How it works

The whole programme, in the order you will meet it.

From the joining letter to the certificate: what a brief looks like, how your manager scores it, what the defense is, and why you bring your own AI key.

1 · Your desk

A company, a manager, a first day.

Meridian Retail Co. is a simulated mid-size retailer with a product catalogue, quarterly numbers and a management team. The day you join, a joining letter arrives by email with your role and track, and the first brief is already on your desk.

Priya Nair, Head of Insights
Your manager. She writes the briefs, reads what you send, and scores it. You can ask her about a brief before you write.
The CCO
Runs your portfolio defense at the end: a live conversation about the work you submitted.
Colleagues and the Copilot
Messages for questions along the way, and an AI copilot for drafting when a brief calls for it.
The office
An isometric floor that grows as the internship unlocks rooms, with the team moving around and your real day drawn into it. Nothing lives only there; every page works without it.

2 · A brief

Real numbers, a deadline, and the rubric up front.

Every brief comes from Priya with the data you need attached: a table, a worksheet, a set of emails. It says what to send back (a memo of a set length, a completed worksheet, a five-slide deck, or something you build with a real AI tool and hand in as a link or a PDF), roughly how long it should take, and the three things it will be scored on. A PDF you hand in is read by Priya; a link is opened by the people who read your portfolio later.

This one is the first brief of the Digital Marketing track, exactly as students receive it.

Brief 1 of 8Digital Marketing ~20 min · memo to your manager

Reallocate the ₹50,000 weekly ad budget

From: Priya Nair, Head of Insights

Weekly performance is below. We currently split ₹50,000 equally across three channels.

Send me a memo (120 to 250 words): how would you reallocate next week, and why? Remember: conversions pay the bills, not clicks.

Channel	Spend (₹)	Clicks	CPC (₹)	Conversions	Cost / conv.
Instagram	16,667	9,800	1.70	118	₹141
Google Search	16,667	4,100	4.07	196	₹85
Facebook	16,666	7,200	2.31	64	₹260

Priya scores this onInsightUse of dataClarity

3 · The review

Three scores, a reason, a verdict.

Priya scores each rubric line out of five and writes feedback that quotes your work: what landed, what is missing, and the single sentence that would have fixed it. Then a verdict. Approved means shipped. Revise means change the substance she names and send it again.

Being sent back is the normal path. Of everyone who has resubmitted, 92% scored higher the second time, by 1.21 points on average.

PNManager review · Priya Nair

Insight

4/5

Use of data

4/5

Clarity

3/5

This is an excellent, highly actionable proposal. You correctly identified that Google Search is our most efficient channel at ₹85 per conversion and rightly prioritized it with a ₹30,000 allocation.

✓ Approved · deliverable shipped

4 · Eight skills

Every rubric line counts towards one of eight skills.

Briefs are scored in their own words (“Newsworthiness”, “Slide discipline”), and each of those maps to a shared skill. That is how a profile builds: a 3 in Clarity four briefs running is a pattern, not bad luck, and the advice for it is the same before and after every brief.

Clarity: Whether a busy person understands your work on one read, and whether it is pitched for them.; Strong work: A manager can skim the first two lines and know what you are telling them. No throat-clearing, no restating the brief back.
Structure: Whether the piece is built in an order that carries the reader, rather than in the order you thought of things.; Strong work: Situation, then what it means, then what to do. Each paragraph earns the next one. In a deck, every headline asserts something rather than labelling a topic.
Use of data: Whether you used the actual numbers you were given, correctly, to support what you claim.; Strong work: Specific figures appear in your argument, not just in a table. A number is quoted because it changes the conclusion, not to show you read the sheet.
Rigour: Whether you checked your own work: the arithmetic, the assumptions, and what the data does not say.; Strong work: You name what would change your mind, flag the number you are unsure of, and catch the thing that looks wrong instead of passing it along.
Insight: Whether you saw something past the obvious — the reading someone else would have missed.; Strong work: You connect two things the brief kept apart, or explain WHY a number moved rather than reporting that it did.
Judgement: Whether you chose well under constraint, and were honest about what your choice costs.; Strong work: You commit to one option and name what you are giving up by not choosing the others. Risk is stated, not avoided.
Actionability: Whether someone could act on this on Monday morning.; Strong work: A specific next step: who does what, by when, and roughly at what cost. Not 'we should consider optimising' but 'cut this spend by 30% this month'.
AI workflow: How well you drove the AI tool, and whether you improved on what it gave back.; Strong work: You show what you asked for, what the tool got wrong, and what you changed. The judgement is visibly yours.

5 · Live moments

Four times, the work stops being a brief and becomes a conversation.

