Every week, it seems like there’s a new AI tool promising to build your perfect portfolio in minutes. Upload your resume, click a button, and watch as artificial intelligence creates a stunning showcase of your career achievements. It sounds brilliant. And some of it genuinely is. But a lot of it is producing generic, soulless content that recruiters can spot from a mile away.

I’ve tested dozens of these tools over the past year, and I want to give you an honest assessment of what’s worth your time, what’s useful as a starting point, and what you should avoid entirely.

Tools That Genuinely Help

AI Writing Assistants for Case Studies

This is where AI shines brightest in portfolio building. Writing case studies is hard. Most professionals know what they did on a project but struggle to articulate it in a compelling, structured way. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Jasper can help you take rough notes about a project and transform them into a well-structured case study.

The key is using AI as a drafting partner, not a replacement for your voice. Here’s the workflow I recommend:

1. Write bullet points about the project — what the problem was, what you did, what the result was
2. Ask the AI to structure these into a case study format
3. Read the output critically and rewrite anything that doesn’t sound like you
4. Add specific details, numbers, and context that only you would know

The result should be 70% your words and thinking, 30% AI-assisted structure and polish. If it’s the other way around, you’ve outsourced your story instead of telling it.

Grammar and Clarity Tools

Grammarly and ProWritingAid have integrated AI features that go beyond basic spell-check. They can identify unclear sentences, suggest more concise phrasing, and flag inconsistencies in your writing. For portfolio content, this kind of polish matters. A typo in your case study won’t necessarily cost you an interview, but it does create a subconscious impression of carelessness.

AI-Powered Design Tools

Canva’s AI features, Framer’s AI site builder, and tools like Durable have made it genuinely easier to create professional-looking portfolio websites without design skills. You can go from zero to a deployed portfolio site in an afternoon.

Team 400 recently published research suggesting that professionals with well-designed digital portfolios receive 40% more recruiter engagement than those with text-only resumes. The design of your portfolio matters, and AI tools have dramatically lowered the barrier to getting it right.

Tools That Are Useful But Limited

AI Resume Builders

Tools like Rezi, Kickresume, and Teal use AI to optimise your resume for applicant tracking systems (ATS). They analyse job descriptions and suggest keywords to include, reformat your experience to match common templates, and score your resume against specific roles.

This is useful to a point. ATS optimisation is real — many Australian employers use these systems, and having the right keywords in the right format does matter. But over-optimising produces resumes that read like they were assembled by an algorithm. Because they were.

Use these tools to check that your resume isn’t being filtered out by ATS software, but don’t let them rewrite your entire experience section. Your resume should pass the machine and resonate with the human who reads it afterwards.

LinkedIn Profile Optimisers

Several tools (like Taplio, AuthoredUp, and LinkedIn’s own AI features) can analyse your LinkedIn profile and suggest improvements. They’ll recommend headline structures, summary templates, and post ideas.

Again, useful as a starting point. The headline suggestions, in particular, can help you think about positioning. But the LinkedIn profiles that actually generate inbound opportunities are the ones with genuine personality and specific expertise — not the ones that follow a template perfectly.

Tools to Approach with Caution

Fully Automated Portfolio Generators

Services that promise to generate a complete portfolio from your LinkedIn profile or resume in one click produce results that are technically correct and completely forgettable. They pull your job titles, dates, and company names into a template, maybe add some stock imagery, and call it done.

The problem is that everyone using the same tool produces nearly identical portfolios. When a recruiter has seen the same layout and same generic language twenty times in a week, yours doesn’t stand out. It disappears.

AI-Generated Project Descriptions

Some tools will write project descriptions for you based on minimal input. “I worked on a website redesign” becomes three paragraphs of polished prose. The output is grammatically perfect and completely devoid of the specific details that make case studies compelling.

Recruiters and hiring managers are increasingly trained to recognise AI-generated content. In a recent survey by Hays Recruitment Australia, 62% of hiring managers said they could identify AI-written application materials, and 78% said it negatively affected their impression of the candidate.

The Right Approach

Here’s how I advise people to use AI in their portfolio building:

Use AI for structure, not substance. Let it help you organise your thoughts, create outlines, and suggest formatting. Don’t let it write your story.

Always add specifics. AI can’t know that your project saved the client $340,000 annually, or that you managed a team of seven across three time zones, or that the stakeholder nearly pulled funding in week three. Those details are what make portfolios memorable.

Read everything aloud. If it doesn’t sound like something you’d actually say, rewrite it. Your portfolio should sound like you on a good day — articulate, clear, and confident — not like a generic professional template.

Don’t use AI-generated images for project screenshots. If you worked on a real project, show real screenshots. If you can’t (due to NDAs or confidentiality), describe the work instead. Fake visuals undermine trust.

Keep your authentic voice. The professionals who land the best opportunities through their portfolios are the ones who come across as real people with real expertise. AI tools should amplify your voice, not replace it. The moment your portfolio reads like everyone else’s, you’ve lost the thing that makes it valuable.

AI tools are getting better every month. Used thoughtfully, they can save you hours of formatting, writing, and design work. Used carelessly, they produce content that actively hurts your chances. The difference is in how much of yourself you put into the final product.