For those of us in the startup world, AI has been a source of constant excitement, new opportunities, and a whole new way of thinking about how to build and scale companies.

This excitement has also been accompanied by genuine concerns, and not surprisingly, a top concern has consistently been AI’s impact on jobs. With super intelligent computers replacing all white-collar work, will there be any jobs left for humans to do? And fresh graduates, without existing networks or any real-life experience have seemed especially vulnerable.

But an article by Andrew Hill in today’s Financial Times shares recent data and the latest trends on the fresh graduate front, and the news is actually quite good.

Most noteworthy is that an April survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers showed US companies expected to hire 5.6 per cent more new college graduates this year compared to last year’s expectations of zero growth for the 2026 grads.

Secondly, a June survey by PwC of more than 1bn job listings globally points to a “seniorisation” of entry level jobs, meaning that new joiners are given more decision authority, more people management responsibility, and generally a broader scope and remit in their roles.

This in particular is actually quite good news. Many of us at QED Investors were active and instrumental in scaling Capital One in the early days, right before and after the IPO in 1994, and one thing that stood out back then was the amount of decision making and management responsibility young grads were given right out of college.

The supporting technology back then was not AI, but rather the latest data mining tools, and using one of the largest commercial databases at the time, the “inexperienced” team at Capital One was able to 20x market cap from around $1bn at IPO to $20bn over ten years.

In fact, it was quite common back then for twenty-something professionals at Capital One to run P&Ls in the $100s of millions, extending billions in credit lines as we quickly became a household name in the US.

And many years later, as Nigel Morris and others from the Capital One team founded QED Investors and set out on a journey to help scale the next big fintechs, we saw companies such as Nubank, Credit Karma, Zopa, Stream, Ramp, Payhawk, and others follow the same playbook of empowering talented new grads with the latest technology to build explosive and disruptive fintechs.

It is thus encouraging to see the same dynamic repeat itself once more, this time with AI and across a lot of different sectors.

And as usual, there are some key takeaways for founders and professionals in the startup community to consider beyond the headline data.

For example, while empowering young grads is great, inevitably every founder and CEO runs into the question of when to “layer” less experienced talent with more seasoned “grey hair”.

This is always a tough question, and while outside talent that brings with it some battle scars and knowhow is valuable, it is important to balance that with continuing to grow and develop home grown talent.

There is never an exact formula for making these kinds of trade-offs, but one thing we always recommend at QED is having dedicated talent discussions during board meetings. It is surprising to see how many boards do not spend enough time talking about their people, despite proclaiming themselves to be the ultimate people business.

So as we give our new grads more power and more responsibility, let us also dedicate time as founders, managers and investors to discuss how we best enable these new grads to flourish within our organizations. There is no stronger signal for a commitment to talent than having these discussions in depth at our board meetings.