When AI Internships Get a Glow Up

By Stefan Lederer, Co-CEO & Co-Founder, Bitmovin

There’s tons of AI talent here in Europe, but companies are still hiring fewer young people. I see this as a huge mistake because young graduates are massively talented and are also AI fluent in how they work and build software. Also, founders in the AI space are getting younger in the US, but young/student-led startup companies are lacking in Europe. We wanted to do something about this, so set up an AI internship to incubate the amazing talent we have here, also giving those young people a taste-test of how to start a product and company.

The Bitmovin AI & Beyond Internship Incubator is the result. The program gives young talent hands-on experience with AI-powered solutions, supporting them to develop their skills and ideas. But what does it look like from the interns’ perspective? Olha Rybak and Gozde Sahin are two of this year’s 15 interns (selected from over 450 applicants), and their experiences give a good sense of what we’re trying to build with the program.

Why the Bitmovin AI internship?

Olha has just finished an AI Bachelor’s degree and wanted to put the skills she’d developed in university into practice, while making a real impact through projects she could be proud of. She felt that Bitmovin’s technology is quite unique in the industry and was particularly excited about its AI Scene Analysis (AISA) technology.

Gozde is studying for a Master's in Management, Economics, and Data Science, majoring in Business Analytics and was already an intern at Bitmovin, working closely with our Observability product. For her, moving to the AI internship felt like the natural next step because she wanted to be closer to the data pipelines and models that power the insights customers see.

What’s it like for the interns?

The Bitmovin AI internship stands out because the students work on meaningful, real-world AI video streaming products rather than work experience style tasks.

For Olha, having a sense of ownership was important:

“We’re building projects from scratch and are responsible for building, maintaining, promoting and making product decisions. We treat our projects as our own startups. It’s the perfect playground for learning how to build a startup because you don’t have any risks, only your ideas that you can realise through the program. It’s nothing like regular internships where you’re assigned to the work that people in the company are bored to do.”

Olha also highlighted the support she received: “The people at Bitmovin helped as much as they could and were genuinely interested in what we are building. This gave me a real sense that we were doing something meaningful.”

Gozde feels the experience exceeded her expectations, mainly because of how fast everything moved:

“By the third week, I was already presenting to a major customer, and from there almost every week brought a new customer touchpoint through my project, Davy. That rhythm gave me a rare combination: it sharpened my technical understanding while also building up my customer-facing experience at the same time. It's rare to get that much real exposure this early on.”

What do the interns get from the program?

We wanted the interns to develop their AI skills, learn how to build a product in the media domain, understand customer feedback and traction, and present their ideas to stakeholders and the public. The interns themselves are of course best placed to tell us what they’ve gained. 

Olha found she is excited by the interesting ways you can apply AI to streaming:

“I have so many intriguing ideas that I would love to realise but we simply didn’t have enough time for all of them. Nevertheless, it motivates me to keep going in this direction and I am glad that I found what I am passionate about. I have gained new skills, which I’ll be able to use next time I come across similar concepts. Also, I’ll have a polished product (GoVideo), which will hopefully have a couple of regular customers.”

Gozde’s goal from day one was always to build something that goes beyond an internal prototype, and as she explains, we're already seeing that come to life:

“Davy is going to be showcased as a demo page at IBC, and one of the features we worked on, the Ad Score, is set to get its own standalone page in Bitmovin's dashboard. That's exactly the kind of tangible outcome I was hoping to be part of; something real that customers and the ad sales teams actually interact with.”

Bitmovin’s Innovation Labs at IBC

We’ve built seven of the interns’ projects inside our Innovation Labs, and we're showing the live products at IBC with full demos at our stand (hall 5, stand 5.F72). They’re well worth a look.

I’m genuinely thrilled that the AI & Beyond Internship Incubator is helping to develop the skills, ideas and leadership capability for emerging AI talent and I can’t wait to see these young people take the video industry by storm.