Things I’ve built with AI.

For years, when a client asked which CoachingOurselves topics to run, the answer lived in my head and my sent email. I pulled about 1,500 emails from my archive and turned how I decide into rules. Now learning and development professionals use an AI designer built on those rules to plan a custom peer learning program. It asks them the questions I would ask, then hands them a slide deck and three letters for their colleagues.

I’m on the volunteer board of a lake association in Quebec and help get its newsletter out. I use Claude to turn a rough draft into plain French, in the board’s voice. I edit, the board corrects, then it goes to members. The AI rereads my past corrections and the issues that went out before each new draft.

A friend, a university professor in the UK, had twelve interview transcripts to anonymize for a paper, and ethics boards are wary of that kind of material going to a cloud AI. So I built him a small Windows program. It finds the names, organizations and places, gives each one the same code in every transcript, and does all of it offline on the computer it’s installed on.

I wanted to see if AI could work on résumés without seeing the candidate’s name or contact details, since Quebec’s privacy law makes you careful where they go. My tool strips them out on a server in Montreal, with a recognizer that runs on that server, so only the anonymized text goes to the AI, which writes an anonymous profile in French and English.