For decades, the surest route for a talented new graduate was a job at a bank or a consulting firm. It offered high pay, a brand name that opens doors and the freedom to do almost anything afterward. Alternatives such as Teach for America pulled in real talent. None fully broke the hold of banking and consulting on the insecure overachiever who wants both income and status. Entry-level jobs putting AI to work inside organizations have a real shot at pulling those graduates away.
What gives them that shot is the size of the companies behind them. OpenAI and Anthropic have grown in value and profile to rival the banks and consulting firms that recruit the same graduates.
The most direct of the new jobs are in consulting businesses, which both companies have launched. Each sends engineers into client companies to rebuild how they use AI in daily work. The job suits the person banks and consulting firms have always hired. That person can manage a client, solve a problem under deadline and run a project inside another company.
Anthropic has gone further. It has committed $150 million to a fellowship for 1,000 people with under two years of work experience. Each spends a year inside a nonprofit, building AI tools and training the staff to keep them running. The fellowship works like Teach for America, with nonprofits in place of classrooms and AI as the subject.
Both paths teach the strategy, operations and management a young hire has always picked up in banking or consulting. The difference is the tools on top. A junior banker or consultant learns narrow ones, such as spreadsheets that estimate what a company is worth and pitch decks built for one client. Those lose much of their value outside finance. Wiring AI into how a team works is a skill that travels to any company, or to a new business.
These roles pay less than a first job in banking or consulting. Yet a skill that travels can buy the same freedom a brand name once promised, and that trade is what the two companies are testing. Both programs launched in 2026, which left neither with a graduate to compare against someone five years into banking or consulting.
