Employers Still Want MBAs Even as One in Three Hands Entry-Level Work to AI
A GMAC survey of 621 corporate recruiters finds business degrees as trusted as ever and hiring on the rise, even as one in three companies hands junior work to AI and the skills employers prize shift toward what machines cannot do
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For two years, business schools have braced for a blunt question about whether artificial intelligence would make their graduates redundant. The recruiters who actually do the hiring have given a more tangled answer. Their faith in the degree is intact, even as they quietly rewrite what they expect it to deliver.
That tension runs through the 2026 Corporate Recruiters Survey from the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), the nonprofit behind the GMAT admissions test, released on 25 June.
The survey drew responses from 621 recruiters and hiring managers across 39 countries, just over half of them at Global Fortune 500 companies, among the world’s largest by revenue.
Every one reported at least some confidence in graduate management education, the umbrella term for the MBA and the shorter, more specialized business master’s degrees in fields such as finance, management and data analytics.
The complication shows up at the bottom of the ladder. One in three employers said they had handed at least some entry-level work to AI, a shift concentrated in technology, where 40% had done so, and manufacturing, at 36%.
Consulting and finance, the sectors that have long hired business graduates in bulk, reported the lowest rates, at 25% and 22%.
Asked what the software had taken over, recruiters named coding, data entry and customer service, not the higher-judgment analytical work that many assume is most exposed.
What employers want in a new hire is moving in two directions at once. Demand for AI ability grew faster over the year than demand for anything else the survey measured, and recruiters expect the ability to use AI tools to be the single most important skill in their hiring five years from now.
For today’s decisions, though, AI ranks only 14th on a list of 22 skills, and graduates are seen as among the least ready to use it well.
The abilities employers lean on now are older and harder for software to imitate. Communication sits at the top, with problem-solving and adaptability just behind, and the sharpest gainer was data analysis, which climbed from 10th to 4th in a single year.
GMAC made this its main message, with the headline “In the Age of AI, Employers Say Human Skills Matter More Than Ever.”
As AI does more of the routine analysis and writing, companies need people who can judge whether its work is any good, and who can change course and carry their colleagues along when it is not.
None of this has dented hiring plans. More employers intend to hire graduates of every degree type in 2026 than actually did in 2025, and better than a third expect to take on more MBAs than they did last year.
Pay is the one figure that slipped. GMAC put the median starting salary for a US MBA at $120,000, down from $125,000 a year earlier, and for other business master’s graduates at $82,500, down from $92,500.
That drop carries a heavy asterisk. GMAC says the year-to-year change is not statistically significant, meaning it is small enough to be a quirk of who happened to answer this year’s survey rather than proof that salaries are actually falling.
Even at the lower number, MBAs are still expected to out-earn both new bachelor’s graduates and experienced professionals hired straight from industry, the people companies poach from rivals rather than recruit on campus.
There is a further caution for anyone reading the optimism too literally. Recruiters consistently predict more hiring than they deliver, especially for the specialized master’s degrees. The MBA forecast tends to land close, with 90% of employers saying last year they would hire MBAs and 88% following through, but projections for degrees such as the master’s in data analytics have overshot actual hiring by ten points or more.
The survey also caught a quieter shift in where business talent ends up working. About four in ten US employers said they had pulled back on hiring international graduates, blaming current US government policy, and roughly a quarter of American companies said they would route more of that hiring to offices outside the country.
Employers elsewhere are headed the other way. Four in five recruiters in Western Europe and Asia said they were willing to hire graduates who need additional legal documentation, which in plain terms means visa sponsorship to work, and willingness in Western Europe jumped 17 points in a year.
That tilt toward technology was most pronounced among recruiters in Central and South Asia. They placed technology and IT skills at the very top of their current wish list, named by 81%, ahead of communication at 75% and AI tools at 71%, and they reported some of the firmest plans of any region to hire graduates from abroad.
One result cut against the confident mood, and it was among the few the survey could call statistically solid. The share of employers who felt new graduates were as professional as the cohorts before them fell to 52% from 61%.
GMAC defined professionalism in everyday terms, as reliability, showing respect, taking accountability and looking the part, and recruiters in consulting and manufacturing were the hardest to please.
