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Last month, I spent a weekend in my dorm room using AI tools to build a blind-date platform. The platform worked, and people I spoke with said they understood the idea, but using it felt a bit inconvenient. They did not keep using it.
I still had a working product to show employers and proof that I could turn an idea into something real with AI in a weekend.
You can spend a weekend building a website and find out nobody wants it. You can make an AI tool that gives bad answers or breaks after five minutes. That is OK. You still learn what went wrong, what you would change and whether the idea was worth building in the first place.
I think that is why college may be the best time in our lives to experiment with AI. We have time to be curious, get things wrong and start again. You do not need to become an AI engineer or build the next huge company from your dorm room. Start with the field you already care about and see what the tools can help you do. Even if the project goes nowhere, you will understand AI better because you used it on a real problem. You will also have something you built and an experience you can talk about.
We spend a lot of time in college trying to predict what employers will want from us two or three years from now. AI is one thing we do not have to guess about. In a 2026 McKinsey survey, nearly nine in 10 respondents said their organizations regularly used AI, and 28% said their organizations spent more than 10% of their technology budgets on it. Students joining those companies should understand how to use the tools they are building around.
That does not mean everybody needs to become an AI engineer. A finance student can start much smaller. Take a company’s annual report, put it into ChatGPT or NotebookLM and ask why margins changed, how debt moved, where cash is being spent and what the cash flow statement says about the business. Keep asking questions and checking the report until you can explain it yourself. That is a much better use of AI than asking it to finish an assignment.
For a marketing student, the opportunity looks different. Pick a local restaurant, clothing store or small business. Study its Instagram, website and reviews. Use ChatGPT to understand what customers repeatedly like or complain about. Come up with user-generated content ideas and build a simple landing page using Lovable or Replit. You can show the owner examples of something you made instead of only writing “digital marketing” on your resume.
Computer science students should go further. Learn how to work with coding agents such as Cursor, Claude Code or Codex. Learn how to give them clear instructions and, more importantly, how to understand and improve what they build.
This applies to almost every major. Accounting, journalism, consulting, design, health care and media will all have their own ways of using AI. The point is curiosity. Watch demo videos. Try new AI software. Figure out what works and what could be improved. Talk to professors using AI in research, students building companies and people already working in the industries you want to enter.
AI tools are changing too quickly for anyone to become comfortable with the status quo. Someone who masters one AI tool today may not have much of an advantage three years from now. Someone who learns how to keep learning probably will.
Your concern should not be that AI will suddenly replace every college graduate. It is that two students with similar grades, internships and resumes apply for the same job, but one has spent years experimenting with these tools and the other has not. It is not difficult to imagine who becomes more useful to an employer.
Of course, this does not mean every AI company will succeed. Some investments will turn out to be terrible. Some products will disappear. AI will disrupt jobs, and data centers use a serious amount of power. But AI is not going away, and students should take that seriously.
Become good at your field, but stay curious about how AI is changing it. Experiment while you have the time. Build things while the cost of failing is low. Have something to show for what you have learned. Being comfortable with AI may soon stop being an advantage and start becoming an expectation.
Rishabh Karnawat is a sophomore studying Finance & Informatics.
