This is a little story from my most recent internship and I think it reflects current dynamics in the job market very well:
Two years ago, during my first consulting internship, using AI at work basically meant having a little help at basic tasks. Rephrasing a sentence, cleaning up a few bullets, maybe generate an Icon. Now in my recent internship in strategy consulting at BCG it felt like something had completely shifted. AI wasn’t a side tool anymore, it was doing the actual heavy lifting. I used it to draft PowerPoint slides, to structure and clean Excel models, to run deep research on markets and competitors. It didn’t replace the thinking but it removed most of the grind that used to eat my days. While I was spending most of my first internship aligning slides and coming up with fancy action titles I genuinely spent a large part of my day just prompting Claude at my recent internship.
One thing I immediately noticed was how much this set me apart. I wasn’t the most experienced person in the room and I didn’t need to be. Being the one who could turn a vague request into a fully functional excel model in 10 minutes was enough to impress people who have been doing this a lot longer than me. AI literacy is quietly becoming one of the most valuable skills you can bring to a team right now, and almost nobody is treating it that way yet.
So here’s my takeaway for you, even if you don’t work in tech. The mistake I see a lot of people make is thinking this is an engineering thing. “I don’t code so it doesn’t really affect me.” That’s exactly backwards. Consulting, finance, marketing, ops, law, school. If your job involves thinking, writing, analyzing or communicating then AI is already touching it. You don’t need to code, you just need to know how to use these tools well enough that they make you faster and sharper instead of leaving you behind.
💡 My Recommendation of the week
To get better at using AI you have to use AI (wow who would have thought). No but genuinely try to use AI as much as possible for all recurring time-consuming work you might have. Just being comfortable at using tools like Claude, Claude cowork, claude code, or whatever you’re using is insanely valuable and will get you very far.
Have a great week,
Chris