At Mantel, one of our core principles is to ‘make things better’, and that starts with the talent who walk through our doors. Our AI internship is not your typical run-of-the-mill summer internship. It’s an opportunity to find, challenge, and shape the next generation of Mantelorians.
We were particularly struck by the calibre and diversity of the interest we received in this internship, with applicants joining the conversation from a huge range of backgrounds and disciplines. This year, we welcomed a fantastic cohort of AI Interns Anthony, Hannah, and Lucy, as they dived headfirst into a transformative 7-week journey covering agentic architecture, client conversations, and beyond.
The blueprint
From internal to client projects
Our internship structure was custom-designed for a high-impact progression, all centered on a deep, practical focus on agents and agentic architecture.
The foundation: Our internal hack (4 weeks)
The interns’ first mission was to contribute to our Mantel website chatbot to replace traditional navigation with smart, natural conversation. This ambitious start was backed up by training sessions from our wider AI/ML team, with team members running sessions covering everything from Agile and Git introductory sessions to deep dive sessions on Embeddings and Agentic Architecture. Armed with this knowledge, the interns put theory into action with each intern formulating and developing their own specialised, high-value agent on top of the chatbot. The interns created a suite of agents for everything from assessing client maturity to pre-qualifying leads and intelligently matching consultants to projects.
The deep dive: Client-facing impact (3 Weeks)
The next challenger for our interns was real client-facing work, where they took their agentic skills into the wild. One project involved the discovery phase for a team assistant agent. The goal was to build an HR query solution for a user base of over 200,000 employees. Talk about a huge, real-world impact! In another project, they worked on key features for a client’s flagship product, developing a specialised reviewer agent tool and a conversational interface to let users interrogate document findings in real-time. Overall, the interns contributed to building crucial tools for the client’s success.
The overall takeaway? The interns felt a great, natural progression between the two phases. Every week was a step forward, solidifying skills in everything from going “from LLMs to agents” to deep skills in GCP and agentic architecture.
The Mantel experience
Our culture
At Mantel, we know that growth isn’t just about writing code. That’s why we provided plenty of opportunities for our internships to experience what life at Mantel is really like.
- New tech, new challenges: Client work meant getting hands-on with a huge range of technologies like ADK, evals, and RAG. As one intern put it: “We mainly worked on the discovery phase, so we got to experiment with lots of technology which was fun but challenging.”
- Giving back: We’re a company that believes in Making Things Better, and our interns joined the mission by volunteering with Beyond Blue to call donors and personally thank them for their donations.
- Great people: Hannah’s highlight was working with the Vietnam Mantel Team, and she loved taking part in a Lunar New Year-themed retro.
The conclusion
Work can be fun and impactful
Seven weeks flew by, but the impact will last. For us, the best part is hearing how the experience has shaped their next steps.
- Hannah settled a long-standing debate for good: “‘Work can be fun’ is not a myth.” She also summed up the entire experience: “The internship felt like one big festival! So sad it is finishing.” Luckily Hannah won’t be gone for long. She joins us as a fully fledged Mantelorian once her studies have wrapped up later this year.
- Lucy is setting the culture bar high for her future career search back in the UK: “I’m going to search for a job with a high standard for culture and environment.” As Lucy moves to the other side of the world, we’ll be watching her journey from afar and cheering her on from the sidelines.
- Anthony had a great takeaway on networking: “Have conversations with people, everyone has something interesting to say.” Anthony continues his journey with Mantel as an Associate Machine Learning Engineer, having an incredible impact in client facing work already!
