Design graduate Harriet Lindsay has spent nearly a year emailing, calling and applying – but she still can’t land a job after spending $25,000 to obtain her UTS degree.
After contacting about 200 design firms across Australia, the 23-year-old from Sydney’s Northern Beaches is starting to wonder whether she should have gone to university at all.
“No one left with a job,” she said of the 90-person cohort who completed the degree.
“Some people have gone to honours.”
Graduates across Australia are sounding the alarm over the lack of entry-level positions needed to get them into the workforce, as part of a news.com.au investigation into the widespread human impacts that AI is having on our nation in just a few short years.
According to Indeed, graduate job postings fell 15 per cent in 2025 year-on-year in Australia, down 35 per cent from 2023, with fears AI is replacing junior workers.
Ms Lindsay said she felt “ripped off” with universities failing to prepare students for the reality of the AI market.
She said students were told not to use AI and instead trained in outdated programs that would soon be overtaken by AI models.
“Essentially, they’re not acknowledging how AI exists,” she said.
“It was like … this is how we’ve always done it, so this is how we’re going to do it.”
Ms Lindsay completed a Bachelor of Design in Product Design after deciding to switch from architecture, which she studied in her first year.
She said half of the course was spent training students in computer-aided design programs which are now being taken over by AI.
During her first internship while she was still studying, Ms Lindsay said she was immediately told to “just use AI” on projects – something she had never been trained in.
The program students were trained in costs $2000 for an individual license, which could explain the reluctance to adapt, she said.
Yet ironically, Ms Lindsay counts herself as one of the lucky ones, as she is still living at home and working in a pet store.
“At the end of the day, when we’re paying so much money (for a degree), it’s not really good enough … [the university] needs to keep up,” she said.
“It’s really annoying … we spend all this time and all this money, learning those skills that will eventually become almost obsolete.”
In a statement to news.com.au, Faculty of Design and Society Dean professor James Bennett said the degree had been updated in recent years to include more AI skills.
However, he said the university wanted to teach students “durable human skills” so they can “contextualise the value of AI-generated solutions”.
“We aim to teach our graduates creative and critical thinking, interpretation and reasoning – these are core to product design and they are the skills employers tell us are far more valuable than just technical understanding of AI,” he said.
AI taking over after school jobs, graduate roles
In September, a report released by the Australian Association of Graduate Employers revealed one in seven employers said AI was influencing the number of early career roles available within their organisation.
Earlier this year, law firm MinterEllison became the first major Australian practice to cut its graduate cohort due to AI.
The firm cut its graduate numbers by almost a third from the previous year – from 100 to 72.
In March, PwC Australia, which has cut entry-level roles by 6 per cent, announced it would be looking for half of its 2027 graduate intake to come from non-accounting backgrounds in response to AI.
Nic Rothquel, the founder of Alchemy Tuition, which employs about 2000 tutors across Australia, said he is receiving more applications from young Aussies than ever.
“Our sweet spot for a tutor is about [age] 18 to 23 … and we had about 10,000 applications last year of just people wanting to tutor with us,” he said.
Mr Rothquel said teenagers are struggling to find employment during school and university and after graduating in the age of AI, and are turning to tutoring as a result.
Last year, fast-food giant Hungry Jack’s began trialling the use of AI drive-through assistants, starting with their St Peters store in Sydney, with McDonald’s following suit last month with an AI trial at its Schofields store in Sydney’s west.
“It’s a wild time,” he said.
“You go to McDonald’s or Burger King, and they’ve got an AI person taking your orders, or you’re touching a screen.
“Just dealing with difficult customers and trying to solve problems … they’re just such crucial life skills that I feel so many young people are going to miss out on now because of the introduction of AI.”
GP AI receptionist trial
The replacement of entry-level jobs is not just being adopted by commercial businesses.
The federal government is also seemingly trialling the deletion of junior roles in one major industry – at the cost of $140,000 to taxpayers.
In a tender obtained by news.com.au in September, the Hunter New England and Central Coast Primary Health Network (HNECC PHN) called on GP clinics to participate in a 12-month pilot program to adopt “AI-enabled patient communication and reception tools”.
The 14 chosen clinics will each receive $10,000 for their participation from the PHN, which is funded by the federal government.
“The initiative will explore how AI can support routine administrative tasks such as phone calls, appointment booking and rescheduling, reminders, follow-ups, FAQs, after-hours inquiries and escalation to practice staff where required,” the expression of interest states.
In a statement to news.com.au, the PHN said the AI tools would still “require appropriate human oversight” and were intended to “complement, not replace, the work of practice staff”.
“By automating routine administrative tasks, these tools can improve efficiency and enable staff to focus more time on patient-centred care,” the statement said.
The Department of Health said that while the federal government funds the PHN, decisions about grants “are the responsibility of individual PHNs”.
Dr Liliana Laranjo, who is an associate professor in digital health at the University of Sydney, said she was concerned at the rate of AI entering into clinical settings without the appropriate safeguards.
About 40 per cent of Australian GPs are now using generative AI in Australia for notetaking.
“A GP receptionist is not just answering the phone,” she said.
“They can be the first person to recognise that a patient needs urgent medical attention.
“If the patient is asking for an appointment on the same day because they have chest pain and the AI does not recognise that as an potentially emergent situation that needs to be referred to ED, then that’s a problem.”
In August, a woman in the UK who was recovering from a stroke was unable to book in for an appointment after the AI receptionist failed to understand her speech.
Dr Laranjo also believes that human connection is vital when it comes to patient care.
“So when you call in with chest pain [the receptionist] might know, ‘Oh, it’s a chest pain, they’ve been having this for a while’,” Dr Laranjo said.
“The AI tool will never be able to have that level of understanding of the human dimension.”
Job cuts
AI is already causing major shifts within the Australian job market, with NAB recently announcing they would be slashing 2500 jobs in a major restructure.
In the announcement, the job cuts were blamed on “rapid technological change”, but NAB stopped short of attributing them to AI directly.
Last month, Kmart announced a number of roles from its tech department would be removed due to AI.
Earlier this year, software firm WiseTech announced it would be slashing 2000 jobs over the course of 18 months as AI impacted the industry.
Dr Sue Keay, director of the UNSW AI Institute, said Australia needed to be investing locally in artificial intelligence to ensure jobs and profits remain onshore.
“We have not seen any significant investment in artificial intelligence and I’m not the only member of the AI community that’s been trying to raise alarms about that,” she said.
“We see a never-ending stream of our talent moving offshore.
“I don’t think there would be too much that needs to change to make an environment here where we could actually benefit from the great talent that we produce and those technologies and keep a lot of the benefits here in Australia.”
Get in touch. Sarah.Keoghan@news.com.au