In today's edition:
🎯 The Gap Report — Stop testing AI. Build one. 🔧 From the Build Bench — AIHRPilot walkthrough (new series) 💎 Portfolio Stack Spotlight — Notion via Secret: up to $6,000 in value 💼 The Board Brief — 3 live NED/Chair roles closing in 2 weeks 💰 The Talent Feed — Mercor, micro1, Meridial 🧠 The OS Corner — Founding Cohort: 6 seats remain 🪶 The Closing Signal — A quote to sit with
1. The Gap Report
Stop testing AI. Build one.
Every executive I know is "experimenting with AI."
They've tested Claude Projects. Spun up a GPT. Done a Copilot pilot. Put their team through the McKinsey/BCG/Deloitte AI exec program. Bought licenses for three different copilots. Posted a thoughtful thread about prompt engineering.
Ask them one question: What did you ship?
Silence.
This is the License Trap. The License Trap is when you confuse buying access with building leverage. Every subscription, every certificate, every five-figure exec program is a receipt you can show your boss. None of them change what happens on Monday morning. None of them appear on your portfolio. None of them compound.
Here's what does compound: one shipped AI tool per quarter that solves a specific pain in your own work.
Not your company's work — your work. Something you use. Something with your name on it. Something you can demo on a screen share instead of describe on a deck.
I built AIHRPilot because I was tired of watching CHROs answer the same ten policy questions twenty times a week. I built DueDrill because my VC work required grinding through DD packets at 11 p.m. I built ChaiRaise because a yeshiva trusted me with a $12M, five-year fundraising goal and I was not going to hit it with a spreadsheet and a Gmail folder.
Each tool did three things a course cannot:
Removed 5–20 hours a week from recurrence. Time I now spend on portfolio income or my family.
Became a credential I could show, not tell. Clients don't want another deck. They want the screen share.
Earned its keep by month one. Each tool generated revenue, unlocked revenue, or freed the hours to earn it.
The counter-argument I hear is: "I'm not a coder." Neither was I. I used Claude. I used Cursor and Lovable. I used Supabase when I needed a database. I broke things. I shipped. Today's stack compresses the gap between "I wish this existed" and "here is the thing I built" to 40–120 hours of focused work — less than the hours most executives burn on a single board-meeting deck they won't remember in six months.
Pick one repeating pain in your work. Ship one tool against it this quarter. By end of Q2 2026 you'll have something almost none of your peers have: a tool that proves you built, not just adopted.
Your move this week: pick the one repeating task you most resent — the recurring meeting prep, the vendor scoring, the candidate screen, the board-packet assembly, the policy Q&A. Write it down in one sentence. Hit reply and tell me what it is. I'll tell you if it's a 40-hour build or a 120-hour one — and where to start.
Let's build.
— Yuri
2. From the Build Bench
AIHRPilot: how I built a CHRO's policy engine in a weekend
This is the first in an ongoing series. Every few issues I'll walk through one tool from The Portfolio Leverage Co. stack — not a demo, not a sales pitch, but the actual build story.
First up: AIHRPilot — the HR policy intelligence engine I built for a Fortune 500 CHRO.
The 30-second version:
Problem: HR was answering the same 8–12 policy questions ~200 times a week. ~40 hrs/wk of HRBP time burned on recurrence.
Design call: Don't replace Lattice. Augment it. Read every ticket, answer 60% automatically, route the rest with a pre-drafted reply.
Stack: Flask + scikit-learn (TF-IDF) + Claude API + HTMX UI. No vector DB. No fine-tuning. ~$40/month to run.
Time savings: ~40 hrs/wk → ~6 hrs/wk of review.
Build time: One weekend for v1. Three weeks to production.
(Full walkthrough covers the 6-phase architecture, 4 copy-paste Claude prompts, and an adaptation table for candidate screening, RFP scoring, board prep, deal flow, and compliance Q&A.)
3. Portfolio Stack Spotlight
Make.com, at 40% off.
