Internships and AI: Juniors Build Agents, the Rite Changes

This summer, interns designed AI-based agents and workflows, while others saw their routine tasks absorbed by tools. Employers like Liberty Mutual and Duolingo are converting a large portion of their promotions (79% and 80%), while the share of junior positions requiring AI skills has risen from 13.5% to 35%, according to NACE. At Northeastern, co-ops requiring AI have reached 1,500 placements.

Universities and Employers Doubt the Effects and Assessments

As AI integrates into education and professional life, concerns arise about a dependency that could undermine critical thinking. Institutions do not display a consensus on a potential return to analog learning, and companies are still figuring out how to evaluate their employees' use of AI. Preliminary studies raise questions about the long-term impact on creativity and reasoning.

In technical recruitment, companies face AI-fueled fraud during engineering interviews. Preparation becomes heavier to meet evolving expectations and assessments, and candidates claim that the exercise is becoming more complicated as many now master coding. Amid these uncertainties, some believe that job requirements could grow faster than young people's confidence in their own judgment.

It is also anticipated that the upcoming internship season will open in work environments reshaped by ongoing experiments.

At MiQ and Eightfold, Interns Design Agents

At MiQ, interns operated in a context of increased AI integration into processes. They developed an agent to compare internal documents and verify their consistency, and another that matches entries in Salesforce with revised data to highlight discrepancies, avoiding line-by-line checks. After observing in-house practices, they proposed what they expected from an automated tool, with their achievements seen as proof of understanding AI and the company's needs.

At Eightfold AI, intern Jasreen Toor did not spend her summer on traditional administrative tasks. She built and supervised a Claude agent producing initial drafts of marketing content from internal information, whereas in previous internships she was limited to brainstorming and research. Here, AI was the central focus, and she says she took initiatives to build solutions to product marketing problems.

Beyond these cases, companies are entrusting more responsibilities to certain interns to contribute to AI-driven workflows, while agents and chatbots absorb the usual repetitive tasks.

Liberty Mutual and Duolingo Restructure Missions and Hire

At the insurer Liberty Mutual, 79% of rising interns received a contract offer last year. This summer, according to the company, AI tools took over functions traditionally assigned to juniors, such as data entry, document proofreading, and presentation formatting—activities deemed formative but not always conducive to judgment. The actuarial and analytics teams have mobilized AI to analyze or visualize data and edit code, freeing up time for presentations to executives, with an increased demand for understanding the business model.

The employer sees this as an accelerated development of communication and advisory skills, with tools taking on a portion of routine processing. On Duolingo's side, the focus has been on training young people in the use of AI: interns can code, but alongside the team rather than automating their own positions. The company also extended full-time offers to 80% of its cohort last summer.

Demand for AI Skills Grows, Numbers and Pathways

According to a survey conducted by NACE, the share of junior positions requiring AI skills rose from 13.5% to 35% between last fall and this spring. The same association anticipates a 4% increase in the volume of interns year-over-year, while industry players assert that the demand for profiles ready to use AI has significantly increased. At Northeastern University, which incorporates six-month co-ops into its curricula, placements requiring AI skills have doubled to reach 1,500, according to the administration.

Chancellor Ken Henderson states that technology enhances the value of the work produced by each student and allows for the delivery of tangible elements useful to the company and future careers. Supporting his individual journey, student Matt Mizra explains that he was pushed to use AI during internships in software engineering and data science. He says he primarily planned, then solicited Claude to write less code, lamenting programming but describing broader, high-value commercial projects.

However, he worries about the entry-level job market, as tech companies grapple with AI-related cheating during interviews. In this context, having completed an internship remains associated with better chances of securing a job, but recent graduates face an unemployment rate of 5.7%, compared to 2.9% for all graduates, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The Entry-Level Role is Transforming, with Blind Spots for Tomorrow

Consulting firms estimate that the best internship environments today offer the opportunity to use AI to transform the role itself, but only for a few years. A leader at Korn Ferry anticipates that future cohorts could directly leap to roles historically reserved for beginners. It is also suggested that the scale is narrowing, as recruiters prioritize proven skills.

In a tight market, an internship where juniors design an AI solution for team efficiency could prove crucial for hiring. However, the automation of repetitive tasks risks drying up entry-level missions as soon as the following year, and the agents created this summer will need maintenance or will be abandoned. Some interns have already taken on "cleaner" roles for AI outputs, while others have participated in defining future uses in the company.

It is emphasized that work experience remains the best learning ground. Leaders recommend calibrating missions to elevate young people's judgment and check whether the experience replaces what an initial internship would have provided. Overall, this generation serves as a laboratory for AI-driven workflows, as chatbots and agents nibble away at execution tasks.