AI is making polished resumes easy to produce. As employers are flooded with good-looking resumes that reveal little about what candidates can do, we need another way to stand out. My recommendation: build an AI portfolio of real work. Show not only that you can direct the machine, but that you can draw more value from it than your peers.
I once helped a group of students build their first AI portfolio case. With the head of the library, I defined a real problem: borrowing rates were falling. The students received actual borrowing data and details of the library’s recent marketing campaign, and time to investigate. The best proposals would go to the school principal, and I arranged prizes.
Yet their proposals were polished 7/10s: competent and plausible, but showing little of the students’ own framing, reasoning or understanding. They had largely handed the information to the machine and presented its reply as their own work. Work done almost entirely by the machine cannot showcase the student. It only shows what the machine can do.
A portfolio has to show the opposite: what you brought to the work. Here is how to build one.
Start with a real problem, one you find yourself. Ask friends, family, schoolmates or colleagues what needs solving. Then use AI to solve it: build a website or app, research a question, or create an agent to automate a task.
Don’t settle for AI’s first response, which is often a competent seven out of 10. Test it, break it, improve it. Then document the problem, your decisions, AI’s contribution, your revisions and the result in a website or presentation. Let AI help you build it, but be ready to explain how you did the work yourself.
Your portfolio is your chance to show what AI alone cannot provide: the initiative to spot a problem worth solving, and the judgment and effort that turn a competent answer into work worth noticing.
Frank Ng is a retired NASDAQ CEO, who co-authors this column with his son Ryan after publishing their book Hey AI, Let’s Talk!