Sunday's Gap Report argues for one shipped AI tool per quarter. Here's the reality most executives hit on day two of actually building: the tool doesn't fail because Claude isn't smart enough. It fails because nothing is connected.
The ticket comes into the inbox. Nothing grabs it. The draft reply gets generated. Nothing routes it. The confidence score exists. Nothing acts on it.
That's what Make.com solves — the glue layer between your AI reasoning and the systems where work actually happens (Gmail, Slack, Notion, Airtable, your CRM, your calendar, your Beehiiv account, Lattice, 2,000+ others).
Through The Portfolio Stack (powered by Secret):
40% off annual Pro or Teams plan — covers your whole year of automations
First month free with 20,000 operations credits — enough to prototype 3–5 real workflows before you pay a cent
Stacks with Airtable (Ed. #2) — Airtable as data store → Make as the automation engine → your inbox, calendar, CRM downstream
For a Portfolio Executive running 3–5 mandates, this is the difference between "I built an AI tool" and "I built an AI tool that runs itself every weekday at 7 a.m."
(Some links may be affiliate; all have to earn their place.)
4. The Board Brief
3 live NED/Chair roles. All closing in 2 weeks.
Board seats are one of the fastest ways to change both your economics and your identity. This week on VirtualNonExecs, three roles stood out:
GTM Advisor — AI FinTech (Remote · Negotiable fee · Closes May 1) The most on-brand pick for Leverage Brief readers — remote, AI-first, natural fit if you've done AI enablement, transformation, or HR-tech GTM work.
Non-Executive Directors ×2 — Financial Services (London · £24,500 · Closes May 1) Classic "economics and identity unlock" play at a solid fee.
Chair — Social Housing Provider (UK National · £29,000 · Closes May 5) Board impact with social mission attached.
(I don't get paid by VirtualNonExecs for featuring these. The job board is the easiest weekly pulse on what the UK board market actually wants right now.)
5. The Talent Feed (Mercor + micro1 + Meridial)
Where the AI-first economy is actually hiring
Most "AI jobs" lists are noise. These three platforms pay real money for senior SMEs.
Mercor — Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic use Mercor to source experts for model evaluation and domain training. Typically $75–$150/hr qualified; specialist projects pay higher.
micro1 — Sharp engineers, PMs, data scientists, senior operators. End clients include Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Coursera.
Meridial by Invisible Technologies — Flexible AI training projects. Lower hourly than Mercor/micro1 at entry, but consistent pipeline and friction-light onboarding.
If you're already senior in HR, finance, legal, healthcare, or any regulated domain — your hourly rate on these platforms is almost always premium-tier.
6. The OS Corner
Founding Portfolio Executive OS cohort — 6 seats remain
Plenty of leaders are spinning up "AI projects." Very few are designing a Portfolio Executive OS that makes every week more leveraged than the last.
That's what the next Career BEAST MODE / Forward Share Operator cohort is built for. 90 days of focused work on:
Redesigning your calendar and decision-making around leverage, not noise
Building concrete AI workflows (or tools) that support your actual job
Re-architecting your people and org-design patterns for an AI economy
You leave with a real operating system — not just "I've tried a lot of tools."
If you're serious about deciding which custom AI apps to build — and which to skip — this is the room where we make those decisions with real stakes.
7. The Closing Signal
At the end of Q2, a very small number of your peers will be able to open a laptop, run a screen share, and show a thing they built that saves 20 hours of their own week.
That group is about to get disproportionately well-paid.
Here’s an EXCELLENT example of what this looks like (in practice, not theory):
Be in that group.
— Yuri
If this was useful, forward it to one peer who's still "experimenting." Every forward is worth more than any ad I could buy.
If someone forwarded this to you: subscribe at leveragebrief.beehiiv.com — weekly, free, one click to unsubscribe.
The Leverage Brief is written by Yuri Kruman — 3x CHRO/CLO, AI trainer to Meta/Microsoft/OpenAI, founder of Portfolio Leverage Co. (portlev.com), author of the forthcoming Closing the AI Wage Gap. Reply to this email; I read every one.
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