Post by Oliver Bernard

🛠️ Breaking into AI Problem: "I want to gain commercial AI experience however my company has strict AI governance/security in place which prevents me from using AI tools, what are my options?" We hear this often, so thought it was worth sharing our advice: 🌟 Continue to look inside your company: Before looking outside your company, check what's already been approved internally. A lot of businesses have quietly rolled out secure AI tools that employees aren't even aware of. If yours hasn't, perhaps suggest it and get involved in how AI is adopted at work from a governance or risk angle. 🌟 Solo Projects are your best friend: Build a portfolio outside of work including end to end applications using APIs from OpenAI, Anthropic or Hugging Face and deploy them publicly. Contribute to open source AI projects on GitHub. Enter a Kaggle competition or hackathon. Replicate real business problems like churn prediction, document summarisation or demand forecasting using open datasets, then write it up like a business case; what was the problem, what did you build, what would the impact be. 🌟 Get a certification that carries weight  Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer, AWS Machine Learning Specialty, and Microsoft Azure AI Engineer are the ones hiring managers recognise; these are a good way of showing you’ve done more than just dabbling. 🌟 Contribute to open source projects Even small contributions to AI projects on GitHub show you can work in a real codebase, collaborate with others, and ship. That's closer to commercial experience than most people realise. 🌟 Talk about your AI governance exposure  If you've worked somewhere with strict AI policies, you've seen the other side; risk, compliance, data sensitivity, ethical considerations. That is both scarce and valuable, especially at companies trying to scale AI responsibly. 🌟 Share what you're learning Post on LinkedIn about what you built and share what didn't work. There's still plenty of demand for AI Engineers, and not enough candidates so this is your best way to demonstrate you have the skills. Feel free to reach out for advice!