Nafeesa Azman has applied for hundreds of jobs over the past two months, yet the 24-year-old Malaysian marketing graduate is yet to find a permanent role that pays what she needs or uses the skills she spent years, and a good deal of money, developing.

Natthanicha Intawong, a final-year media arts student in Bangkok, describes the terror many of her peers feel as they prepare to enter a jobs market that artificial intelligence is already beginning to scythe through.

For Joshua Nai, a Singaporean graduate, the writing was quite literally on the wall. He completed a three-year diploma in animation and game art at Singapore Polytechnic in 2024, but abandoned his dream of a career in gaming after seeing the increasing amounts of AI-generated artwork being used in the industry and elsewhere.

It was “a slap in the face”, he said. “It seems like people have forgotten the human ingenuity that makes art meaningful.”Nai has since changed course on his career ambitions and now works full-time in a gym.

Across Southeast Asia, millions of graduates are entering a workforce that has been irrevocably changed by generative AI: the software behind popular chatbots ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek and the like that produces text, images and code from short written instructions.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that nearly 80 million Southeast Asian workers – or more than one-fifth of the region’s total workforce – will be affected by the rise of AI. Some 11.7 million could lose their jobs outright or see their tasks entirely reworked, it said.

Though an ILO report published in July found no evidence of large-scale AI-driven regional job losses as yet, the first effects are beginning to be felt at the bottom of the career ladder.

Graduates, who traditionally learn on the job during their first few years in a role doing routine work such as taking notes, preparing slides and compiling data, are increasingly finding that AI can now do those tasks faster and cheaper.

“If you are in a repetitive task job, kiss it goodbye,” Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, told a panel discussion on AI in Bangkok earlier this month for online.

Singapore, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ wealthiest member, is already showing early signs of slower graduate hiring as it struggles to match the aspirations of the region’s best-educated young people with suitable work.

A survey by the city state’s six public universities conducted late last year and released in March found that the share of job-seeking graduates who found work within six months of their final exams fell to 83.4 per cent in 2025 from 87.1 per cent in 2024.

Whether the change is gradual or sudden, every country in the region is now grappling with the fallout from a new technology that pits professional experience and judgment against machine minds that are at once faster and cheaper.

In the Philippines, concerns are mounting that AI could replace at least some of the nearly 2 million people employed in the business process outsourcing sector that handles administrative tasks for foreign clients – and provides about 850,000 graduates with their first job every year.

donesia, where the ILO estimates around 13 per cent of young people are already unemployed, a further hollowing out of entry-level work carries political risks among restive students who have repeatedly taken to the streets in recent months to protest against government policies.

For young people without the means to retrofit their education, catching the AI wave is becoming increasingly difficult.

The technology has already ravaged Malaysia’s marketing sector, according to Nafeesa, taking away copywriting and visual-content production work with the stroke of a few well-aimed chatbot prompts.

She finished an internship around two months ago and says she has since applied for “200 to 300 jobs” without success as the rise of AI pares back the available roles and employers armed with machine assistants lowball on pay.

“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,” Nafeesa said.

“AI can be useful but it shouldn’t replace the entire creative process,” she said, arguing that the technology was best employed to help generate ideas “rather than supplanting human creativity”.

The big beasts of AI are fond of prophesying about a machine-scripted future that is as as unpredictable and dangerous as it is abundant and exciting.

In Bangkok this month, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark called AI a form of “creative destruction”, using an economist’s term for new innovations and industries replacing old ones.

He said job losses were likely in fields with high exposure to AI, such as call centres, while simultaneously predicting employment would grow in other areas such as scientific research – and calling the technology’s potential to create jobs in entirely new industries a major unknown.

Anthropic, whose chatbot Claude is among the world’s most used, is preparing for an initial public offering that could value the company at up to US$2 trillion – making Clark and his fellow founders unfathomably rich.

At the other end of the spectrum, the advent of the AI age has those who are about to join the workforce overcome by a sense of powerlessness.

“I’m terrified,” Natthanicha said. “AI technology keeps getting more advanced and I’m worried it will replace human labour.”She dreams of becoming an actress, already a tough calling, but as AI-generated scripts and videos increasingly pervade the entertainment industry, the 25-year-old is realistic about her chances of success.

“Businesses will not waste money hiring when they know there’s technology available that’s faster, better and costs [next to] nothing,” she said.

“I guess at the end of the day I’d rather just make a living than wait for the right opportunity to come so I can do my dream job.”Natthanicha is among the six in 10 Thai graduates who study humanities and social sciences, fields that feed many of the jobs most exposed to AI.

