For years, we’ve been bemoaning the lack of new talent entering the insurance industry. At the same time, economists, technologists, and executives have debated which workers artificial intelligence would most displace. The answer is becoming harder to ignore: not senior professionals, not experienced managers, but the people we thought we needed who are just starting out — the graduates, the analysts, the junior associates who were supposed to be the future of their industries. Two major new reports, read together, make this picture disturbingly clear.
The Oliver Wyman Forum and the New York Stock Exchange surveyed nearly 500 chief financial officers — executives whose public companies alone represent roughly 12 per cent of global market capitalisation — about how the finance workforce will change over the next three years. The findings are unambiguous on one point: junior roles are where the pressure is being applied.
Sixty-four per cent of CFOs say they expect the finance function to shift away from junior roles. Ninety-one per cent anticipate either flat (61 per cent) or lower (30 per cent) headcount overall in finance. The traditional pyramid — wide at the base with entry-level staff, tapering to a narrow band of senior executives — is, in their own words, beginning to flatten into a middle-heavy diamond.
64%of CFOs expect finance to shift away from junior roles over the next three years.
91%expect flat or lower finance headcount — 61% flat, 30% lower.
What is driving this? The report is unambiguous: A.I. Four in five CFOs view embedding A.I. in the finance function as a top three transformation priority. The use cases they are targeting — planning and forecasting, controls and fraud detection, order-to-cash, spend analytics — are precisely the areas where junior analysts have historically spent most of their time. Automation absorbs the work, and the roles built around it begin to disappear.
Crucially, senior roles are not shrinking in the same way. The most common expected shift in workforce composition is toward midlevel roles (cited by 41 per cent of CFOs), followed by a shift toward senior roles (23 per cent). Only 13 per cent expect a shift toward more junior roles. The pull is unmistakably upward. The base of the career ladder is under pressure; the top is not.
The insurance industry offers perhaps the sharpest real-time illustration of this dynamic. A Q1 2026 Insurance Labour Market Study found that job openings in finance and insurance fell to their lowest monthly level in a decade — dropping from an annual average of 281,000 openings to roughly 138,000 in a single month by December 2025, according to Insurance Business. Automation improvements requiring fewer staff were the most common reason cited by companies that had reduced headcount.
While CFO survey data captures intentions, two significant research papers provide empirical weight to what is actually happening in the labour market right now.
A Harvard working paper by Seyed Hosseini and Guy Lichtinger, published in May 2026, analysed résumé and job-posting data covering 65 million workers across more than 280,000 US firms between 2015 and 2025. Their finding is striking: at firms that adopted generative A.I., junior employment declined by approximately 9 per cent after six quarters relative to non-adopting firms. Senior employment, over the same period, showed no comparable break in trend — in fact, it continued to rise.
The mechanism matters as much as the magnitude. The decline was not driven by mass redundancies of junior staff. It was driven primarily by a sharp reduction in hiring. Companies that adopted generative A.I. simply stopped bringing in as many people at the bottom. The separation rate for juniors at adopting firms actually fell slightly — it is not that firms are making their existing junior workers redundant in large numbers. They are just not replacing them, and not recruiting new ones.
The Harvard researchers call this "seniority-biased technological change" — a concept that inverts the familiar anxiety about A.I. threatening experienced workers. The jobs being eroded are not the complex, judgement-intensive roles at the top of the hierarchy. They are the entry-level, task-heavy roles at the bottom: the debugging, the document review, the data entry, the routine analysis. Those are the tasks generative A.I. handles best, and those are the tasks that used to define the early years of a professional career.
The insurance sector illustrates this hierarchy of displacement with unusual clarity. As Insurance Business has reported, roles in financial reporting, data synthesis, and aggregation are among those most likely to be displaced by A.I., alongside call centres, data entry, and transactional operations work. The roles that are growing, by contrast, are experienced underwriters, compliance specialists, analytics professionals, and technologists — positions that require judgement, not just processing. The industry is, in a phrase, automating from the bottom up.
A parallel Stanford Digital Economy Lab study, analysing payroll records from ADP — the largest payroll software firm in the United States — found that employment for young software developers aged 22 to 25 declined nearly 20 per cent by July 2025 from its peak in late 2022. Senior employment in the same sector showed no such decline. The pattern holds across industries: A.I. exposure predicts junior employment loss, specifically in the occupations and tasks most susceptible to automation.
The Oliver Wyman report reveals an important nuance that makes the junior employment picture more complex, not less concerning. Despite the overwhelming intention to use A.I. in finance, actual deployment at scale remains very limited: only 8 per cent of CFOs have deployed A.I.-assisted tools or autonomous agents at scale across their finance functions. Between 70 and 81 per cent are still in the planning or piloting stages across key use cases.