After your first approval the CCO wants ten minutes on it. Halfway through, a competitor drops prices and you have twenty-five minutes to say what to do. Before the capstone, someone from outside the company is on the line: a client renewal, a courier contract, a creator fee, an offer to a candidate, a software renewal, matched to your track. Four exchanges, a limit you cannot see, and the CCO reads the transcript and grades questions asked against concessions given.

Each one goes on your record with the executive's verdict as it was given. None of them can be passed by pasting.

Courier contract with SwiftShip2 exchanges left

Devang: Diesel is up, drivers are up. Twelve percent is what every client is taking this year.

You: Before we talk rate, what happens to your festive capacity if we commit our full volume for those eight weeks?

Devang: That would change things, honestly. If the volume is guaranteed I can look at the number again.

Your limit: nothing above a 5% increase. A service-level commitment on late deliveries is worth a small rise.

6 · The defense

Before the certificate, the CCO asks why.

Once the last brief is approved, you sit a live question-and-answer session about the work you submitted. Not a quiz on the material: questions about your own decisions, your numbers, and what would have changed your mind. Answer in chat, or by voice to earn Distinction on the certificate.

There is a practice mode, with nothing recorded, so the first real question is not the first question you have ever been asked.

Portfolio defense · Q&A with the CCO

CCO

You moved ₹15,000 out of Facebook in your first brief. If Facebook conversions had doubled the following week, what in your memo would have told me you were wrong?

Your answer, live, in your own words.

CCO

You owned every decision, backed up your numbers, and didn't flinch when I pushed on your logic. That is exactly how you defend work to an executive team.

7 · The body of work, and the certificate

A page a recruiter can read, and a credential they can check.

Switch on your profile in Settings and you get one public page with every approved brief: the memo, the deck, the file you made, the score on each rubric line, Priya's review, and the executive's verdict from each live moment. You choose whether the work itself is shown or only the titles and scores. The certificate is issued when every brief is approved and the defense is done, one per track, and its credential page links to the body of work.

What a verification page shows

AInternMeridian Retail Co. · Virtual Internship

Certificate of Completion

This certifies that

Your name here

completed the Finance & Accounts internship track as a Finance & Accounts Intern, shipping all 8 AI-reviewed deliverables to a professional standard.

Average rubric score

★ / 5

Credential ID

AIN-2026-••••••

8 · Your AI key

You bring the key. Two minutes, no card.

Reviews and chat run on Google's Gemini models using a key you create yourself at Google AI Studio. It is free. It is what keeps AIntern free, and it means your work runs on your own quota rather than a shared pool that runs out halfway through a batch.

Your key is stored encrypted and used only for your own work. You can replace or remove it from Settings at any time.

Setting it up

Open Google AI Studio with any Google account and create an API key.
Paste it into Setup once, on your desk. That is the whole setup.
Send your first brief. Priya reviews it on your key, usually within a minute.

Watch the walkthrough Student Handbook (PDF)

Questions

The ones students actually ask.

Is it really free?

Yes. Students pay nothing and there is nothing to buy anywhere on the site. The AI key you bring is free from Google and needs no card.

Do I need to be in a college batch?

No. Anyone can join with an email address. A college batch adds a teacher who can read your work and a report for the department; the internship itself is the same.

How long does it take?

Eight briefs of twenty to thirty minutes each, a capstone of two to three hours, then the defense. There is no daily limit and no deadline; most students finish in three to five weeks alongside classes.

What happens if my work is sent back?

You change the substance Priya names and resubmit. 92% of resubmissions have scored higher than the first attempt, by 1.21 points on average.

Can I use ChatGPT or other AI tools?

Yes, and several briefs require it and grade how well you did: the prompt you wrote, what you kept, what you corrected. Pasting an answer in without understanding it tends to fail the defense, where the questions are about why.

What do I actually have at the end?

A body of work: a public page with every brief you had approved, what you made for each, the scores and the review, and the verdicts from the CCO meeting, the crisis drill, the negotiation and the defense. Plus the certificate, which links to it. It is the thing you send instead of saying you did an internship.

Can I hand in a Canva deck or a Google Sheet?

Yes. The briefs that send you to real AI tools take a share link or a PDF export. A PDF is read by Priya and graded as the deliverable. A link cannot be opened by her, so she grades your note about it and the people who read your portfolio open the link.

Can I do a second track?

Yes. Every track has its own briefs and its own certificate. Switch tracks from Settings once the first is done.

Does a human read my work?

Your teacher does, if you joined through a college batch, and can leave a note on any brief. The scores themselves come from the AI manager against the rubric printed on the brief.

Who can see my certificate?

Anyone with the credential link, by design: that is what makes it checkable. Your wider profile page is off unless you switch it on in Settings.

That is the whole thing.

A desk, a manager, work that gets read. The first brief takes twenty minutes.

Create your account