And the ranks of unemployed graduates are growing. About 44 per cent of Thailand’s unemployed are graduates aged 20 to 24, many with skills that do not match the jobs market, according to a recent briefing paper from the Kasikorn Research Centre.

At the same time, jobs are being created thanks to the billions of US dollars’ worth of investment in AI infrastructure that is pouring into the country – but a chronically underfunded and unreformed education system has left it short of the science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates these industries need.

The government must therefore bring its universities up to speed to teach young people about a technology that is already here, according to observers. Yet while it scrambles to fund plans to upskill the graduates leaving university in their thousands every year, entry-level roles are quietly disappearing.

“Normally, fresh graduates learn on the job,” said Thongnuakao Kampim, co-founder of AEIOU, an AI consultancy for Thai businesses.

“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. As a result, business owners no longer have the same need, or the time, to train them.”Secretaries, clerks, administrators and those who made presentation decks, kept records or entered data were all becoming redundant, the 37-year-old said – the selfsame roles that once gave newcomers an entry point and an understanding of a company’s systems, culture and expertise.

“A company that once employed thousands of people might shrink to just 100,” she said. “There will simply be fewer seats available within organisations, fewer positions to fill. It will become a game of musical chairs when it comes to hiring people and competing for jobs.”New roles, such as that of office “AI champion”, who helps a firm compete using AI agents and expertise, may also prove out of reach for graduates gradually being frozen out of the jobs market.

“It’s not just about being good at using AI,” Thongnuakao said. “They need other skills … like the ability to develop and upskill people across the organisation so that employees can effectively use AI in their work.”The very nature of work is changing, according to business analysts, demanding constantly updated skills from workers and pushing employers to embed AI throughout their operations just to stay ahead.

“Delayed adoption risks widening skill gaps and weakening competitiveness,” consultancy PwC Malaysia said in a July report. “Ultimately, the advantage will come not just from technology, but from effectively integrating and managing it – across people, processes and AI.”For jobless graduates, adapting to the AI age is easier said than done. Andy Iskandar Baharudin, 23, a finance graduate from a Malaysian public university, has applied to more than 100 companies since finishing an accounting and administration internship in July.

He spends his days slogging through job applications, trying to stay upbeat about his prospects as he completes round upon round of speculative emails and calls.

“As fresh graduates, we not only have to compete with other applicants, but also continually upgrade our skills to keep up with technological developments,” he said, lamenting the amount of competition for entry-level jobs that often called for two years’ prior experience.

“How are we supposed to gain experience as fresh graduates if even getting an opportunity to work is difficult?” he added.

“Not every fresh graduate who is still unemployed is being too picky or isn’t trying to find work. We do want to work, gain experience and build our own careers. It’s just that sometimes the opportunities are so hard to come by.”In Singapore, the promise of employment and “the good life” in return for working hard in school and college is, in many respects, part of the social contract. But with that well-worn path no longer as certain as it once was, policymakers are speaking frankly about what the future might look like.

AI might have already broken the “bottom rung” of the career ladder, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said at the DBS Asia Future Forward Conference on October 12. Routine tasks such as note-taking, speech drafting and preparing PowerPoint slides would soon be obsolete, he said.

“So employers will need to be more deliberate in thinking about training and mentoring of their young officers,” Wong said. “And that is something we are studying in Singapore, sector by sector.”As part of that push, the government has agreed to subsidise companies that take on students as interns, with the aim of teaching them the systems, culture and soft skills they will need before graduating into a transformed workforce.

So far, job losses in the city state attributable to AI appear to be little more than a trickle, but that could become a flood as use of the technology expands across industries.

Of those Singapore firms that have adopted AI, 6.2 per cent reported lowered headcount and another 8.5 per cent reported lower hiring activity, an April report by the Manpower Ministry found.

Wong said there was still time to retrain workers affected by AI and match them to new job opportunities. This year, the city state unveiled ambitious plans to do just that, including a S$1 billion (US$780 million) investment in worker upskilling, infrastructure upgrades, securing advanced hardware and research and development.

“That is what we are doing in Singapore and hopefully that is what, over time, the global economy will be able to do for the rest of the world as well,” he said at the October 12 conference.

Singapore has won praise for its foresight and preparation. But it is a small, wealthy state with a strong record in planning, adopting technology and implementing policy.

For other Southeast Asian nations, the outlook is bleaker. The IMF has warned that already unequal economies risk becoming even more so as a few people earn a premium for harnessing AI technology while most stay trapped in a service class.

“You get young people, who would normally have gone into professional routine jobs, now serving coffee in Starbucks,” IMF chief Georgieva told the Bangkok summit. “That is not what young people aspire for.”