Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BIThis intern season, fetching lattes for bosses is out. Teaching bosses how to use AI is in.When Jasreen Toor interned at the agentic human resource company Eightfold AI this summer, her day wasn't filled with answering phones or taking notes. Instead, she spent most of her time building and then monitoring a Claude agent that scours through company information to create first drafts of marketing materials. In her previous internships, Toor used AI to brainstorm and research. At Eightfold, AI became the point, rather than a shortcut. "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, a rising junior studying economics and data science at the University of California, Berkeley, tells me.Many have warned that AI will collapse the white-collar career ladder, devouring entry-level jobs and leaving those at the bottom without rungs to grab onto. Recent college graduates face an 5.7% unemployment rate, nearly double the 2.9% unemployment for all college graduates in the workforce, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But as entry-level grad work falls, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) predicted the number of interns would grow by 4% year-over-year. And today's crop of interns have become a testing ground for the ways AI will reshape entry-level work. As chatbots and agents eat up their usual tasks — note taking, data input, and creating slide decks — some companies have trusted them with more responsibility, giving them a hand in creating new AI-driven workflows.But that shift, much like a summer internship, could be fleeting. Each tedious process automated this summer may eliminate tried and true tasks for next year's interns, and every new workflow or agent developed by an intern will fall to someone else to upkeep, or let die.Unlucky interns of the Class of 2026 may have spent the summer clocking in as an AI slop janitor, sorting through code or documents for basic errors in a rote task that's become the 2020s equivalent of filing papers. But the lucky have hit the sweet spot, getting to play 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. "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 their 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 other companies. With more employers trying to grab the elusive "AI-native" worker, an internship where young people worked on an AI solution to a team-wide efficiency problem could become the golden ticket to landing full-time work in a constricted hiring market.Last year, Liberty Mutual offered full-time jobs to 79% of its rising senior interns, says Maura Quinn, vice president of the company's early talent acquisition and engagement programs. By this summer, AI had taken over many traditional intern tasks, like data entry, document review, and formatting slide decks. "That was the work that actually built discipline, but it didn't always build judgment." Quinn tells me that interns working on the actuarial and analytics used AI to analyze or visualize data and edit code. With the time they saved, interns were free to work on presentations for higher managers, which required developing a deep understanding of how the findings fit into the business model. She saw this as a more advanced development of communication and consulting skills for interns. "That's where we're seeing the big shift: AI tools are handling a lot of that routine processing." At Duolingo, there's more emphasis on teaching young workers how to use AI this summer, Debica Bhattacharya, head of people, says. 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 extended full-tim
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