The AI Enablement Brief · Jun 2, 2026
The Build Is the Signal
I went to a networking event and ended up using Claude to redesign my Apple Watch face. The watch worked. The signal worked harder.
This is how I network from now on.
Last Wednesday I was at the Socialwest Calgary opening bash. Met a lot of interesting people.
But every time I wanted to connect with them, I found myself entering my full name inside their phone, watching them tap through to find me on LinkedIn.
It worked. But there had to be a better way, given the tools we have access to now.
The Hotel-Room Build
That night, back at my hotel room, I sat with Claude and designed a custom watch face for my Apple Watch. A QR code that drives traffic to my personal site, which has all my content, tools, and LinkedIn connected in one place.
The whole thing took less than an hour. The output was a thing I could wear the next morning at the event.
This is the kind of build that wouldn’t have been worth doing a year ago. Designing a watch face from scratch was a project. A real project, not a one-night experiment. You’d need to learn the design language, mock up the dial, get the QR code rendering at scanner-friendly resolution. Now it’s a conversation.
The friction between “I have an idea” and “I’m wearing it” has collapsed to whatever I can describe in a hotel room before I go to sleep.
The Day-After Wow Factor
The next day, my reflex every time it came time to connect was simply to show my watch and let them scan it. Worked beautifully. Faster than the old way. No typos in my name. Their phone already on the page that has the rest of my work, not just a LinkedIn profile.
But that wasn’t the most powerful part.
And here’s the thing. Not only did it work super well, but it did something even more powerful.
It triggered a wow factor every time I pulled my watch.
It sent a clear signal that I’m tech forward and a builder by nature. People remembered the watch. They remembered the moment. The conversation about the QR code became its own networking thread.
And that wasn’t even my goal. I was just trying to simplify something most of us do at a networking event.
The Build Is the Signal
For most of the last decade, when we talked about “building” as a marketer or operator, we meant productivity. Building tools to save time. Building automations to remove repetitive work. Building dashboards to see things faster. The build was justified by what it did for you in private.
Then it became a business move. Custom tools for clients. Internal AI agents. Workflow systems that ship faster than anything off-the-shelf could. The build started creating leverage, not just saving time.
What I noticed at Socialwest is that building has expanded again. The build is now a signal.
When I held up my watch, the scan was the function. But the build was the message: this person doesn’t wait for the tool to exist. This person makes the tool exist. That signal is worth more than the 30 seconds it saved.
We’ve gotten used to thinking about AI tools as productivity boosters. They’re also identity statements. What you build, when you build it, and how visibly you build it, says something about how you operate in this era.
The Work to Start Now
Pick a friction in your week that nobody else has solved yet. Not a big one. A small, annoying, repeatable one. Typing names into phones at a networking event. Formatting reports the same way every Monday. Finding the right asset in a Google Drive folder for the tenth time.
Build the solve. Wear it, or share it, or talk about it in the conversation where the friction comes up.
You’re not just building a product. You’re building a signal.
It turned out to be something bigger. And more impactful.
And this is how I’ll be networking from now on.
