Rokt sees the Class of 2026 as uniquely valuable because AI has increased the leverage of early-career, AI-literate builders, and its culture, structure, and growth strategy are deliberately designed to turn that talent into long-term competitive advantage.
Rokt’s bet is simple: in an AI-first era, the companies that give ambitious graduates real tools, real problems, and real ownership will move faster than those waiting to see how the talent market shakes out.
As conversations about AI and entry-level hiring intensify across corporate America, Rokt’s CEO is making a different argument: companies that invest in young talent now will have a significant structural advantage.
The Wall Street Journal recently explored how artificial intelligence is reshaping the entry-level job market for this year’s college graduates, examining how companies are rethinking what early-career roles look like in an era of generative AI. Among the leaders featured in that coverage was Bruce Buchanan, co-founder and CEO of Rokt, the New York-based e-commerce technology company that will power more than 10 billion transactions in 2026. His perspective stood apart: rather than viewing AI as a reason to pull back on early-career hiring, Buchanan sees it as precisely why companies should double down on developing the next generation of builders.
That conviction is reflected throughout how Rokt is organized, who it hires, and how it grows the people already inside the company.
Buchanan has been direct about how he sees AI’s role in the workforce, and his view cuts against the prevailing caution many executives have expressed about early-career hiring. Speaking in connection with the recent appointment of Sam Dozor as Rokt’s Chief Technology Officer, Buchanan framed the AI era not as a force that narrows opportunity but as one that expands it for teams willing to adapt quickly.
“We are in the middle of the most significant transformation in how software is built in a generation,” Buchanan said. “AI has collapsed the cost of experimentation and compressed innovation cycles from quarters to weeks, handing a structural advantage to the companies that adapt fastest.”
For Rokt, adapting fastest means building teams of people who know how to think, build, and move with the technology rather than around it. The company gives every employee access to the full suite of AI tools it licenses, regardless of role or seniority. According to Built In’s 2026 company culture profile, one employee described the approach as watching “a collective effort to democratize access to tooling and information,” unlike anything they had seen elsewhere in their career. That democratization extends to recent hires just as much as to senior leaders.
The company’s position is consistent with a growing body of evidence that AI-literate early-career workers contribute more and ramp faster than their predecessors. According to data from Handshake’s Class of 2026 outlook, the share of full-time job postings mentioning AI has nearly doubled year over year, and the National Association of Colleges and Employers reports that 35% of entry-level roles now require AI skills. Graduates who arrive with that fluency are genuinely more capable of tackling meaningful work from day one. Rokt’s answer is to hire those people and then give them the tools and environment to grow as fast as the company does.
Rokt’s approach to early career talent comes through most clearly in how the company describes its own culture. In a first-person account of life inside the company, Rokt employees, or Rokt’stars as they are referred to internally, consistently point to four things that define the experience: genuine care for people, a growth mindset, fast feedback loops, and an unusual amount of range across the business. For someone early in their career, that combination is what turns a first job into a launchpad.
The range piece matters most for new hires. One Rokt’star described how quickly the scope of the role expanded, going from writing backend code one day to working directly with go-to-market ads analysts the next. As that employee put it, establishing those relationships early on revealed the full extent of opportunities available at Rokt. Cross-team connections form early and turn into real career paths that span engineering, product, and go-to-market work, rather than locking someone into the narrow lane they started in.
The throughline is care. As one Rokt’star said, the company does a great job of welcoming people and creating connections you would not find elsewhere. That care shows up in onboarding, in the cross-team friendships people form, and in the latitude employees are given to bring strong ideas and run with them. For a graduate choosing where to start, an environment that pairs real responsibility with genuine support is exactly the setting in which early talent grows fastest.
Rokt refers to what it looks for in candidates as “Builder DNA,” a preference for curiosity, accountability, and comfort in conditions that keep changing. The company runs an annual hackathon called the Rokt’athon, which in 2025 focused on building AI-powered solutions to actual business problems. Cross-functional teams worked under time pressure to produce working products, not presentations. That is a deliberate design choice: a culture that produces working software under a 48-hour deadline is one where early-career hires develop judgment and ownership faster than they would in a more conventional environment.
