Is Retail Merchandising the Outlier in AI's Entry-Level Cut?

Recent labor-market data point to a sharp divergence in how artificial intelligence is reshaping entry-level work. Stanford Digital Economy Lab researchers, drawing on ADP payroll records covering millions of US workers, reported in August 2025 that employment among workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations fell roughly 13 percent between late 2022 and mid-2025, while comparable roles outside that group held flat or grew.

That finding has fueled a broader question: which entry-level roles, if any, remain insulated? The International Business Times article "AI is Cutting Entry-level Jobs. Could the Opposite be Happening in Retail Merchandising?" points to one candidate — merchandising, the planning function that decides what stores stock, in what quantities, and at what prices.

What retail merchandising actually involves

Merchandising sits at the intersection of buying, planning, and analytics. Buyers select product assortments; planners translate those choices into inventory, pricing, and promotional calendars. The work relies heavily on demand forecasting, vendor negotiation, and category-level financial modeling, disciplines that have used statistical models for decades.

What distinguishes merchandising from other entry-level white-collar work is its physical-data feedback loop. Every markdown, endcap display, and regional promotion generates measurable sell-through data within weeks. Analysts can test forecasts against ground truth quickly, and judgment grounded in tactile product familiarity still influences buyers' choices.

Why the question of an opposite trajectory is plausible

Three structural features make merchandising a candidate for an AI-resistant entry-level pipeline:

• Scale. Major US retailers together employ several hundred thousand merchandising assistants, planners, and allocators, according to National Retail Federation workforce estimates.
• Accountability. Planogram changes and promotional pricing decisions carry direct revenue and shrink implications; retailers have been slow to delegate those judgments to fully autonomous systems.
• Cost of error. A misallocated shipment costs the company money; a misjudged markdown erodes margin. These consequences dampen managerial appetite for removing human planners from the loop.

What the available evidence does not yet say

The IBT framing raises an empirical question the public reporting does not fully resolve. Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational data do not break out merchandising as a distinct category; the work is folded into "buyers and purchasing agents" (53,200 jobs in 2023, BLS) and "market research analysts" (837,000 jobs in May 2023, BLS), making it difficult to isolate AI exposure for the function alone.

Sophisticated retailers — including those that have deployed generative AI for assortment descriptions, demand sensing, and vendor communications — have not, on the public record, published headcount figures separating AI-displaced merchandising roles from net new hires in the same function.

What an individual merchandiser should watch

For workers already in or considering merchandising, the practical question is which tasks within the role are contracting and which are expanding. The contracting tier includes:

• Vendor outreach and routine communications
• Planogram drafting from templates
• Basic replenishment analysis

The expanding tier includes:

• Forecast interpretation under unusual conditions
• Vendor relationship management
• Exception handling for stockouts and overstocks

A merchandiser who can read a forecast critically, negotiate with a supplier, and defend a category strategy is positioned in the expanding tier; one whose output is a weekly replenishment file is in the contracting tier, regardless of employer.

The unresolved gap

The headline's "opposite" hypothesis is, on present evidence, a question rather than a finding — and retailers that have not disclosed headcount data by function leave the labor-market answer to the analysts, not the marketers, of the field.