The LinkedIn Career Trailblazer Camp cohort at LinkedIn Singapore, where students moved from career confidence into hands-on building with AI.

Singapore, 26 June 2026 - At LinkedIn Career Trailblazer Camp, students were asked to look at work differently: identify a problem they knew firsthand, understand the process behind it, and use AI to build a better way through it.

Over five weeks, around 60 students moved through sessions on personal branding, professional development, AI upskilling, and a final build sprint. At the final, five teams were presenting projects shaped around real problems: job search, interview preparation, career development, founder workflows, and fitness instruction.

ChatAndBuild supported the hands-on build portion of the camp, helping students move from problem statements into AI-assisted workflows, agents, and first versions they could explain, test, and improve. The focus was practical: how to identify a workflow, decide what AI should help with, keep the human decision-maker in the loop, and create something useful enough to present publicly.

The career development arc had turned into something more practical: students were using AI to shape tools for the work they are about to enter.

The finals also opened with a message from Feon Ang, LinkedIn APAC Managing Director and Global VP of LinkedIn Sales Solutions, who reminded the cohort that “The future will remain deeply human, and it is something each person helps create rather than something that happens to them.” The finalist projects carried that frame into familiar moments: finding the right role, preparing for interviews, managing admin, organizing founder work, and building better professional habits.

From career confidence to building with AI

Career Trailblazer Camp began with students building confidence in how they present themselves professionally, tell their stories, and connect with others.

By the final showcase, that confidence had moved into product thinking. Students were presenting systems built around problems they understood personally, then explaining the choices behind them: who the product was for, where the workflow broke down, and what should happen next.

This is where ChatAndBuild’s role became clear. The camp introduced students to the practical skills now sitting between an idea and a useful product: finding a real workflow, deciding what should be automated, understanding where a human still needs to stay involved, and using AI tools to build a first version quickly.

Christel Buchanan, Founder and CEO of ChatAndBuild, framed this from the first workshop:

“The tools now let anyone move from an idea to a build, so the real skill is judgment about what to build and why.”

The strongest teams explained the problem clearly, showed how their approach helped, and kept human judgment visible.

The finalist builds

The five finalist teams approached different problems, with one common starting point: a real frustration they wanted to make easier to handle.

HiredCrew

HiredCrew, the winner of the finals, was built for a problem its makers were living through in real time: juggling several interview processes in a semester and struggling to prepare properly for each one.

Their research put the cost at roughly 24 hours of interview prep per semester, and close to 24 working days across an academic career. HiredCrew set out to reduce that load by staying with a candidate across the whole interview journey.

The demo followed one candidate end to end. The agent scans email for interview invites, helps schedule them into the calendar, generates a tailored prep file for the specific company and role, suggests people to reach out to, and runs a mock interview that pushes deeper the way a real interviewer would. After each practice round, it returns a score and feedback so the candidate knows what to improve.

That end-to-end workflow is what made HiredCrew stand out. It did not treat interview prep as a one-off prompt. It treated it as a process that needs context, follow-through, and practice over time.

As the team put it:

“The interview is almost never where you’ve lost. It’s in your preparation itself.”

Team members: Naveen Saathappan, Dilon Ng, Federick Halim and Kavin Kumar Velu

CareerLingo

CareerLingo pitched in Shark Tank style, asking the panel to imagine career growth working the way a language app does: small daily actions, visible progress, and enough momentum to keep going.

The team built around a familiar student problem. There is no shortage of career advice, tools, or content. The harder part is knowing what to do today, then doing it consistently enough that progress becomes visible.

CareerLingo turns broad career goals into daily missions, with proof of work that can become a LinkedIn post, message, or project update. It also uses XP, streaks, and Pip the Penguin, a career companion with memory that follows a learner’s path.

The team’s framing was clear: CareerLingo helps learners take action every single day, rather than stopping at content.

Their final reflection brought it back to the people behind the product: four students who began as strangers and spent five weeks refusing to give up on each other.

Team members: Shyan Ray Phua, Bernardino Lintang, Jovan Nai and Hyeseong Ju

PilaAI

PilaAI came from a problem one of the builders knew personally while training to become a Reformer Pilates instructor: the admin around each class kept piling up. Sign-ups lived in Google Sheets, notes sat somewhere else, exercise ideas were saved from Instagram, and feedback came through another channel.

