Make junior hiring part of your 2027 SEO budget by funding defined learning roles and tracking unfilled seats, so AI savings support your talent pipeline.

Treat your 2027 entry-level hires as their own budget line and not part of overall headcount. The best current payroll data shows that employment in AI-exposed jobs is shifting, with fewer junior hires rather than layoffs. Most marketing budget discussions are looking somewhere else.

In July, I argued that chief marketing officers should fund five functions instead of legacy channel buckets. In September, I argued that SEO and paid media managers become directors by proving AI pays for itself while keeping their teams intact. Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen, and Kevin Indig’s October planning memo, support parts of both arguments.

The Stanford Digital Economy Lab working paper, revised Aug. 12, 2026, draws on anonymized ADP payroll records. The analysis sample is a balanced panel of firms with between 3.5 and 5 million employees per month, running through June 2026.

The headline finding is that employment of workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations stands 19% below where it would be if it had kept pace with their less-exposed peers. In raw terms, the two most exposed quintiles of young workers fell about 11% since November 2022, while the three least-exposed quintiles grew about 10%.

Experienced workers show no comparable gap. Every older age group grew over the same period, by as much as 11% for workers aged 35 to 40.

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