In an exclusive interaction with NDTV's CEO and Editor-in-Chief Rahul Kanwal, Google DeepMind's Chief AI Readiness Officer Lila Ibrahim shared advice for young engineers graduating and getting into the workforce on how to tackle the AI disruption.
Ibrahim - who herself is an electrical engineer by training - said that in the backdrop of entry level engineering jobs drying up as companies increasingly embrace automation, the most important question for young techies is: "What are you doing in your job where it's so very human - you are bringing in your unique skill into that task, into that problem solving."
"And I think those are the skills we need to look for while hiring and during our talent development strategy and we need to reward. So I really encourage people to take a little bit of a look inward to say 'what are you bringing into this?'."
AI has significantly reduced entry-level and junior software engineering hiring by automating routine tasks like writing boilerplate code, basic SQL queries, unit tests, and debugging.
Ibrahim, whose role at Google's AI arm - is to help prepare governments, institutions and society for the impact of increasingly powerful AI systems - firmly believes that while most tasks can be automated with AI, there are some that need human nuance, "need human understanding of culture and people."
With the AI boom, entry-level tech and software engineering hiring at major companies has fallen sharply, with estimates showing a 25% to 55% drop in junior job postings since peak years.
In India, roughly 37% of entry-level tasks are now handled or augmented by AI, and traditional fresher/on-campus tech hiring has faced multi-year declines (with fresher roles making up a small fraction of active tech openings), according to a joint global research study titled "The AI Workforce Pulse: The Adaptability Imperative," released in June 2026 by Cognizant and Pearson.