We’re using the first four days of September to spotlight four big ideas shaping the future of New York’s workforce. Each day, we’ll share a new perspective on what it will take to create good jobs, expand opportunity, and build an economy that works for every New Yorker. Then, right after Labor Day, we’ll release our calendar for the year ahead. Today: a three-part series on workforce as infrastructure. This is Part 2 of 3: on redesigning work itself so that technological progress and economic mobility advance together.
by Mary Beth Williams
For generations, entry-level jobs have been where young people learn how to work, where they build skills, relationships, confidence, and the experience that unlocks the next opportunity. As AI changes the tasks traditionally performed by junior workers, we risk weakening that first rung of the career ladder just as young New Yorkers are trying to get their footing.
That outcome is not inevitable.
New York should be asking a more ambitious question than how we train young people for the jobs that remain: How do we redesign work itself so that technological progress and economic mobility advance together?
Singapore offers one model for what that could look like. The comparison is instructive. Like New York City, Singapore is a dense, global economic center with a diverse workforce, a population measured in the millions, and a government managing a budget of more than $115 billion annually. Both have also made ambitious commitments to harness AI as a driver of economic opportunity.
But Singapore has paired its recent investments in AI with something New York has not yet developed at the same scale: a deliberate strategy to anticipate how technology will change work and help employers and workers adapt before disruption occurs.
Singapore’s Jobs Transformation Maps examine how technology—including generative AI—is expected to reshape jobs and skills across 19 industries. The government is also putting substantial resources behind workforce transformation initiatives and job redesign, offering employers public support to rethink roles, work processes, and responsibilities as technology changes how work gets done. Employers can now receive public subsidies covering up to 70% of the cost of job-redesign projects.
New York City has made promising investments of its own, positioning itself as the “Applied AI Capital of the World” and investing in the infrastructure, business incubators, and innovation challenges that can make that ambition real. But we have not yet articulated an equally ambitious strategy for the workers whose jobs will change along the way.
We should start with the jobs that serve as the first rung of our career ladder.
Instead of waiting to see which entry-level roles quietly disappear, New York should work with employers now to identify where AI is changing junior-level work and test how those jobs can be redesigned. That means asking which tasks can technology take on, which human capabilities become more valuable, and what new responsibilities can give young workers meaningful opportunities to learn, contribute, and advance?
This isn’t about preserving jobs or tasks that no longer make sense. It’s about preserving pathways. When AI eliminates the tasks through which generations of workers learned a profession, we need to be intentional about creating new ways into that profession, or new pathways to opportunity altogether.
What would that look like in practice?
Start small. A philanthropic partner could provide the risk capital and convening power to bring together employers, CUNY, workforce organizations, and—critically—young workers themselves. The group could identify a handful of occupations where AI is rapidly changing the work traditionally assigned to junior employees and recruit employers willing to redesign those roles rather than simply eliminate them.
Then examine the work itself. What does an entry-level employee do today? Which tasks can AI automate or accelerate? Which responsibilities that once required more experience could now move down the career ladder? And what training, supervision, or workplace supports would allow a young worker to take them on successfully?
Public and philanthropic dollars could help employers answer those questions in practice—funding job-design technical assistance, training, implementation, and evaluation so individual businesses are not asked to shoulder the full cost and risk of experimentation.
And we should be clear about what success means. The test is not simply whether AI makes an employer or worker more productive. It is whether the redesigned job still functions as a genuine first rung of a career ladder. Are young workers gaining skills and meaningful responsibility? Are they staying, advancing, and earning more? And does the redesigned role create enough value for employers to ensure the model can be sustained and expanded?
If it works, New York would have something far more valuable than another report, advisory council, or working group conversation about the future of work. We would have a model employers can adopt, workforce organizations can support, and government can help bring to scale.
Making this happen will require employers willing to experiment, funders willing to invest before all the answers are known, and workforce and education partners willing to build and learn alongside them. New York already has the essential ingredients, including world-class employers and civic institutions, an extraordinary workforce ecosystem, and a city actively investing in AI and its economic potential.
What we need now is the same level of ambition for economic mobility. AI will reshape how we work and how careers begin. The question is whether we redesign the first rung of the career ladder with intention, or let technology redesign it for us.
Let’s make sure every young New Yorker still has a path to opportunity in the economy AI creates.