8%of CFOs have deployed A.I. tools or autonomous agents at scale in finance. Yet 64% already expect to shift away from junior roles — meaning the contraction is happening ahead of full deployment. Source: Oliver Wyman Forum × NYSE CFO Survey 2026.
This matters enormously for the junior employment question. If only 8 per cent of finance functions have genuinely deployed A.I. at scale, yet 64 per cent already expect to shed junior roles, much of the junior workforce contraction is being driven not by automation that has already happened, but by anticipation of automation that is coming. The Harvard researchers identified the same forward-looking dynamic: firms began reducing junior hiring shortly after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, before large-scale deployment had occurred, consistent with managers making workforce decisions based on what they expect A.I. to be capable of in the near future.
In other words, junior workers are already paying the price for automation that has not yet fully arrived. The same pattern is visible in insurance. Research from Accenture found that 90 per cent of insurance executives intend to invest more in A.I. in 2026, with 85 per cent viewing it primarily as a revenue and growth driver — yet a quarter of executives cited skilled talent shortages as the main factor limiting their ability to extract value from the technology. Ambition is running well ahead of execution, yet hiring decisions are already being made as though the automation were complete.
The finance function is a useful lens precisely because CFOs are unusually direct about their intentions. But the pattern is not confined to finance, and it is acutely visible in insurance — an industry facing both demographic pressure and rapid automation simultaneously.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 400,000 insurance workers will retire by 2026, creating a structural talent gap at the same time that A.I. is automating the entry-level roles that have traditionally served as the sector's recruitment pipeline. Meanwhile, 91 per cent of insurance and pension fund employers plan to hire people skilled in working with A.I. — well above the global average of 62 per cent — signalling that demand is shifting sharply toward experienced, technically proficient workers rather than traditional graduates.
Yet the tools and training needed to develop that A.I. proficiency are not reaching the people who need them most. As Insurance Business has reported, only 32 per cent of individual contributors say they have clear access to A.I. tools, compared with 80 per cent of executives. Only 27 per cent of frontline workers have received company A.I. training, versus 81 per cent of C-suite leaders. The people doing the most repetitive, A.I.-suitable work — the claims processors, the data handlers, the junior analysts — are the last to get tools, training, and expectations. This creates a damaging irony: the workers most exposed to automation are the least equipped to adapt to it.
The Oliver Wyman report notes, with some urgency, that 70 per cent of CFOs plan to intensify succession planning and leadership development over the next three years. What the report does not fully reconcile is the tension between that ambition and the simultaneous erosion of the entry-level pipeline from which future senior talent has always been drawn.
Finance functions, like law firms, consulting practices, and insurance carriers, have historically operated as apprenticeship systems. Junior analysts learned by doing. They absorbed institutional knowledge, developed judgement, and moved up. As Insurance Business has reported, the administrative and junior analytical roles being thinned out by automation have long served as training grounds — the way employees learned the craft of underwriting or claims judgement. Without those early rungs on the ladder, the industry risks losing the informal apprenticeship model that has sustained it for generations. Future underwriters may arrive highly educated in data science but untested in the grey areas of risk, regulation, and human behaviour.
CFOs are simultaneously intensifying succession planning (70%) and reducing junior hiring (64% expect to shift away from junior roles). These two intentions are in direct tension. The senior leaders of 2035 are the junior hires of today — and today, those hires are not being made.
In insurance, this tension is especially acute given the retirement wave already under way. The industry is simultaneously losing experienced workers at the top and automating away the entry-level roles at the bottom that would have replaced them. The organisations that solve this problem first — finding ways to build expertise without relying solely on the traditional apprenticeship ladder — will carry a significant competitive advantage.
The Oliver Wyman data makes clear that CFOs are making rational decisions, function by function and firm by firm. A.I. does reduce the need for certain junior tasks. Headcount discipline matters. The finance pyramid does need to evolve.
But the Harvard research suggests those individually rational decisions may be aggregating into something no single employer intended: a generation of workers being locked out of the entry-level roles that have historically been the first step on the professional ladder. The decline in junior employment is being driven by slower hiring rather than separations — meaning it is largely invisible in conventional unemployment statistics, which measure people who have jobs and lose them, not people who never get hired at all.
The decision to stop hiring junior staff is not a purely technical one. It is an organisational, cultural, and ultimately strategic bet — one whose consequences, for both the workers affected and the employers making it, will compound for years after the current business cycle has moved on.
