Bill McDermott, the chief executive of enterprise software giant ServiceNow, told CNBC this week that unemployment among recent college graduates could climb into the mid-30 percent range within a couple of years as AI agents absorb entry-level corporate work. “I think young people coming out of university today is like 9% unemployment,” McDermott said on Squawk on the Street. “I think it could easily go into the mid-thirties in the next couple of years.”
The prediction is striking partly because of who is making it. ServiceNow sells the platforms that companies use to deploy those agents at scale. McDermott was simultaneously making the case for his company’s business model and conceding its consequences for a generation entering the workforce. On the same call, he noted that ServiceNow’s active users are up 25% year-over-year, even as overall hiring at client companies has stalled — a dynamic he attributed to agents covering more territory than human teams ever could.
His concern centers on what he calls “nondifferentiating roles” — the repetitive, process-heavy work that has historically filled out the early careers of new graduates. “For the nondifferentiating roles, so much of the work is going to be done by agents,” he said. “So it’s going to be challenging for young people to differentiate themselves in the corporate environment.” As an example, he cited ServiceNow’s work with clients like Pepsi, Panasonic, and NVIDIA, where the platform has taken over 90% of the customer service use cases that once required human workers.
The warning lands at an already difficult moment for young job seekers. About 58% of Gen Z students who graduated in 2024 and 2025 were still looking for their first job, compared to roughly 25% of millennial and Gen X graduates in prior years, according to early-career platform Handshake. Job postings on the platform fell more than 16% between August 2024 and August 2025, while the average number of applications per open role jumped 26%.
McDermott is not alone among executives flagging the structural shift. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink warned this week that the class of 2026 could face the highest graduate unemployment in years, calling it a crisis for Gen Z workers even without a broader recession. U.S. Senator Mark Warner earlier flagged a 25% unemployment scenario for recent graduates, describing it as a level of social disruption without precedent.
For ServiceNow, McDermott frames the same trend as a commercial opportunity. He told CNBC that by 2030, enterprises will have added roughly 3 billion non-human digital agents, and that ServiceNow is the only platform that natively manages agents from multiple software vendors. “We will have billions of users in the next several years that we could have never gotten from human beings,” he said. The company has moved into security and non-human identity management, businesses it was not in a year ago, betting that the governance risks of autonomous agents will need the kind of audit and compliance layer ServiceNow already provides to IT departments.
Since ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, U.S. job postings have declined by nearly 32%, according to a November 2025 analysis of Federal Reserve data. Hiring of new graduates at 15 of the largest tech companies fell by more than 50% since 2019.
