The traditional route into the workforce used to begin with an internship: a (usually) lightly paid stint built around training and on-the-job mentoring. New graduates were handed secondary duties — data entry, press clippings, drafting copy, basic data analysis — the very tasks that are now, with growing frequency, handled by artificial intelligence algorithms.

The arrival of this technology has upended the labor market. For many young people it looks like one more door slammed shut in an already saturated job market. And yet, behind what critics call a «training suicide» for companies, lies a different reality: for plenty of new graduates and young professionals, the end of the traditional internship is good news.

The technology, in fact, promises to finally break the vicious circle of underpaid and abused internships, forcing companies to rethink how they bring young people in — no longer as cheap labor, but as a strategic resource to be trained on high-value skills.

Companies are hiring fewer interns: 10,000 positions lost in a decade

Employers have gradually scaled back internships precisely because of their heavy investment in AI tools already trained to perform basic, repetitive tasks. Activities like data entry or writing a press release are increasingly automated and instantaneous thanks to algorithms — at the expense of the initiative once expected from young graduates.

According to the labor market observatory of Piedmont (a region in northwestern Italy), roughly 10,000 internship positions have been lost at companies over the past ten years. The numbers are stark: non-curricular internships (placements not tied to a school or university program) collapsed from -11% in 2024 to -17% in 2025, with the intern population shrinking to just 26,000 active placements.

Many experts have described this as a genuine «training suicide»: to stop hiring interns is to drain the corporate talent pipeline. Without juniors learning the trade today, there will be no experienced managers tomorrow.

Young people, on the other hand, have greeted the news with a degree of enthusiasm. On one side there is indignation at the shrinking space left for new graduates; on the other, there are those who welcome the end of the era of underpaid or abused internships used to fill what were really low-cost operational roles.

The economics of the internship

Part of the decline also comes down to new Italian and European Union rules that mandate a minimum stipend — between €300 and €800 a month (roughly $325 to $865) — which makes an internship less attractive to employers than an apprenticeship or a fixed-term contract for workers under 30.

At the European level, specific rules have also been imposed on training internships, which must now include meaningful learning content. It is no longer enough to bring young people in to make photocopies or take out the trash; companies have to provide them with real tools and instruction.

Attitudes among Generation Z have shifted, too. Today’s young workers are not looking for an internship as their first step into the workforce, but for a well-paid profession that also guarantees a balance between personal and professional life. A growing number are willing to turn down a job paying €1,500 a month (about $1,620) that requires a full day in the office, in favor of more flexible, hybrid work.

Fewer internships, more stable contracts: the upside

According to the Piedmont regional government, this drop in the number of interns at Italian companies should not be cause for alarm — precisely because young people are being offered more stable, «secure» positions instead. «The decline is not the symptom of a weak market, but the reflection of improving employment», said regional councilor Daniela Cameroni. «In Piedmont, unemployment and the number of NEETs (young people not in education, employment or training) are falling, while the number of young people finding work is rising».

Unions are also celebrating the sunset of the intern’s role, which in most cases involved no real training but rather a string of side tasks. Interns were routinely assigned duties entirely unrelated to building useful skills for the future: making photocopies, taking out the trash, cleaning up at the end of the day, and so on.

Better, then, to start with an apprenticeship or a fixed-term contract than with an underpaid internship doing work that has nothing to do with the profession you actually want to build.

Editor’s note

This article was originally published in Italian on money.it by Laura Pellegrini on June 25, 2026 as «Addio agli stagisti, ora le aziende preferiscono l’AI. Ma per molti è una buona notizia». It has been translated and adapted for an international audience by the Money.it International desk.