Internships: A New Kind of Boredom?
AI is taking over many of the mundane tasks interns formerly did. So why are so many of them feeling lost this summer?
The team expected big things from him. He wouldn't be sitting and learning from a star. Despite his age and inexperience, he'd be a start himself from day one—which is the same day his slump started.
This isn't the tale of a highly prized teenage basketball recruit failing to live up to expectations. Rather, it’s the new reality for many of the three to four million interns across the corporate landscape. 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. And as firms pare away more management roles, interns in surveys report that mentoring has become much rarer. “Internships aren’t really about the output,” says Jerry Collier, leader of the assessment and succession practice for Korn Ferry across EMEA. “They’re supposed to be about developing people.”
To be sure, many firms say their interns are making good use of the summer. “They’re using it as a time to show off their AI skills,” says Dennis Deans, an HR expert at Korn Ferry. But many others are confronting a great paradox: Companies expect them to arrive fully proficient in AI so that they can spend more time developing their problem-solving and other human skills. Meanwhile, due to layoffs and remote work fewer managers are in the office teaching those skills and interns are frequently tasked with verifying AI output rather than engaging in a human interaction. “Judgment used to come from doing the work that AI now does," says Collier. "Skip the apprenticeship and you don’t get a faster leader. You get a less experienced one.”
The data bears that out. In one major survey, 43% of interns said their biggest concern at work is that AI will reduce critical thinking and decision-making skills. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), one in five interns went without a human mentor last year. Even more telling, surveys show boredom increasing among interns in remote or hybrid environments and AI-related fatigue rising among those taked with “botsitting."
For firms, however, internships remain a vital talent pipeline, as evidenced by the fact that 63% of interns receive full-time job offer—a five-year high, according to NACE. The challenge, say experts, is to design programs that engage interns in higher-value work without overwhelming and paralyzing them. “Firms are going to have to be more deliberate about teaching and coaching the skills they actually want interns to develop,” says Mark Royal, a Korn Ferry senior client partner who specializes in employee engagement.
Bryan Ackermann, head of AI strategy and transformation at Korn Ferry, agrees. While AI relieves the boredom for interns of sorting through pages of reports and filings, he says consigning employees to figure out higher value work for themselves produces a different kind of disengagement. “Firms that do that shouldn’t be surprised by the outcome," he notes.
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