INNOVATION

See their work at the Tech, Data, AI, Ventures (TDAV) Intern Capstone Showcase.

Highlights

• 64 interns tackled real business challenges throughout the summer.
• Interns worked alongside employee project leaders to research problems and develop solutions.
• Employees explored the projects and selected the New York Life 2026 People’s Choice Award winners.

After a summer of learning, collaboration and problem-solving, Tech, Data, AI, Ventures (TDAV) interns at New York Life put their work on display at the TDAV Intern Capstone Showcase in August in the Home Office.

The showcase celebrated what interns accomplished alongside their TDAV project leaders and gave employees a chance to see new perspectives applied to real business challenges.

Turning summer learning into solutions

The TDAV Intern Capstone Showcase serves as the culminating experience of the TDAV summer internship program, challenging interns to work together to tackle a real business challenge from start to finish. Throughout the summer, 12 teams of interns partnered with business and technology leaders to develop innovative solutions spanning AI, data, engineering, modernization and employee experience. In doing so, they built hands-on experience through real project work, gaining the technical and professional skills that equipped them to deliver meaningful solutions by summer's end.

Beyond showcasing technical capabilities, the capstone encourages collaboration, critical thinking and leadership development, while providing interns with the opportunity to demonstrate how their work can help advance New York Life's business objectives.

Each team researched its problem, developed a solution and prepared to bring that work to life for employees at the showcase. The result: 12 interactive project booths where interns could demonstrate their solutions, talk about their approach and share what they learned along the way.

Showcase showdown

Beyond exploring the booths and hearing from the teams, the event also gave attendees a role in recognizing standout work. Over 500 New York Life employees attended the event and had the opportunity to vote for the projects that made the biggest impression, which helped determine the winners of the 2026 TDAV Intern Capstone Showcase People’s Choice Award.

“The Capstone Showcase is a highlight of our TDAV intern program because it's where you see learning translate into real impact,” said TDAV’s Nancy Sherman, executive sponsor of the TDAV Summer Intern Program. “These interns didn't just study our challenges. They dug in, partnered with our business and technology leaders and built solutions that address real needs across the organization — several of which are already on their way into production. That kind of thinking and initiative is exactly what TDAV is all about.”

Congratulations to this year’s winners

1^st Place
Team: The Gold Standard
Project name: User Adoption Intelligence
Capstone Leads: Karthik Manohar and Jay Upadhyay

Interns:

• Sinmisola Akinjayeju
• Javier Celestino
• Nadav Issacof
• Olivia Kirby
• Anamitra Rawat

The business challenge: Business leaders have limited self-service access to insights on how applications and features are being used. This can make it harder to spot adoption trends early, identify opportunities to improve user experiences, and make informed decisions about product enhancements and investments.

The solution: The team built Aureon, a tool that transforms New York Life application usage data into genAI-powered insights and recommendations. Through natural-language conversations and interactive visualizations, business leaders can uncover usage trends, identify adoption gaps and opportunities, and make more informed decisions about product improvements and investments.

2^nd Place
Team: A11y Scan
Project name: AI Accessibility Assistant
Capstone Leads: Andrea Khan and Evan Barden

Interns:

• Rio Blumenthal
• Tanzim Hossen
• Dev Patel
• Skye Pickett
• Nicholas Tayag

The business challenge: Many frontend accessibility issues are difficult to identify, prioritize and translate into actionable engineering fixes. This calls for a solution that solves these problems at the development level, before the sites are finalized, and change becomes more costly.

The solution: An AI-powered frontend accessibility analysis assistant was developed that scans web applications, identifies potential accessibility issues, suggests likely root causes, prioritizes findings by impact and urgency and provides remediation guidance.

3^rd Place
Team: The A/V Club
Project name: Multimodal Media Q&A Assistant
Capstone Lead: Su Yang

Interns:

• Marlyn Arque Rupa
• Rae Gainer
• Chloe Tsetsekas
• Jacky Wong
• Kavya Sri Yakkala

The business challenge: Enterprise knowledge is increasingly stored in multimedia formats such as meeting recordings, training videos and presentations. Unlike documents, this content is difficult to search, requiring employees to manually watch lengthy videos or listen to recordings to find relevant information.

The solution: A multimedia knowledge AI-assistant was built that enables users to ask questions through text or voice, and extracts the most relevant video clips for quick, contextual insights.

The event marked the culmination of a summer of work for the interns — and reflected the time, guidance and partnership TDAV mentors and project leaders invested in helping them learn, experiment and turn their ideas into something tangible.