AI Is the Intern We All Deserve

Published: 5/1/2025

If you’ve ever worked with an eager intern, you know the type:

✔️ Brimming with potential

✔️ Always ready to jump in

✔️ Occasionally overconfident

✔️ Needs clear direction

✔️ Definitely needs review

Sound familiar?

That’s pretty much AI.

Meet Your New Overachiever

AI doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t get tired. And it definitely doesn’t mind repetitive tasks. It’ll organize folders you haven’t opened in years, draft summaries for content you forgot existed, and make confident suggestions about things it barely understands — all in record time. It will try to do everything — even things you didn’t ask it to.

But like any overzealous intern, AI needs boundaries. Left unsupervised, it might confidently tag a press release as a recipe, write headlines that make legal nervous, or hallucinate a topic that doesn’t exist.

The Intern Isn’t the Strategy

AI is fast. But speed isn’t strategy.

Without context, training, and structure, AI doesn’t know your brand tone, your taxonomy rules, or that the "Holiday 2022" campaign should never see the light of day again. That’s where human review — and good system design — come in.

If we want AI to support our teams instead of creating more work, we need to:

• Give it clear instructions (defined taxonomies, prompt templates, guardrails)
• Set up checkpoints (reviews, validations, approvals)
• Provide training data that reflects how our organization actually works

What AI Can Do Really Well

When supervised, AI is the intern we always dreamed of:

✅ It handles repetitive tagging so we don’t have to
✅ It helps us scale content reviews faster than humanly possible
✅ It’s tireless — perfect for content audits, metadata enrichment, and idea generation
✅ It doesn’t get bored updating metadata (but we do)

And most importantly — it’s teachable.

Interns Grow. So Will AI.

We’re still early in the AI journey, but the trajectory is clear: these tools are evolving rapidly, and so is the way we use them. If we treat AI like a junior team member — one that needs onboarding, feedback, and the occasional redirect — we’ll get the most value out of it without losing quality or control.

Because in the end, AI isn’t here to take our jobs. It’s here to lighten the load — as long as we’re willing to show it how.

TL;DR: AI is the intern we all deserve — energetic, optimistic, sometimes wrong, but capable of great things when paired with strong mentorship and good systems.