I Thought AI Would Make My Skills Irrelevant. My Internship Proved Me Wrong.

By Yasmine Ksiyer

When I started my internship with JGM Innovation’s Workforce Accelerator, I had a nagging worry, the same one I think a lot of people my age carry, is AI going to make everything I’m learning irrelevant before I even graduate? I pictured spending thirteen weeks building skills that a chatbot could replicate in thirty seconds. What happened was almost the opposite. AI didn’t do my job for me; it changed how fast I could do it. That forced me to get better, faster, at the parts that actually mattered like knowing what to ask for, knowing when the output was wrong, and knowing how to turn a rough draft into something I’d put my name on.

From Blank Page to Starting Point

One of my tasks was creating a social media post to showcase an achievement our team had reached. I started where anyone would, on Canva, scrolling through templates, until I ended up staring at a blank page for twenty minutes. Then I opened Claude and asked for a few post ideas that showcased the achievement while using our logo and brand colors and matching the rest of our social media layout. Within seconds, I had a dozen options. None were ready to publish, but I no longer had to start from nothing. My job became choosing, editing, and improving.

When AI Got It Wrong

Not every moment went that smoothly. Early in the internship, I asked Claude to build a budget template for documenting expenses and revenue. It gave me a clean, confident result with a row that looked right but didn’t exist anywhere in our data. I only caught it because I had reviewed every document myself and the line felt off. If I had pasted that into our application, a funder could have seen an incorrect figure with our name on it. That was the day I started thinking of AI as a very fast, very confident helper who still needs checking.

AI Is Only as Good as What You Bring to It

The more I used AI, the more I noticed that the tool was only as good as the person using it. To write a useful request, I had to understand our audience. To judge the result, I had to recognize strong writing and clean data. To fix it, I needed the skills I was learning in the program: structuring a message, reading a dataset, and presenting an idea clearly. AI didn’t replace those skills. It exposed how much I needed them. This changed the way that I thought about AI use in a career sense. At the start of the internship, I wondered if AI would make my skills irrelevant. I don’t think that anymore. Tools get faster every few months, but judgment, taste, and the willingness to take responsibility for your work stay valuable. If a classmate told me they were worried, I’d tell them to learn the tools, but to spend even more time learning how to think, write, and check their own work. Those are the skills that make AI useful instead of risky.

AI Responsibility and Accountability

I also had to decide where my own boundaries were. I never typed personal details, donor information, or anything about the students we serve into an AI tool. JGM Innovation only shares aggregate numbers about students, and that standard made sense to me right away. If I wouldn’t post something publicly, it didn’t belong in a chat window. I also learned to be honest about when I used AI. Doing so makes the work more trustworthy, not less.

Looking back from the beginning of this internship to now, what stays with me most isn’t the tools, it’s where the work went. The websites, strategies, and reports I helped produce this summer support education programs for low-income students in rural schools in Peru. I’ll probably never meet those students, but my work helps give them a shot at recognition and opportunity. AI helped me do more of that work and doing it well was up to me. I’m continuing on with a skill set I didn’t have in September, and with a clearer sense that the most meaningful work is one that reaches people far beyond the room I’m sitting in.