Your AI Work Is Your Intellectual Property
Start Treating it That Way
There’s a version of the AI conversation that focuses entirely on the threat it poses and the jobs it will eliminate. I find that conversation less interesting than the inverse — which is that for people who are actually building with AI, the work you’re creating right now is becoming one of the most valuable things you’ll carry into your next role.
Here’s what I mean.
The question CEOs are already asking
Last fall, I was in a conversation with a recruiter, Michael King, who told me something that reframed how I was thinking about my own career positioning.
I was asking what the landscape was like for CMO roles and he mentioned that the first thing CEOs were asking when evaluating CMO candidates wasn’t about pipeline numbers or brand strategy or category thinking. It was: *what have they and their teams built with AI?*
To be clear, this wasn’t about CMOs were thinking about AI or personally using AI tools. It was about what they’ve built, what problems it solved, and what the measurable impact was.
I’ve experienced this from the other side too. I’m currently hiring for several roles on my team at Sequel.io. When I evaluate candidates, AI fluency is part of what I’m looking for. I don’t want to hear that someone is excited about AI or actively exploring use cases (although both of those things are great). I want to know what they’ve built or, for more senior candidates, what their teams have built under their direction.
I’m asking things like:
What was the problem?
What was the solution?
What was the impact on pipeline, revenue, and/or efficiency?
Interestingly, most candidates aren’t prepared to answer those questions.
What you build with AI is your IP
The systems and workflows you build with AI are replicable. You can’t take a company’s customer data or proprietary information with you when you leave (and you shouldn’t) but the approach you used to solve a problem, the workflow you designed, and the system you built to automate something that used to take three hours a week — that knowledge belongs to you.
If you built an AI-powered voice-of-customer research system at one company, you can rebuild a version of it at the next. If you built a tool that automatically routes meeting transcripts into your CRM, you know how to do that again. The method is yours.
This means that every AI project you complete is compounding into something you carry with you. It’s professional equity that doesn’t disappear when you change jobs.
The AI Resume
When I was having those conversations last fall, I did something that I’d never seen done before — but that turned out to be incredibly valuable.
I built an AI Resume.
It wasn’t a replacement for my regular resume. It was a separate document specifically designed to answer the question I knew was coming. I documented everything that I and my team at Pavilion had built with AI and then organized it into categories. For each item, I listed the use case, the tools and platforms we used to build it, and wherever I had data, the impact (leads generated, hours saved, revenue influenced).
My AI Resume preempted the question CEOs had before they could ask it.
Every CEO I met with who might have planned to probe on AI fluency didn’t have to, because I’d already answered it in the first document they received, before we even had our first conversation.
The feedback was unanimous. Every CEO mentioned it. Every recruiter mentioned it. It was the thing that stood out.
Want to build your own AI resume? Download the template here.
Positioning yourself as an AI-native candidate
I’ve been hiring consistently over the past several months, and I ask every candidate the same question — what have you built with AI, and what was the impact?
No candidate has ever handed me an AI Resume.
Not one.
The opportunity is sitting there, wide open, and almost no one is taking it.
An AI Resume would be a differentiator, but an AI Resume combined with a demonstration would be a true game changer.
If you’ve built an app, show it to me.
If you’ve built a workflow, walk me through it.
Better yet — if you’re creative about it — use AI as part of the job search itself. Build a personal website. Create an interactive chatbot that can answer questions about you and your work. Show me, through the medium of AI, how you think about and work with AI.
The best candidates walk into interviews with not just an AI story to tell, but a thing to show.
How AI will kill help your career
Last weekI had a long call with Maddie Bell, CEO of Synapsa. Maddie is one of the most interesting people I know in this space — she’s been building a full marketing brand OS platform, and the depth of her thinking on AI systems is impressive.
At some point in the conversation, she said something I’ve been turning over in my head since.
We were talking about operating systems — the personal systems and workflows that people like Maddie and I are building for ourselves using AI and the institutional knowledge that lives in how we’ve designed these systems.
She said: *there will probably be a world where your operating systems are your personal career equity.*
She’s right. The people who are building these things right now (really building them, not just prompting) are accumulating something that others don’t have yet. It’s more than familiarity with the tools. It’s judgment. The ability to look at a problem and ask, what would the right AI-powered solution look like here? To know when you’re close, when something isn’t built right, or when the architecture needs to change.
That judgment is hard to fake. And it’s going to be in shorter and shorter supply as expectations rise faster than people develop it.
Two flavors of AI candidates
I don’t want this to read as a blanket endorsement of “use AI, get a job.”
If you’re using AI to write emails, that’s a great starting point but it won’t be a differentiator for much longer — it’ll be table stakes. The same is true for using AI to summarize documents, generate first drafts, or run basic research. Those are useful habits, and you should build them, but they’re not what CEOs are asking about.
What creates real competitive advantage for job seekers right now is building. Solving a real problem with an AI-powered solution that didn’t exist before. Having the judgment to identify a workflow worth automating, the curiosity to figure out how to build it, and the rigor to measure whether it actually worked.
If that’s you — if you’ve been building things and seeing them work — you have something worth showing off. The mistake would be to hide it on a shared drive somewhere, or to assume that your interviewer will think to ask the right questions.
Show your work
Here’s my call to action, and it’s simple.
Start an AI Resume — right now, today, while you’re thinking about it.
Open a document and create three columns:
What you built
What problem it solved
What the impact was
Organize it by category if you have more than a handful of items. Include the tools and platforms you used and the outcomes where you have them. Then share it as part of every application you submit and every hiring manager you’re scheduled to meet with.
Better yet, get started quickly using my AI Resume template.
Want to build your own AI resume? Download the template here.
Your AI work is your intellectual property. It reflects how you think, what you prioritize, and what you know how to do.
Make it part of your story.
— Kathleen
PS: If you’ve built an AI Resume, or if you try it after reading this, I want to hear how it goes. Reply to this email — I read every response.
💜 A note on my content:
Yes, I use AI to help me write this newsletter. Every idea, insight, and point of view here is mine. AI helps me think, structure, and draft — it does not replace my judgment. I also use em dashes (and emojis 👀) unapologetically, sometimes because AI likes them, and sometimes because they’re grammatically correct. If you’re here to sniff out “what was written by AI,” you’ll probably be disappointed. And if you’re fundamentally against the use of AI in writing, this newsletter is likely not for you. You’ll find this disclaimer in every issue, because transparency matters to me.