This summer's interns may be helping to kill summer internships
Internships are shifting from traditional administrative tasks to AI-focused roles, where interns are tasked with building and monitoring AI agents. While this provides valuable experience, it also raises concerns about the long-term viability of entry-level roles as AI automates more junior-level work.
Why it matters
This trend suggests a fundamental restructuring of the corporate career ladder, potentially displacing entry-level employees as AI becomes more capable.
Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI This 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.
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