The AI Squeeze: Fewer Juniors, Exiting Seniors, and a Burned-Out Middle in Singapore
Source: ThinkChina
Singapore's AI debate has mostly been about the young and the old: graduates struggling to land first jobs, and experienced workers choosing to leave early. A NUS academic argues the real pressure is landing on the middle — the mid-career workers absorbing the work that both groups used to do, at a moment...
Singapore's AI debate has mostly been about the young and the old: graduates struggling to land first jobs, and experienced workers choosing to leave early. A NUS academic argues the real pressure is landing on the middle — the mid-career workers absorbing the work that both groups used to do, at a moment when AI is making everyone's job harder rather than easier.
Weiyi Ng, an assistant professor of strategy and policy at NUS, lays out the squeeze in a new essay for ThinkChina. The World Economic Forum reported a 35% fall in entry-level hiring over 18 months, and Singapore mirrors the pattern: full-time graduate employment has fallen for three consecutive years, from 87.5% in 2022 to 74.4% in 2025, with the share of graduates receiving zero job offers doubling since 2023. At the other end, the proportion of Singapore residents above 60 neither working nor seeking work rose from 54.9% to 56.3%. The work both groups did does not disappear — it is absorbed by whoever remains.
The uncomfortable finding is that AI is not delivering the relief it promised. An eight-month University of California, Berkeley study of a 200-person tech company found employees who adopted AI tools did not work less — they took on broader tasks and extended their hours, in what researchers dubbed "workload creep". An IESE Business School study of 138 million US workers in AI-exposed sectors found firms cut junior positions by 4% while adding mid-level positions by the same amount — and cut starting salaries for those roles by 5.9%. Work is not disappearing, Ng writes; it is being reclassified upward, at lower pay. A National Bureau of Economic Research survey of nearly 6,000 executives found over 80% report no impact from AI on employment or productivity — the paradox McKinsey calls the "gen AI paradox".
The consequences are already measurable in Singapore. Jobstreet's 2025 Workplace Happiness Index found millennials aged 30-44 the least satisfied generation at 52%, with satisfaction with stress levels at just 31% — workers in their 30s and 40s, laden with mortgages and ageing parents, who cannot afford to exit. A Duke-NUS Medical School and Institute of Mental Health study estimated mental-health-related productivity losses cost the Singaporean economy S$15.7 billion annually. Meanwhile the old-age support ratio has nearly halved from 6.0 in 2014 to 3.5 in 2024, projected to reach 2.7 by 2030 — and seniors who leave the workforce do not escape AI, they simply shift the cost of inclusion onto the state.
Why it matters for Singapore: Singapore has treated AI adoption speed as a national imperative, and Budget 2026 pours money into research, workforce transformation and technological literacy. Ng's argument is that the country also needs to price in the societal costs of adoption — burnout, lost institutional knowledge as seniors exit before juniors are hired to replace them, and the retraining bill for workers the private sector chose not to retain. For a workforce as compressed as Singapore's, how the AI transition is managed may matter as much as how fast it happens.
