AI and ‘seniorisation’ are fuelling a generational conflict within companies
A PwC report analysing over a billion job adverts paints a picture of the new labour market: young people will be entering the office as managers straight away. It is the new ‘1968’ of the white-collar world; the class war has begun at the top echelons of management.
Throw away your HR handbooks. Certainly, those that described a career as a linear ladder — junior, middle, senior, manager — are about as useful today as a 1997 road map for finding your way around Milan. Artificial intelligence is reshaping the labour market. But not in the way we were led to believe. It’s not just the usual story of jobs disappearing. It’s more radical than that. It’s changing the balance of power within companies.
In its “Global AI Jobs Barometer 2026”, PwC analysed over a billion job advertisements across six continents. The verdict is clear: AI does not merely eliminate tasks. It eliminates career steps. PwC’s economists have coined a technical, almost sociological term – a managerial neologism: ‘seniorisation’, which has no immediate translation into Italian other than ‘seniorizzazione’, meaning nothing more than the forced maturation of skills. In short: junior roles are dying out.
What does an intern do?
Until yesterday, you’d join a company and learn on the job. You’d do repetitive tasks, watch others, make mistakes, and grow. It was a training ground. Today, that training ground is taken over by an algorithm. Excel? AI does it. Presentations? AI does them. Reports? AI writes them. Code? AI generates it. In a matter of seconds. Without a coffee break.
And so something paradoxical happens: the new graduate is no longer asked simply to carry out tasks. They are asked to make decisions. Strategy. Problem-solving. Critical judgement. Project management. The ability to make quick decisions in complex situations. Skills that used to take five or ten years of work to acquire. The ‘junior’ is disappearing. Or rather: the junior must think like a senior from day one.
The new class war in the office
This is where a rift is opening up. And it is not a technological one. It is a social one. ‘Seniorisation’ risks turning into a ‘class war at the top levels of management’. Because AI is not democratising power. It is concentrating it. On the one hand, there are traditional senior managers, who have come up through vertical hierarchies, where experience meant seniority. On the other, young professionals are emerging who, thanks to AI, can produce as entire teams and think like mini-managers far sooner than expected. Experience accumulated over decades risks losing its value in a matter of months. Not because it is no longer needed. But because its market value is changing. Power will no longer lie with those who know how to do things. It will lie with those who know how to orchestrate people, machines and algorithms.
