AI is raising the bar for interns and changing the career ladder

For students preparing for life after university, internships have long been a first foothold in the working world. They offer a chance to learn how an office functions, make mistakes on relatively low-stakes assignments, and gradually take on more responsibility.

Artificial intelligence is beginning to alter that progression.

As companies automate menial tasks once reserved for interns, young workers are being given higher-level responsibilities and are expected to arrive with skills they would once have developed on the job.

The change is particularly visible in the United Arab Emirates, where AI adoption is among the highest in the world. Nearly nine in 10 organizations now use AI in at least one business function, according to McKinsey, while 44% say they are scaling its use across their organizations.

For young graduates in the UAE, that automation is feeding into an increasingly competitive race for opportunities as companies re-evaluate their internship programs. For those who manage to secure a spot, the richer experience is the upside of mass spending on tools to make workflows more efficient.

Ganna Eltahan is one of those interns. With AI tools handling much of the grunt work, her internship spent at the fashion publication at MADAME Arabia involved everything from spearheading the outlet’s social media strategy, covering fashion events and even interviewing prominent fashion designers – responsibilities closer to a seasoned fashion journalist or social media editor.

“I thought interns would be given low-risk tasks where you’re still learning, and if you fumble or mess up, then it’s fine. That is definitely not the case anymore,” the 24-year-old said.

Eltahan noted that AI has definitely added pressure and raised the bar for her generation, both in terms of the pace of work and in the selection process. “Many students now are sprucing up their resumes with AI to appear as stronger candidates on applications. Everyone is hungry for the opportunity – so, once you are selected, you really have to stand out and prove that you can bring value,” Eltahan added.

After completing her internship in February this year, she secured a job as a social media manager at the marketing agency Obleeq – a move that would traditionally take several years to achieve on the career ladder.

According to some employers, career leaps like this will become increasingly more common.
“Now that everybody in the office has access to the same AI tools, I can easily get a 19-year-old to take on tasks that would previously have been expected of someone with five years of experience,” said Tarik Chebib, Middle East CEO of the fintech trading platform Capital.com.

“It questions whether we should hire entry-level people at all anymore, and instead just have interns prove themselves and then give them full-time positions,” Chebib added.

In fintech, where nearly half of firms are already at an advanced stage of AI adoption, literacy in the technology is no longer a plus – it is part of the filter. Graduates are increasingly expected to arrive able to use the tools and take on substantial work from the start. For Cherib, that evaluation increasingly functions like auditions where students temporarily perform duties of new hires.

To secure an internship at the company, candidates must first complete a four-hour “AI buildathon,” working through three live problems drawn from marketing, sales or operations with access to tools including ChatGPT and Claude. They then present their solutions to a panel before entering the internship program.

“These internships are to see whether candidates can prove that their solutions work, whether they can be implemented across our departments around the world, and whether we can actually get them live,” Chebib said. “The expectation is not simply that interns understand AI, but that they can use it to produce something useful.”

Since launching the program two years ago in partnership with ADGM Academy, more than 10 interns have transitioned to full-time roles and now represent 10% of the workforce at their Dubai office.

“I am surprised with what they come up with and how we can tweak some of their ideas,” Chebib said. “Interns are from a new generation. They have a completely different lens, and having grown up natively with these tools, they just bring a different perspective that can’t be disregarded.”

What they lack in experience, they make up for in their understanding of younger consumers, a perspective valuable to Capital.com as younger generations enter the investment market.

“I get people that are very curious to work on difficult projects that you can’t just fully automate and require different layers of creative thinking. There are always touch points within a project that need human intelligence and brainstorming on the human side before they can be executed with the use of AI.”

The result is a workplace where the titles exist, but the boundaries between junior and more experienced roles are becoming less defined.

“The bottom rung is changing shape,” said Bryan Luro, County Manager at ManpowerGroup Middle East.

“HR and people teams across this region are busy rewriting job descriptions and trying to work out what a junior person actually does in an AI-enabled business,” Luro said, adding that companies seeing the strongest outcomes and intern-to-employee conversion rates tend to be those that have taken the time to rethink what the role is actually for.

“Over the next two to three years, I’d expect internships to become shorter on routine work and longer on exposure. Less about producing output, more about learning judgement, sitting in the room, being part of decisions, understanding how a business actually operates,” Luro added.

