SerpApi.Org
Interns used to spend their time doing admin work. What’s the best kind of task to give them now?
Internships have long been considered a valuable steppingstone toward future full-time jobs, often because many companies hire people they previously mentored. But a number of recent workplace trends—notably increasing business deployment of AI tools—are creating new challenges for many younger apprentices as they seek to effectively learn the corporate ropes.
Frequently, those changes are leaving interns with little or even none of the administrative grunt work they’d been traditionally given, and which AI applications have now automated. Even if that sounds like a good thing, it can strand many trainees in what business consultancy Korn Ferry called “a new kind of boredom.” In an effort to respond, companies are now assigning novice workers weightier workplace responsibilities they haven’t been trained to assume and are often terrified to take on.
Consider it a feast-or-famine scenario for post-AI workplace apprenticeships. Under it, the workflow management and decision-making skills interns previously learned through repetitive and boring administrative tasks are being swapped for far more consequential roles usually reserved for more seasoned employees.
“Thanks to AI, the drudgery that typically accompanies an internship—data entry, report drafting, meeting tracking—is being replaced by a different kind of cognitive burden that requires more fact-checking than judgment or critical-thinking,” a Korn Ferry blog post on the change said. “Companies expect [interns] to arrive fully proficient in AI so that they can spend more time developing their problem-solving and other human skills.”
Unmentored interns
The problem with this shift isn’t merely the bigger risks and higher costs of trainees stumbling while making decisions previously reserved for experienced staff.
Interns may also lack the ongoing supervision they’d previously benefitted from, in part because of the effects of now common remote working arrangements or the manager-depleting effects of hierarchy “flattening” strategies.
Indeed, a survey by the National Associations of Colleges and Employers (NACE) found nearly 20 percent of 2025 interns said they didn’t have a mentor, “which is a key anchor point to and sounding board for an organization.” Having a mentor is also critical in preventing trainees from being too terrified to make the decisions they’ve been assigned, or making costly errors after plucking up that courage.
Alternatively, in many cases where workplace mentors were either never or infrequently present, novice workers were told to carry out work using the same AI bots that had already automated the administrative tasks earlier generations fulfilled. A far duller form of that came with younger trainees being instructed to monitor output of those apps—essentially an updated form of earlier grunt work that now keeps watch for slop the tech produces.
Why should the shifting skills and experiences interns are learning be of concern to employers? According to Korn Ferry, a big reason is that companies frequently recruit the same young people they’ve helped train.
Its post said last year that fully 63 percent of former interns received a full-time job offer from either employers they apprenticed with, or other companies that appreciated those training efforts. Fully 89 percent of businesses say they rely those programs on to identify future full-time employees, with NACE data showing nearly half of internship veterans received at least one employment offer before graduating from college this year.
Internship programs need a big AI update
Meanwhile, the size of the talent pipeline is huge, with an estimated 3 to 4 million people interning for U.S. companies each year. That flow of trainees is becoming an even bigger recruitment focus for businesses, now that AI has eliminated many traditional entry-level jobs for college graduates don’t have similar hands-on experience.
But as important as internship programs have become, employers need to revise and refocus them in order for both youthful participants, and the employers themselves, to continue getting maximum benefits from them.
With apps and AI replacing the administrative tasks trainees previously performed, businesses must find a middle ground between the contrasting alternatives many have adopted in the post-AI era. That means enriching roles situated somewhere between vetting chatbot output for slop, and the often terrifying responsibility of making decisions typically reserved for managers.
“Firms are going to have to be more deliberate about teaching and coaching the skills they actually want interns to develop,” Mark Royal, a Korn Ferry senior client partner who specializes in employee engagement, said in the blog post.
That means employers should focus less on the immediate, pragmatic concerns about assigning interns whatever work remains available that AI hasn’t taken over yet. Instead, they need to aim for the longer, strategic objective of identifying the tasks, experiences, and roles that will shape the kind of young workers they’d be eager to hire as employees.
“Internships aren’t really about the output,” said Jerry Collier, leader of Korn Ferry’s EMEA assessment and succession practice. “They’re supposed to be about developing people.”
This post originally appeared at inc.com.
“Click here to subscribe to the Inc. newsletter: inc.com/newsletters"
