AI Natives Are Entering the Workforce. It’s Complicated

As soon as he got a company email address for his summer internship at accounting software maker FloQast, Sam Otto reached out to his employer’s newly hired director of artificial intelligence to see how he could help. After reminding the baby-faced business major that it was still his first week on the job, the AI director sent back links to two eight-hour-long YouTube videos explaining the ins and outs of a particular workflow automation platform. “He thought it’d get me off his back and I’d come back in three weeks or whatever,” Otto says. “No, I spent that entire weekend earnestly watching those videos and experimenting.”

With his boss’s blessing, Otto spent the rest of his finance internship working with the AI director to streamline tasks like analyzing competitors’ earnings calls and pulling charts from the company’s data system into slide decks. Managers who attended his end-of-summer presentation were surprised to see the amount of development work he did, given his nontechnical background.