But that shift comes as companies are also becoming more selective about entry-level hiring. According to ManpowerGroup’s 2026 UAE Employer Hiring Sentiment survey, more than 50% of UAE employers are cutting back on entry-level hiring as they place greater emphasis on technical skills, AI literacy and experienced candidates who are productive immediately.

Yacine Gaye, Transformation Programme Lead and AI Product Manager at Delivery Hero in Dubai, said that the shift is changing how companies think about their workforce, with the focus moving away from headcount and toward capabilities.

“The question is no longer, ‘Can this person do the work?’ but rather, ‘Can this person create value with the tools available to them?’” Gaye explained. “We’re increasingly looking for people who can ask the right questions, make informed decisions, and combine technology with human insight.”

Yacine Gaye, whose expertise lies in developing AI-embedded workforce strategies across departments, highlighted that having the technology in place does not always guarantee that value will follow.

It is a trend that is starting to show up across the Emirate. While on the one hand, UAE companies are investing more in AI than businesses elsewhere in the GCC, a recent Cooper Fitch survey found that 41% of GCC managers and 50% of individual contributors said AI had fallen short of expectations.

For Gaye, the disconnect lies in the gap between deploying AI and getting employees to use it effectively.

“The opportunity for employers isn’t teaching young people how to use AI. It’s helping them use it wisely. What will differentiate people in the future isn’t simply knowing how to prompt an AI tool. It will be knowing when to trust it, when to challenge it, and how to combine it with independent thinking and sound judgment.” Gaye added.

Sonny Arcot, founder and CEO of Arcot Group, sees AI playing a much larger role in the workplace going forward. The company operates across the UAE, the US, and India, offering several AI products that automate workflows. Based on sales, his products in the UAE are selling twice as fast as in other markets he operates in.

“It’s like everyone just flipped the switch and said, ‘Let’s automate as much as we can,’ right? And they’re running with it,” Arcot said.

Arcot focuses on helping organizations process data, personalise user experiences and improve compliance and workflows. Its latest offering, HAIRE.AI, automates the hiring process and can sift through hundreds or even thousands of applications in seconds.

“Surprisingly, a lot of candidates have found it very easy to use. Takes off the pressure of talking to a human being.”

For interns, these tools do come with ambiguity, but are more often welcomed than feared. According to Al-Futtaim’s 2025 Future of Emirati Youth research, 62% of young Emiratis are optimistic about AI’s impact on the workforce. Although this figure, only 33% identified data literacy as critical for success.

“That gap tells us something important: enthusiasm for AI is not yet matched by the practical skills needed to work alongside it,” said Hesham Ikhwan, HR Director Retail & Automotive, Al-Futtaim

Internships may now offer more meaningful responsibilities, but securing one is becoming a hurdle in itself. Students still largely rely on personal networks, university and school partnerships and online platforms such as LinkedIn to find placements, leaving the process fragmented.

Sparq, an online platform that matches UAE students with internships and job-shadowing opportunities, grew out of founder Gaurav Gulati’s difficulty finding structured work opportunities for his own children. The platform matches students with companies based on their profiles and ambitions — effectively the equivalent of Uber for students and companies offering internships.

“When students get their first internship, they see more than just a job description. They see the actual culture and the support that the company gives, which is what will then make them choose company A versus company B, when they eventually get into the workforce,” Gulati said.

It also means giving employers a clearer way to understand what students can already do, and where they still need to develop. Spark is designed to help companies structure internships around those gaps, rather than expecting students to arrive fully prepared for an AI-enabled workplace.

“They will be the people spending in five to 10 years on businesses that are there today. They will be the future clients of private banks. They will be the future clients of fashion. They will be the head designers or the future teachers,” Gulati said. “It’s the question of how do we upskill them starting today so that they understand and have a path … to eventually contributing to the workforce,” he added.

Gaye’s bet is the same. “The real risk isn’t AI replacing interns. The real risk is organizations becoming so focused on short-term efficiency that they weaken the talent pipelines that sustain long-term growth,” Gaye said.

“The companies that succeed won’t be the ones that spend the least on talent. They’ll be the ones that combine great technology with great people better than anyone else. Because at the end of the day, AI may change how careers begin, but it doesn’t change how leaders are made,” she added.