I've spent the summer as a Marketing Intelligence intern at Phlo Technologies, a digital pharmacy in Glasgow. I came in from a pharmacology degree, with AI experience picked up through my own entrepreneurship projects rather than any course. Here's what the summer actually taught me.
I started by asking, not building
My instinct was to build something impressive fast, mostly to prove I deserved to be there.
I didn't. I spent my first weeks interviewing people instead: execs through to the front line, across clinical, engineering, HR, finance, operations, data and creative. I wanted to know where everyone genuinely was with AI, what software stack each team was building out, and what they'd already tried that hadn't stuck.
I treated those conversations as homework to get through before the real work started. They were the real work. Almost everything worth building came out of something said in passing, usually about a task so routine the person had stopped noticing it annoyed them.
What that turned into
The interviews became the foundation for the main thing I've built: an AI mind map and atlas of the company. Who uses what, where the gaps sit, and what's worth solving.
Alongside it, an AI bank of skills. Some are tailored to individuals and their actual workflow, others are shared company-wide. Twelve are now live for anyone at Phlo to use.
Being the most experienced person in the room, and the least
Some rooms I walked into as the person who knew most about AI. That was new, and uncomfortable at first. Getting comfortable there, being the one with the answer and willing to say so, was probably the biggest shift in my confidence all summer.
But the sessions I enjoyed most were the opposite. Sitting with people far more advanced than me, watching how they actually worked, asking questions and picking things up hands-on. You can't get that from a course or a video. Having people around who were genuinely ahead of me, and generous enough to show me how they did it, was the best part of the whole thing.
Both were useful. One built my confidence, the other showed me how far there is to go.
The work was actually visible
Phlo is growing fast and still small enough to be scalable, and that combination made a real difference to my summer.
Projects were actionable. I could build something and watch it land, used by a team, changing how something got done, within days rather than disappearing into next year's roadmap. As an intern that's rare, and it's motivating. You see your own work have an effect from inside the company instead of hearing about it second hand months later.
Building it isn't the same as finishing it
What caught me out was how much of the work sat after the build.
Getting something adopted took more effort than making it work: sitting with one person for twenty minutes, showing them the tool on their own task, adjusting it when their reality didn't match my assumptions. Skip that and nothing happens, however good the build is.
I wrote everything down, and it saved me
I kept a daily log from day one: what I did, what I found, what I got wrong. It felt like admin at the time. Two months on it's the only reason I can remember the detail, and it became the raw material for my final presentation and for this blog.
If you take one practical thing from all this, take that.
Four things I'd tell the next scholar
Where it's left me
Going from two projects to ten has changed what I think I'm capable of. I've also built myself a learning pack over the summer that I haven't had time to start: every gap I noticed in myself, written down with something to fix it. That's probably my favourite thing to be taking away from Phlo, because it means my learning doesn't stop when the internship does.
Coming from pharmacology, what I care about is the overlap. AI is going to change healthcare, and I'd rather be competent enough to shape some of it than watch it happen. Eight weeks ago I suspected that. Now I know it, and I know roughly what I need to learn next.
Thanks to everyone at Phlo who gave me their time, and to Entrepreneurial Scotland and the Saltire Scholars programme for getting me in the room.
