Personal branding in the AI era: what did a one-day workshop actually teach me?

Today I attended APEX, a one-day workshop on personal branding in the AI era run by Innovarad in Taipei.

Arriving with a site that already existed

I was not starting entirely from zero. The domain tsungwu.tw has been mine since February, with a single-page business-card site on it. Only while preparing for the workshop did I notice that its content was filled in by a script after the page loaded, so the raw HTML that Google and the AI crawlers read was empty in every section. But the real problem was not technical: all I had wanted was a business card. The idea of a personal brand had never crossed my mind. A digital Flintstone, more or less.

That happens to be the point the workshop kept returning to: in the AI era a site is not only for people to look at; it has to be readable, and quotable, by search engines and language models. So the goal for the day was clear: not to patch, but to rebuild.

The most important thing from the morning

Part of it was our own hands: setting up the environment and installing the tools. Whenever someone got stuck, the teaching assistants and instructors came over and untangled it. Once the environment worked, building could begin. The first half of the day also covered a fair amount of SEO and GEO basics: how to structure a site, how search engines and AI read a page, which settings are table stakes. Useful, but not what I took away.

The most important sentence was this: the core of an online personal brand should come from the accumulation of your professional work, not from traffic.

I had some resistance to the idea of "writing articles continuously." It sounded like a second job, writing for exposure; and what gets forced out that way is not necessarily what one wants to say. It never felt quite sincere. Listening to the instructor turned that around: it is simply recording one's own thinking. Every day in clinical work there are judgements being made; every day in research there is literature being read and gaps being noticed. That thinking is already happening; it just is not written down, and so it dissipates.

Writing it down accumulates a record of one's professional reasoning. And that process is, in itself, a footprint left in the world. Not for the sake of how many people see it, but so that the ideas existed, can be found, and can be built on. In a digital world these small accumulations are gradually recognised.

Seen that way, writing is no longer an extra burden. It is part of what was already being done, with one added step: recording it.

The afternoon: AI as one's own assistant

The afternoon was about how the instructor uses AI agents to make himself stronger. Not "AI is amazing" in the abstract, but a few things he actually uses every day.

One is the newsletter. He has an AI compile the day's news in a given field into a primer: not merely collecting headlines, but combining what it finds by searching with the background knowledge the model already has, arranging it like a course, written in a tone a high-school student can follow; one can even invite one's children to subscribe. Used this way, it is a method for keeping up with a field and improving oneself, and a personal brand built on that is more solid.

Another is distillation. Not the model distillation of machine learning; here the thing being distilled is oneself. A conversation with a language model is diffuse, but the AI can be asked to pull out what was actually valuable in it and turn that into material for the next step. The conversation is the process; what is distilled from it is what accumulates.

On writing, what he taught was not technique but how to make writing happen at all: say the idea out loud first, let the AI shape it into a draft, then rewrite it in your own words. Fact-checking can be handed to the AI; whether to change anything stays your call. Illustration works the same way. A post used to stall on finding a suitable image; now a scene described to an image model yields something usable in minutes.

Besides the website, what came home with me

Looking back, the website is only the most visible product of the day. What I actually brought back is a way of working: have the AI turn the day's news in a field into something readable; jot down whatever I read or think of, and let the AI distil the scattered conversation into something that keeps; write as soon as there is an idea, without waiting for it to be complete; tidy it up a little, and publish.

Working this way, each day I will understand the world a little more, see a little wider, and record my own thoughts with a little less effort. This site is where that accumulation will show, and I am somewhat curious to look back in a year and see what it has grown into.