As interns at Profit Recovery Partners (PRP) this summer, Aaron Guevara and Syed Sakib set out to eliminate time-consuming tasks for their colleagues. A University of Idaho bootcamp equipped them to meet the challenge of streamlining PRP’s paperwork-processing system.
Before arriving at PRP in Santa Ana, California, in late May 2026, Guevara ’26 and Sakib piloted a new internship training model. They spent two weeks on the Moscow campus working under the guidance of U of I employees. Dan Ewart, U of I’s vice president of information technology and chief information officer, worked with PRP leadership to understand the company’s needs and relay them to U of I’s team of AI experts, who helped prepare the students for the project.
“Once we had PRP’s buy-in and selected the students, we rapidly set up a bootcamp, which was the first stage of the internship,” Ewart said. “They worked with a combination of faculty and staff and learned the tools that they needed to do the AI coding. They went through a business process analysis and then worked with the Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Sciences (IIDS) team on real-world automated projects. They quickly proved they were ready to take on the internship.”
After the rigorous training, Guevara and Sakib headed to Orange County. By day two on the job, they were exploring solutions to PRP’s paperwork dilemma. The company works with businesses across the country to reduce expenses, saving clients more than $11 billion since its founding 30 years ago. PRP receives large volumes of data from hundreds of clients each month, all of which must be collected, organized and formatted correctly.
“They get a lot of raw data from clients and they have to conform it,” said Guevara, who earned his bachelor’s degree in cybersecurity in May. “Right now, they’re entering data by hand. We’re making an agentic AI-enabled app so that clients can put in data and then it comes out in a formatted table.”
Agentic AI systems are designed to analyze information, make decisions and complete tasks with minimal human intervention. By automating a complex, time-consuming process, the app could save PRP employees hours of manual work.
Sakib said the two-month internship required climbing a steep learning curve, but their prep work at U of I set them up for success.
“The biggest challenge was understanding the data and their whole process,” said Sakib, a doctoral student in computer science from Bagerhat, Bangladesh. “With my academic work, we handle a lot of data, but it’s already clean. With this internship, we’re getting our hands on actual data, and it is very noisy, so we come up with real solutions. This experience will be very helpful in my career, as well as my research.”
Colin Addington, senior projects manager for IIDS, guided the interns through their on-campus training, where they learned how to filter datasets and extract only the necessary information.
“We’re all trying to do more with less, and PRP’s proposal was a great opportunity for our students to gain industry-based experience with coding tools,” Addington said. “They’re getting exposed to things like standard software development life cycles and learning how to speak to a client you’re developing software for. They’re also building experience dealing with budgets and timelines.”
We’re making an agentic AI-enabled app so that clients can put in data and then it comes out in a formatted table.
Aaron Guevara
Graduate student in computer science
Outside the PRP office, Sakib and Guevara roamed the scenic beaches minutes from their apartment in Costa Mesa and sampled the area’s many restaurants. They return to campus this fall with new excitement for their studies.
“This internship is an amazing opportunity, and using real-world AI like this is a really cool experience to have under my belt,” said Guevara, who is beginning work on his master’s degree in cybersecurity at U of I. “I’m really excited to see what we cook up for my master’s research.”
After seeing the initial cohort of two thrive, Ewart envisions using the bootcamp approach as a model for future internships.
“The goal was always to make this a repeatable, scalable process,” Ewart said. “Now, we can go out to any business or organization and show them this model. Bringing on interns adds value to these companies, and the students gain tremendous experience. That’s our whole job as a university.”