Eskwelabs Capstone

I joined Cohort 9 of the Eskwelabs Innovation Fellowship for the AI Solution Development track. I wanted real AI and product experience outside of school. Something that ships, with stakeholders, with users, instead of another class project that lives and dies on a single grade.

The fellowship ran from February to May 2026. Two projects, both AI tools built for actual Eskwelabs internal use. The Thought Leader Drafter helps the CEO write articles in his own voice. The Slide Deck Generator helps Learning Experience Designers build instructor decks faster. Different problems, but both about taking the parts of someone's job that drain hours and seeing how far AI can take them, without producing the kind of generic output AI tools usually spit out.

The biggest gap between this and school was the production-ready bar. School projects can be impressive in a demo and fall apart five minutes later. These tools needed to hold up. They needed to handle weird inputs, fail gracefully, and give outputs someone would actually use. None of that is novel as a concept, but actually doing it for the first time is what makes it click.