This summer's interns may be helping to kill summer internships

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.

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.