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A graduate from Northwestern’s MBAi Program — a joint AI-focused MBA degree from the Kellogg School of Management and McCormick School of Engineering — Erin Bruns ’26 MBAi spent her summer internship with Amazon developing AI systems to help the company more efficiently find new employees just like her. Interning as a senior technical product manager with the e-commerce company, part of her work focused on evolving the company’s student-recruitment platform.
It’s a task crucial to Amazon, a company with more than 1.5 million employees worldwide that sometimes rapidly ramps up head count to meet seasonal booms.
“It was very meta-considering the fact that I had just gone through that student-recruitment process,” Erin said of her internship experience. “I had the opportunity to do a lot of research and then give some recommendations about how we can really improve and get some of the best talent from the student pools.” Later this year, Erin will be joining Amazon as a full-time employee with the same department.
Amazon’s use of AI in hiring remains a sensitive topic because an experimental tool developed in 2014 learned to discriminate against female applicants based on historical data. As a result, the company now approaches automated recruiting more cautiously.
Erin says the MBAi program was crucial for her internship success, preparing her for the technical, business and ethical aspects of the problem. “It was very exciting that from day one I understood the problem,” she said. “There was very little on-ramping time for me to understand what they were looking for, and for my entire 12 weeks, I was able to dive into the problem.”
That involved going deep with the AI tools Amazon provides its employees. Erin said that rather than an established e-commerce giant, she felt more like she worked inside a startup that lets employees find better solutions to ongoing challenges.
Once again, there was another moment where her MBAi training made a difference. “For a lot of the coworkers on my team, there was a reservation about what the onboarding timeline would be to try a new AI feature,” she said. “What I had learned throughout MBAi is that you’ve got to get started with AI right away, so you don’t get behind with it.”
This mindset made Erin an early AI adopter within her own team and put her in a position to demonstrate how to use different tools more effectively in the student-recruitment process.
Strengthening her technical knowledge is what led Erin to the MBAi program and back to Northwestern. She previously spent nearly five years as a solutions architect and UX researcher and has a B.S. in computer science.
MBAi helped her enhance her skillset and prepared her for future leadership roles. “The MBAi program gives my MBA immediate recognition and credibility, highlighting the technical skills I bring to the table,” she said. “Especially as a woman, who wants to get a higher-level position in a tech company, I never want to lose the fact that technical knowledge is part of my identity and my strengths.”
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