patrick Perkins / Unsplash)

Most of the argument about artificial intelligence and entry-level work has been conducted with software engineers as the example. A study of job advertisements published this summer suggests the fastest movement is happening somewhere less obvious, in the advisory and creative work that small firms buy rather than build.

So where is the movement actually happening?

The research comes from Coresignal, a company that collects publicly posted job ads at scale. It groups junior postings by the department an employer files them under, then measures what portion of each department’s advertised work current AI tools can already perform in part. Comparing January through May of 2025 with the same months of 2026, how AI exposure varies by job area produces a ranking that does not match the public conversation.

Consulting rose from 10.2 percent of its junior ads being AI-exposed to 14.7 percent, a gain of 4.5 points, according to the study. That is the second largest movement of any department measured. Design rose from 8.2 percent to 11.7, up 3.5 points. Product moved from 14.2 to 16.3.

For scale, the national average across all entry-level ads is 13.3 percent. Consulting began the period below that line and finished above it in a single year.

Why those fields, and why now?

The pattern is easier to understand once you look at what junior work in those fields consists of. A first-year consulting analyst spends a great deal of time on desk research, drafting, summarising and building slides. A junior designer produces variations, resizes assets and prepares comps. These are tasks where the current generation of tools performs part of the job competently, and the study’s definition of exposure is exactly that: work software can already partly do, not work that is about to vanish.

The company says as much repeatedly in its own write-up. “AI-exposed” describes the kind of work involved. It is not a forecast that any particular position will be eliminated, and the data cannot show whether a single person was hired or let go.

What makes consulting and design notable is that they were not already saturated. Departments such as marketing, legal and finance sit far higher, in the forties, and moved very little over the year. The interesting motion is in the fields that had a long way to climb and climbed quickly.

What it means for a town of small firms.

Yavapai County’s professional economy is built largely on small practices and independent operators, the kind of business that hires one junior person at a time and cannot absorb a bad hire easily. For those employers the finding cuts two ways.

The optimistic reading is that a junior hire who is fluent with these tools now covers more ground than the same hire did two years ago, which is a genuine argument for taking one on rather than doing without.

The harder reading comes from a separate source. “Entry-level job postings have been trending downwards since peaking in 2022, declining 7.5% year-over-year as of May 2026,” Indeed’s Hiring Lab reported in July. Senior-level postings rose 14.7 percent over the same stretch. In software development the imbalance is stark: senior roles accounted for 69.3 percent of postings in the first quarter of this year, entry-level for 4.5 percent. Employers are not simply changing what junior work looks like. Many are buying less of it.

Read together, the two datasets describe a market that is narrowing at the entry point while the work waiting on the other side changes shape.

So, what’s the catch?

Two limits are worth stating plainly, and the study states both.

The first is that these are advertisements rather than hires, as the company states plainly. Every figure is a share of posted ads, not a count of people employed, and the company is explicit that it cannot detect an employer’s intent in posting or confirm that any role was filled.

The second is geographic, and it affects Arizona directly. The study publishes a state table covering only the ten highest and ten lowest states by AI-exposed share. Arizona falls in neither group, so no Arizona figure exists to quote, and the national and departmental numbers above are the ones that apply here. What the company will say about geography in general is that the highest shares cluster in metropolitan and technology hub economies, none of which describes Yavapai County.

A related caution applies to departments. Consulting moved fastest over the year, but marketing, at 47.1 percent, remains more than three times as exposed. Speed of change and level of exposure are separate measurements, and the first is much easier to write a headline around.

The company tested the headline result several ways before publishing, including restricting the analysis to employers who advertised in both years and reweighting the second year to match the first year’s industry mix. The direction held in both cases, which is a stronger check than most job-ad research reports.

None of this settles the question facing a small firm here deciding whether to take on a first hire this fall. It does suggest that the useful thing to ask a candidate has shifted, and that the answer now matters most in the fields nobody was watching.