Young graduates across Southeast Asia are facing growing difficulties entering the workforce as artificial intelligence (AI) replaces routine tasks traditionally assigned to entry-level employees, raising concerns about employment prospects, skills shortages and the future of professional careers.
Although there is not yet evidence of large-scale AI-driven job losses across the region, the technology is already affecting recruitment and opportunities for inexperienced workers, according to a report published by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in July. The organisation estimates that nearly 80 million Southeast Asian workers, representing more than one-fifth of the region’s workforce, will be affected by AI. Of these, approximately 11.7 million could lose their jobs outright or have their work entirely transformed.
The pressure is particularly evident in marketing, administration, customer service and creative industries, where generative AI can produce written content, images, presentations and other materials at lower cost. These are also the fields in which graduates traditionally acquire their first professional experience before progressing to more specialised responsibilities.
In Malaysia, 24-year-old marketing graduate Nafeesa Azman has applied for between 200 and 300 jobs over two months without securing permanent employment that meets her salary expectations or makes use of her qualifications. She said AI-generated content had reduced opportunities for copywriting and visual production, while employers increasingly offered lower salaries.
“My expected [monthly] salary is at least 3,000 ringgit [US$730], but many offers fall short and don’t seem to reflect the skills and knowledge I have gained,” she said. Although she considers AI useful, she argued that it should support rather than replace the creative process.
Singapore is also showing signs of weaker graduate recruitment. A survey of the city state’s six public universities, conducted late last year and released in March, found that the proportion of job-seeking graduates securing employment within six months of their final examinations fell to 83.4 per cent in 2025, from 87.1 per cent in 2024.
Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong warned on 12 October that AI could already have broken the “bottom rung” of the career ladder by making routine work such as note-taking, speech drafting and preparing presentation slides increasingly obsolete.
“So employers will need to be more deliberate in thinking about training and mentoring of their young officers,” Wong said at the DBS Asia Future Forward Conference. He added that the government was examining the issue sector by sector.
Singapore has agreed to subsidise companies that employ students as interns to provide workplace training before graduation. The government has also announced a S$1 billion (US$780 million) investment in worker upskilling, infrastructure, advanced hardware and research and development.
An April report by Singapore’s Manpower Ministry found that among companies that had adopted AI, 6.2 per cent reported reduced staffing levels and 8.5 per cent reported lower recruitment activity.
Thailand faces a different combination of challenges. Around 44 per cent of the country’s unemployed population are graduates aged between 20 and 24, many with qualifications that do not match available jobs, according to a briefing paper by the Kasikorn Research Centre. Although investment in AI infrastructure is creating new employment opportunities, weaknesses in the education system have left the country short of graduates trained in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Thongnuakao Kampim, co-founder of Thai AI consultancy AEIOU, said businesses were increasingly relying on AI to perform the routine assignments through which new employees traditionally acquired experience.
“Normally, fresh graduates learn on the job,” she said. “It might take one or two years for them to get through the learning curve and become proficient at what they do, but now AI can already handle those initial tasks, and in many cases, it can do them even better.”
The consequences extend to the Philippines, where nearly two million people work in business process outsourcing, an industry that provides approximately 850,000 graduates with their first jobs annually. The sector is considered particularly vulnerable to automation.
For graduates unable to secure alternative employment, the transition is already difficult. Malaysian finance graduate Andy Iskandar Baharudin, 23, said he had applied to more than 100 companies since completing an internship in July, only to encounter entry-level vacancies frequently requiring two years of previous experience.
“How are we supposed to gain experience as fresh graduates if even getting an opportunity to work is difficult?” he said.
At an International Monetary Fund panel in Bangkok, managing director Kristalina Georgieva warned that young people traditionally entering professional routine jobs could instead find themselves working in lower-paid service occupations. “That is not what young people aspire for,” she said.
