Key takeaways : There is no drop in demand for electrical engineering graduates, but the demands on their education and work experience are changing. Agents are now doing many tasks that were considered the work of junior engineers, but there are new higher-level tasks for them to do. There is an opportunity for junior engineers to help retrain senior engineers in the use of AI. Experts at the Table : Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss what is happening with the latest college graduates in the face of AI adoption, with Chuck Alpert, fellow at Cadence ; Thomas Andersen, vice president of AI and ML at Synopsys ; Simon Davidmann, AI and EDA researcher at Southampton University; Nagesh Gupta, CEO of llmda.ai; Dave Kelf, CEO of Breker Verification Systems; and Kexun Zhang, Head of Research from ChipAgents . What follows are excerpts of that discussion. This is the first article in a three-part series. Clockwise from top left: Southampton University’s Davidmann; Breker’s Kelf; Synopsys’ Andersen; ChipAgents’ Kexun; llmda’s Gupta; and Cadence’s Alpert. SE: AI is disruptive to EDA, the semiconductor industry, and to their customers. One early indication is that computer science (CS) grads are struggling to find jobs. In the past, they were highly sought after. Today, they have moved to a higher unemployability rate than the general averages. What’s going on? Gupta : From my observations, data science is much more significantly affected compared to computer science. I’ve been looking for computer science grads, but from good universities. There are not that many good CS grads available. It’s more of the data science that seems to be affected. Alpert : We know that the vibe-coding tools — Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot — are improving the productivity of computer scientists, and so it’s natural there will be a hiring slowdown. Companies are spending a lot of money on Claude and OpenAI for these things, and they don’t want to hire quite so many engineers at quite the same rate. Andersen : When we talk about computer scientists, or folks in our industry, there are two aspects to consider. There are folks that write EDA software, and then there are chip design companies. I would agree that when it comes to software development, everybody’s a little cautious because they want to see how much AI can automate things. At the same time, when we work on new technology and new releases, everyone wants to know how you can do it faster. If I can do things faster and more efficiently, if I can make releases every three months and develop software faster, that is definitely beneficial. On the chip designer side, it’s not quite at the same level because they are not like traditional software programmers. They are primarily experts in chip design, and they are users of tools. There’s been a shortage of those people for quite some time. To some degree, AI is helping address that shortage, but it’s not that humans are going away. Humans are just elevating the tasks that they’re doing, and can be more efficient, and then they can develop more chips. How long does it take to get a chip out the door? If somebody says I can do it in half the time, everybody would love it. Alpert : I’m guessing none of this applies to electrical engineers (EE) because there is still a huge gap in demand for design expertise. I don’t know if there’s a slowdown there. Davidmann : I did some digging around for the UK market, and they reckon that the graduate market is difficult, but AI is not the only cause. They said that from 2022 to 2026, graduate recruitment among leading employers fell 24%, but that is about economic uncertainty, reduced budgets, corrections, and post-pandemic hiring changes. AI has come into an area that was already complicated. It’s not easy to work out what effect AI is having. From an engineering point of view, they said that graduate engineers are finding employment within 15 months of graduating. So 75% of them got jobs, and that’s pre