According to Rokt’s own performance data, the company invests $100 million annually in product innovation. That investment creates the conditions for people at every level to work on problems that matter, including those who joined the company recently. The company’s July 2025 internal engagement survey found that 88% of employees said Rokt provides equal opportunity regardless of age, race, gender, or sexual orientation, up six points from 82% the prior year.
The scale of what Rokt has built gives those opportunities real weight. The company will power more than 10 billion transactions in 2026 across more than 33,000 active clients, including more than half of the largest global e-commerce companies by volume. Its platform sits in the checkout flow of Live Nation, Fanatics, Macy’s, AMC Theatres, PayPal, Uber, Hulu, and HelloFresh, among others. An early-career hire at Rokt is building infrastructure that touches hundreds of millions of people.
The results behind Rokt’s approach to talent and investment are measurable and independently verified. Between 2021 and 2024, Rokt grew revenue from $97 million to $418 million, a 330% increase. That growth rate earned the company the #87 ranking on the Financial Times list of The Americas’ Fastest Growing Companies 2026, compiled by the Financial Times and Statista based on verified revenue figures. The company has maintained a compound annual growth rate above 40% for more than a decade and saw revenues surpass $800 million in 2025.
“Being recognized on the Financial Times list of The Americas’ Fastest Growing Companies is a testament to the hard work and dedication of every person at Rokt,” Buchanan said at the time of the recognition. “This acknowledgment reflects Rokt’s commitment to building technology that creates meaningful value for our partners and their customers.”
That growth is what makes the talent investment sustainable. Rokt is not asking early-career hires to fill static roles in a mature organization. It is building new teams, entering new markets, and launching new products continuously, and it needs people at every career stage to do it. Dan Wright’s career across fourteen teams in ten years is a concrete illustration of what that looks like in practice. The company keeps building new things that need people to run them.
The workplace recognition Rokt has accumulated comes from sources that measure employee experience directly. Great Place To Work, which certifies based entirely on direct employee surveys, reports that 91% of Rokt employees describe it as a great place to work, compared to 57% at a typical U.S. company. Rokt has maintained that certification for five consecutive years. Fortune ranked Rokt among the Best Workplaces in Advertising and Marketing for 2025. In 2026, the company earned recognition across eight Built In Best Places to Work lists, including the #2 midsize employer in Seattle, #14 in San Francisco, and #15 in New York City.
These designations are not self-reported. They are drawn from confidential surveys and direct employee feedback, which means they reflect what people actually experience working at Rokt, not what the company says about itself.
The broader conversation about AI and early-career hiring that the Wall Street Journal explored reflects a real inflection point in how companies think about workforce development. Some organizations are treating AI adoption as a reason to pause hiring and wait to see how the landscape settles. Rokt’s position is that the companies that develop talented people now and give them genuine access to powerful tools and meaningful work will have the organizational depth to move faster than those that wait.
Buchanan put it plainly: the structural advantage in the AI era goes to the companies that adapt fastest. Rokt’s ten-year track record of 40%-plus annual growth, its culture of internal promotion, and its philosophy of hiring people who will outgrow the person who hired them suggest the company is not waiting to find out whether that bet is right.
Rokt sees the Class of 2026 as uniquely valuable because these graduates are entering the workforce at the exact moment AI is changing how software and products are built. They are more likely to be AI-fluent, comfortable with rapid experimentation, and ready to work in environments where tools and workflows change quickly.
Rokt’s culture supports early-career growth through a mix of genuine care for people, a strong growth mindset, fast feedback loops, and broad exposure across teams. New hires are encouraged to build relationships beyond their immediate role, take on meaningful responsibility early, and move across functions as the company grows.
“Builder DNA” at Rokt means valuing curiosity, ownership, and comfort with change. In practice, that looks like people who are eager to experiment, willing to ship real products under constraints, and ready to adapt as AI and market conditions evolve. Hackathons like the Rokt’athon are designed to exercise exactly those muscles.
Rokt’s sustained high growth means it is constantly forming new teams, launching new products, and entering new markets. That creates more net-new roles than you typically see in slower-growing companies, which gives early-career hires more chances to expand their scope, change tracks, and move into leadership over time.
Graduates should take away that some companies see AI as a reason to limit entry-level roles, while others, like Rokt, see it as a reason to invest in them. In the right environment, AI skills and a builder mindset can increase your impact from day one, and Rokt is structuring its teams and tools around that reality.
