Data Science Intern, AI Strategy & Transformation

Data Science Intern, AI Strategy & Transformation

Requisition ID: 24764

Country: United States of America

Location type: Hybrid (3 days / week in office)

State / Province: Illinois

City: Chicago

Application Deadline: 15 March 2026

About Us

Korn Ferry is a global consulting firm that powers performance. We unlock the potential in your people and unleash transformation across your business - synchronizing strategy, operations, and talent to accelerate performance, fuel growth, and inspire a legacy of change. That’s why the world’s most forward-thinking companies across every major industry turn to us - for a shared commitment to lasting impact and the bold ambition to Be More Than.

Headquartered in Los Angeles, our over 9,000 colleagues globally serve clients in more than 50 countries. We offer five core capabilities that span the full talent lifecycle:

• Organizational Strategy
• Assessment and Succession
• Talent Acquisition
• Leadership Development
• Rewards and Benefits

Job Description

• Analyze a large-scale dataset (millions of employee review records) to uncover trends in workforce sentiment and topics across roles, industries, and geographies
• Apply NLP techniques including text preprocessing, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling (e.g., LDA, BERTopic) to identify key themes driving employee experience
• Integrate AI/LLM capabilities to summarize topics, generate narrative insights, and support exploratory analysis at scale
• Build machine learning and predictive models to link sentiment and topics to outcomes such as retention risk, engagement, or employer brand strength
• Translate analytical findings into actionable business insights, highlighting implications for talent strategy, leadership, and workforce planning
• Deliver results through clear visualizations and executive-ready summaries, demonstrating measurable business value and impact

Job Summary

We are seeking a motivated Data Science and Engineering Intern to join Korn Ferry’s AI Strategy & Transformation team. This intern will work closely with data scientists, engineers, psychometricians, and product managers to support the design, prototyping, evaluation, and deployment of data-driven solutions that apply statistical methods, machine learning, and generative AI to talent and people-analytics problems. This is a learning-focused role: you will contribute to real projects, build prototypes and visualizations, and receive regular mentorship from senior team members.

Why join us

We’re a small, tight-knit team inside Korn Ferry that encourages moving fast, thinking big, and creating real business value. On the AI Strategy & Transformation team you’ll work at the intersection of people science and cutting-edge AI to glean the most actionable insights from complex data. Our work has high-visibility: you’ll collaborate directly with senior product and business leaders, contribute to decisions that influence Korn Ferry’s offerings, and see your ideas go from notebook to production.

Our Data

Korn Ferry maintains a rich collection of people and assessment data (psychometric assessments, multi-rater tools, a pay database, talent movement and organizational datasets). As an intern, you’ll get exposure to these datasets and learn how they are used to produce high-quality insights and visualizations in the People Analytics space.

Context of the Role

This internship offers hands-on experience with prototyping both machine learning models and AI applications while learning how to preserve the quality and integrity of established scoring and psychometric services. The intern will focus on exploratory predictive modeling work with large scale databases on talent and skills. Emphasis will be on projects that generate business value for our clients.

Responsibilities

• Support data science and GenAI projects by preparing and cleaning datasets, conducting exploratory analyses, and producing summary reports.
• Build and document reproducible prototypes in Python for model experiments, simple ML models, and GenAI proof-of-concepts under senior guidance.
• Assist in training, evaluating, and comparing models and summarizing for review.
• Help evaluate generative AI outputs for quality, alignment with ethical guidelines, and fit for HR/talent use cases; participate in prompt engineering and iteration.
• Create clear visualizations and presentations (dashboards, charts, slide decks) to communicate findings to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Maintain clean, versioned code in Git and follow team development practices (code comments, basic unit tests, notebooks with README).
• Participate in team meetings, sprint ceremonies and learning sessions; seek and act on feedback from mentors.

Qualifications

Required

• Currently pursuing a Bachelors, Masters, or PhD in Data Science, Computer Science, Statistics, Computational Social Sciences, or a closely related field.
• Hands-on coursework or research projects using Python or R for data analysis and machine learning.
• Experience with SQL for querying relational data.
• Experience creating data visualizations (Matplotlib/Seaborn/Plotly, ggplot2, Tableau/Power BI, or similar).
• Familiarity with Git/GitHub (commits, branches, pull requests).
• Strong curiosity, eagerness to learn, and good written/verbal communication skills.
• Ability to work collaboratively on a multidisciplinary team and to take direction from senior staff.

Preferred

• Coursework, thesis/research, or project experience with machine learning (supervised learning, model evaluation) and/or exposure to generative models (transformers, LLMs, prompt engineering).
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (Azure/Azure ML)
• Prior research assistantships, internships, or practical experience prototyping analytics/ML solutions.

Experience Level

0–2 years of professional or research experience (research assistantships, internships, capstone and thesis projects count).

Learning Outcomes / What You’ll Gain

• Practical experience prototyping ML/AI solutions for people-analytics problems.
• Hands-on use of tools & platforms used at Korn Ferry (Python/R, SQL, version control, and introductory cloud/ML tooling).
• Mentorship from senior data scientists and opportunities to present work to cross-functional teams.
• Exposure to how AI/ML solutions are applied to real-world business contexts.

Estimated hourly rate: 20.00 USD - 25.00

Salary range represents the compensation Korn Ferry expects to pay to a candidate with the requirements for the job posted. Korn Ferry offers competitive compensation and benefits commensurate with experience.

Korn Ferry may use AI as part of its recruitment process, but all hiring decisions are made by humans.

Korn Ferry Benefits

The Korn Ferry Cares Wellbeing Platform offers Employees health benefits (Medical, Dental, Vision, Short Term Disability, Basic Life and Accidental Death & Dismemberment), Critical Illness, Accident Injury, Hospital Indemnity, and Legal Insurance. Employees are eligible to enroll in Korn Ferry's Tax Deferred Savings plan 401(k). Employee Stock Purchase Program is available to all permanent employees who work 20 hours or more after 6 months of service.

Employees are eligible to receive a total of 15 days vacation annually plus paid time off for 16 company holidays. Full time eligible employees will accrue sick time commencing on the first date of employment at the rate of 3.33 hours per pay period for an annualized maximum of 80 hours.

Internal Mobility at Korn Ferry

If you currently work for Korn Ferry or one of our affiliates, you must be eligible to apply for a different position within Korn Ferry to use the Careers Site. If you accept such a position, your benefits programs and Human Resources policies may change. Please consult with your HR contact for the new position concerning application eligibility, including any immigration/visa needs, benefit programs, and HR policies applicable to that position.

Korn Ferry is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, or veteran status or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.

Background Check Disclaimer

The successful candidate will need to complete background checks as part of our recruitment process, this may include criminal, education credentials, employment history, and other background information relevant to your employment qualifications