How This Summer's Interns Are Reshaping—and Killing—the Internship Model

The summer intern who fetches coffee and takes notes is being replaced by one who builds AI agents and automates the work that used to fill those 10 weeks. That shift is creating a new kind of entry-level experience, but it carries a risk for the class of 2026 and beyond: each task automated this summer is one less task for next year's interns.

Jasreen Toor, a rising junior at UC Berkeley, spent her summer interning at Eightfold AI. She did not answer phones or take notes. She built a Claude agent that scans company information and drafts marketing materials. In previous internships, AI was a shortcut for research. This time, AI was the point. "A lot of what I was doing was kind of taking my own initiative, and building on my own to see how we can solve some of those problems that product marketing was facing," Toor told Business Insider.

Many have warned that AI will collapse the white-collar career ladder, eating entry-level jobs and leaving those at the bottom without rungs to grab onto. Recent college graduates face a 5.7% unemployment rate, nearly double the 2.9% rate for all college graduates in the workforce, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Yet the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) predicted the number of interns would grow 4% year-over-year. Today's crop of interns has become a testing ground for how AI will reshape entry-level work. As chatbots and agents consume their usual tasks–note-taking, data input, creating slide decks–some companies have given them more responsibility, trusting them to help create new AI-driven workflows.

That shift, like a summer internship itself, could be fleeting. Each tedious process automated this summer may eliminate the tried-and-true tasks for next year's interns. Every new workflow or agent developed by an intern will fall to someone else to maintain, or die.

Unlucky interns of the Class of 2026 may have spent the summer as AI slop janitors, sorting through code or documents for basic errors in a rote task that is the 2020s equivalent of filing papers. The lucky ones hit a sweet spot: playing a tangible role in shaping how companies will use AI before the technology upends junior work.

"The best companies for interns right now are the ones where they give young workers the opportunity to use AI to transform the role itself," Shanda Mints, vice president of AI strategy and transformation at management consulting firm Korn Ferry, told Business Insider. "But that's only going to be around for the next couple of years, because once that role becomes transformed, then what are the new interns going to be doing a few years from now? We're seeing that they're likely going to just jump right into what historically were the entry level roles."

The career ladder may not be collapsing, but it is shrinking as the responsibilities placed on young workers grow.

Hiring managers are increasingly throwing out résumés and selecting job applicants for demonstrable skills, furthering the classic career Catch-22: you need experience to get experience. The proportion of entry-level jobs requiring AI skills jumped from 13.5% to 35% between last fall and this spring, according to a survey of employers conducted by NACE. Those who have interned are more likely to land jobs after college, either at a former internship-turned-9-to-5 or at other companies. With more employers trying to grab the elusive "AI-native" worker, an internship where a young person worked on an AI solution to a team-wide efficiency problem could become the golden ticket to landing full-time work in a tight hiring market.

At Liberty Mutual, 79% of rising senior interns received full-time offers last year, says Maura Quinn, vice president of the company's early talent acquisition and engagement programs. This summer, AI had taken over many traditional intern tasks: data entry, document review, formatting slide decks. "That was the work that actually built discipline, but it didn't always build judgment," Quinn told Business Insider. Interns working on actuarial and analytics teams used AI to analyze or visualize data and edit code. With the time saved, they were free to work on presentations for higher-level managers, which required developing a deep understanding of how the findings fit into the business model. Quinn saw this as a more advanced development of communication and consulting skills. "That's where we're seeing the big shift: AI tools are handling a lot of that routine processing."

At Duolingo, the emphasis this summer is on teaching young workers how to use AI, says Debica Bhattacharya, head of people. Interns may vibe code, but they do so alongside other team members, rather than developing solutions to automate their own work. Duolingo is particularly eager to prep these grads for the workforce because it hires so many: last year, the summer program extended full-time offers to 80% of its interns.

Lindsay Foxen, a senior account manager at programmatic media company MiQ, oversaw fellows this summer as the company implemented more AI into its workflows. The fellows also built agents: one that compares internal documents and ensures they match, another that compares data input to Salesforce with revised data and highlights the differences, eliminating the need to check the two line-by-line. The fellows had time to observe work at MiQ, then implement "what they would love to see from an AI automated tool," Foxen said. The solutions they created with AI "goes to show that they understand AI, they understand MiQ, and they understand the future of what's being implemented moving forward."

The demand for interns to show up AI-ready has surged. At Northeastern University, which integrates six-month work periods called co-ops into students' academic schedules, the number of students placed into co-ops that require AI skills doubled year-over-year, reaching 1,500, according to chancellor Ken Henderson. "What each student on a co-op can actually produce of value is higher, as a function of the technology," he told Business Insider. "They can demonstrate a work product that's useful for them in their future careers, so they're actually doing something tangible of value in the company during that time."

Matt Mizra, a rising senior studying computer science and business at Northeastern who has worked at Microsoft and DraftKings, says he has been encouraged to use AI as much as possible when working as a software engineer and data science intern this year. Rather than completing basic software engineering work and churning out tickets, he has spent the bulk of his time planning and then less time prompting Claude for code. He misses writing code, but the scope of his work has advanced. "My projects are very big, and they're good business value," he says. "It's more about thinking about how to solve the bigger picture."

Mizra knows he is collecting impressive experience to speak to prospective employers as he seeks a post-grad job next year, but he still worries about the state of the early-career job market. Tech companies are battling AI cheating in engineering interviews, and there is lots of prep to keep up with evolving expectations and assessments. "It's definitely making it harder, because everyone is proficient at code now."

As AI touches more of the college experience and seeps into more of the workday, fears that overreliance will erode critical thinking mount. Colleges have little consensus on whether to enforce analog learning or how to do it, and companies are grappling with the best ways to review workers' use of AI. Early research continues to raise questions about the long-term effect AI will have on creative thinking and reasoning skills. Stuck in the uncertainty, young people eagerly seek skills and security most likely to lead them to a full-time job. But the demands of these jobs might be escalating more quickly than young workers can grow confident in their judgment.

Mints, the Korn Ferry vice president, said managers who want to train future talent on how to use AI should ask themselves: "Is that task going to help elevate this person's judgment? Is that experience enough to replace the experience they would have been getting if they had whatever their internship was to begin with?" Thanks to the 2026 intern class, next year's summer interns might walk into workplaces that look vastly different.