The surreal summer intern class of 2026

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.

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-time offers to 80% of its interns.

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

Lindsay Foxen, a senior account manager at programmatic media company MiQ, oversaw fellows this summer as the company implemented more AI into its workflows. They also built agents; one that would compare internal documents, and ensure that they matched. Another agent will compare data input to Salesforce and revised data, and then highlight the differences, eliminating the need to check the two line-by-line. The fellows had time to observe work at MiQ, and then implement “what they would love to see from an AI automated tool,” Foxen says. 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, too. At Northeastern University, which integrates six-month work periods it calls co-ops interspersed into students’ academic schedules, the number of students placed into co-ops that require AI skills has 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 says. “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’s 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’s 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’s lots of prep to keep up with the 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 they should or how they can enforce analog learning, 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 our 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.

The best training ground still comes from doing the work. 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?” Mints says. “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.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.