Sloan Dean Richard M. Locke warns of AI automation and asserts need to reimagine education
Locke shares that top firms are hiring in smaller numbers due to automation
MIT Sloan Dean Richard M. Locke PhD ’89 bluntly warned that artificial intelligence (AI) automation is set to reshape white-collar jobs and called on universities to reimagine education in an address and panel at the MIT Human Insight Collaborative event on Monday, Nov. 17.
“It used to be that some of the top consulting or investment banking companies would come and hire 20 or 30 Sloan graduates at a time every year in this huge cohort,” Locke said. “They still come, but they’re hiring in smaller numbers because they don’t need as many students as they used to due to the automation of some tasks by AI.”
These remarks echo a nationwide sense of uncertainty about the increasing presence of AI and the job market. In one Wall Street Journal article published this month, companies predict that 2026 will be the “worst college grad job market in five years,” partly due to AI. In another, it was noted that corporate HR departments are taking steps to “quell employee fears” about automation. And in a 2025 Gallup poll, over 70% of respondents believed that AI would reduce the number of jobs over the next decade.
Accordingly, Locke shared his belief that education — both in management and in other disciplines — must be reinvented so students are “upskilled” in terms of interdisciplinary knowledge and literacy, with technology serving as a tool. He also emphasized equipping students with stronger “value-oriented” mindsets as they prepare for changing white-collar workplace demands.
Locke, a former executive at Apple, specifically referred to his time at the Cupertino-based technology giant as a guide to the importance of values in the workplace. “People were flushed out not because they weren’t good at tech, but because they didn’t align with the values of the company,” Locke said.
But job market changes may vary depending on the industry. This year’s MIT Fall Career Fair in September saw an increase in the number of represented organizations compared to last year, with 225 taking part this year relative to 180 in 2024. Computer software, hardware, and quantitative finance companies were notably well-represented.
Other scholars have argued that the discourse around AI has the potential to discourage young people from entering AI or learning how to code. Stanford Adjunct Professor Andrew Ng SM ’98, founder of Google Brain and Coursera, wrote about an email conversation he had with a high-schooler who was worried that AI would leave him with no “meaningful work” after college in a recent issue of his “The Batch” newsletter.
Ng reassured the student that there would be “plenty of work” for him “for decades hence” and added that “hype about AI” was beginning to be harmful due to its adverse effect on young people’s ambitions.
“AI has stark limitations, and despite rapid improvements, it will remain limited compared to humans for a long time,” Ng wrote.
Moreover, a New York Times article published in August of this year reported that many corporate investments in AI — amounting to billions of dollars — have yet to pay off in the form of tangible productivity gains.
Yet many AI startups are still looking to capitalize from the craze for automation. One of the hottest new buzzwords in Silicon Valley is “agentic AI” — the idea that some AI assistants could be deployed to independently take action and automate full jobs and routines end-to-end.
According to research from the MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group from Nov. 18, out of 2,102 respondents who represented organizations across 21 industries and 116 countries, 35% say that their organizations have begun using “agentic AI” and 44% indicate that they plan to do so soon.
More conspicuously, new controversial billboards in San Francisco from the AI startup Artisan call for employers to hire their “Artisan bot” instead of humans.
“Artisans won’t come into work hungover,” one billboard reads. Another declares, “Artisans won’t complain about work-life balance.”