At Weber State University’s recent Data Summit, students presented work from their summer internships which included several projects that involved AI. These experiences highlighted that working with AI is not always about building chatbots or training huge models. Sometimes working with AI comes down to figuring out when AI gets something wrong. Other times it means deciding how AI interacts with people in the first place. 

For Weber State student Jayanti Achara her experience as an AI solutions intern connected software engineering (SWE) and artificial intelligence together. Part of her work involved AI tools and traditional SWE practices to identify AI-generated errors. 

Achara connected that experience back to classes she had already taken at Weber State. She specifically mentioned CS 3030, Scripting Languages, as useful preparation for identifying problems and understanding what the AI was producing. 

“CS 3030 was particularly helpful because it gave me experience working with Git, GitHub, Linux, Python, testing, and working as part of a development team. Other courses like data structures, databases, operating systems, and web development also helped me understand different parts of the systems I was working with.”

Her internship highlights an increasingly important skill for students entering technology fields: knowing how to work with AI without assuming that AI is always correct.

Another student took on AI from a very different direction.

Tanya Emmett worked as a Responsible AI Intern with Intermountain Health, where her work included creating dashboards and helping manage how AI systems interact with users. Her background is especially interesting because Emmett studied philosophy at Weber State.

“Responsible AI focuses on questions that go beyond whether a system technically works. How should an AI system be used? What information should it have access to? How do organizations make sure people are treated fairly? And who is responsible when an AI system makes a bad decision?”

Those questions become especially important in fields such as healthcare, where technology can interact with sensitive information and real people. Emmett worked on creating dashboards and analyzing the way AI interacted with customers and handled data in the health care industry. 

Together, these internships show how broad the AI field is becoming.