Robert F. Smith Encourages Businesses Not To ‘Destroy’ Internship Programs Amid The Rise Of AI – AfroTech
Robert F. Smith understands the importance of internships.
The billionaire is founder, chairman, and partner at private equity firm Vista Equity Partners. Its portfolio includes enterprise software, data, and technology companies, as previously reported by AFROTECH™. Smith has spoken highly of the internship experience, which paved the way for his career trajectory and impact today.
Smith obtained an internship at Bell Laboratories (Bell Labs) while he was a Denver high school student and continued working with the company in college at Cornell University, where he studied chemical engineering. His interest in the company began with curiosity about what powered the computers installed in the school systems, he said in a video shared on his website. Smith learned about transistors in the process and discovered that Bell Labs had played a key role in their development, which prompted him to find a contact for the company and call; he was connected to its human resources director.
He was a junior in high school when he applied for the internship. However, he shared that the internship required being a junior or senior in college. Smith called the human resources director daily for two weeks, then every Monday for five months, he said. He eventually got a callback for an interview after a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student didn’t show up for the internship.
“I drove down, and I got the job and started working at Bell Labs, and it changed my life,” he said, per the video. “It wasn’t just what I saw and where technology was going. I saw really the first video phones, the first cell phones. You gotta remember, this is back in 1980, OK? And they were doing things in communications that we’re only seeing realized today. So that’s kind of point No. 1. Point No. 2, you had access to computing power. And even more importantly, I had access to some of the greatest minds on the planet to ask questions of.”
While working on fixing an operational amplifier as instructed by his mentor, the internship taught him to “discover the joy of figuring things out,” he said.
“There is great joy in solving problems, and there’s great joy in solving problems if you figure out how to solve the problem, and that’s one of the things I enjoy most about what I do today,” Smith said in the video. “I get a chance to work with some brilliant people, business people, scientists, engineers, technologists, software programmers, HR people, to figure out the most complex problems on the planet and how we’re gonna solve those for the companies that we invest with. So to me, that’s what that all led to.”
Smith understands the value of internships, and this hasn’t changed in a landscape heavily influenced by AI. Already, it has reshaped the workforce with some companies shifting how employees do their jobs and others cutting roles altogether.
“Agents are workers, workers do tasks, some of those tasks get aggregated into jobs, and there is going to be a massive impact on jobs, no question about it. Some may say [it will be] a big loss, some may say an expansion—there’s going to be some mix till we reach different states of equilibrium, and that’s how life is,” Smith said in June at Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Aspen, CO.
Nonetheless, Smith believes businesses should not “destroy” their internship program. He says they are vital for passing knowledge on to the next generation and for keeping excitement about the future of innovation alive, Fortune reports.
“That’s an important part of bringing people along and, honestly, of creating optimism and a new group of technologists and thinkers who can carry this world,” he said at the event.