Team members: Yanushi de Mel, Smriti Pamarati, Liza Bulhakova and Riya Singh

The team built PilaAI as an agent with a Living Brain that learns an instructor’s teaching style and turns those scattered inputs into one connected class-planning workflow.

The system runs on scheduled tasks. Overnight, it reads new feedback and updates recommendations. In the morning, it checks the calendar, sees which class is coming up in the next 48 hours, and drafts a plan in Notion with cues, modifications for injuries, and who is attending, ready for the instructor to review. A Telegram bot lets the instructor send class inspiration straight into the Living Brain.

The team’s turning point came during user testing, when strong-looking plans still went unused. That changed the product. Their reflection was one of the sharper insights from the finals: generating is easy, but good judgment is hard. PilaAI became less about producing a class plan and more about supporting how instructors actually decide.

Scout

Scout started with the reality of modern job search: students and early-career candidates often send dozens of applications before getting one interview. The team estimated around 27 applications for one interview, and about 162 applications to land a role, adding up to more than 60 hours of searching, tailoring, tracking, and following up.

It was built to bring that fragmented process into one workflow - help users discover relevant roles across job boards and company career pages, tailor application materials for each listing, track every application, sync interview details from email to calendar, and receive progress updates.

What made Scout strong was the balance between automation and judgment. AI can reduce the admin around job search, but the candidate still needs to decide which roles are worth pursuing and how to represent themselves honestly.

Team members: Pauline Ang, Sheyenne Lim and Catherine Laura D.A.

CoFound

CoFound opened with a simple show of hands. Almost everyone in the room had spotted a problem worth fixing. Far fewer had acted on it.

That gap became the starting point for the team. CoFound was built for early-stage and aspiring founders, especially those aged 18 to 24, who have ideas and motivation but often do not know where to begin.

Team members: Shane Robi, Adya Rastogi, Michael Shyam, Keerthi Siva

Built on ChatChat, CoFound brings together a founder profile, agent workflows, and a curated memory base of startup knowledge. The team showed how agents could help founders identify learning gaps, find relevant resources, and turn progress into public updates on LinkedIn or X.

The project worked because it understood the first-time founder problem clearly. Many young founders do not lack ideas or drive. They need structure, context, and a way to take the next step.

What the judges saw

The judging panel brought perspectives from both LinkedIn and ChatAndBuild, with Renee Lo, LinkedIn’s Global VP for Sales Solutions Customer Success, Aarti Thapar, LinkedIn’s APAC VP for Sales Solutions, and Anastasia Harper, Head of Partnerships at ChatAndBuild.

Across the presentations, the most useful questions were practical ones: Who is this really for? What part of the workflow does it improve? Where does the human still need to stay involved?

Those questions mattered because they pushed the teams beyond “AI can do this” into something more important: should AI do this, and if yes, how should the experience be designed around the person using it?

What students and organizers shared after the finals

The strongest proof of the camp was not only what happened on stage. It was what students and organizers continued to share afterward.

Several finalists posted reflections on LinkedIn about what they built, what changed during the camp, and how the experience affected their confidence. Those posts showed that the program was not only about one final demo. It helped students practice the habit of making their work visible, explaining their thinking, and connecting their projects to a broader professional story.

Holly Fang from the LinkedIn team also shared her reflections from the camp, giving an organizer’s view of how the students progressed through the experience.

Organizer post by Holly Fang, LinkedIn team.

Jovan Nai from CareerLingo

Post from Shane Robi

PilaAI post by Riya Singh

HiredCrew winner post by Naveen Saathappan.

Together, these reflections help show why the camp mattered. Students were not only exposed to AI tools. They were asked to use them with judgment, connect them to real problems, and explain their work in public.

Why this matters

AI upskilling is often framed as learning which tools to use. Career Trailblazer Camp showed a more useful direction: learning how to identify a recurring workflow, decide what should change, and build something that helps.

That shift is important for students and early-career talent. The future of work will not only reward people who know how to use AI tools. It will reward people who can see where work is broken, design a better flow, and use AI to make that flow easier, faster, or more human.

For ChatAndBuild, the finals showed how conversational creation can bring more people into that process. When students can move from idea to first build faster, the focus shifts from whether they can build at all to what they choose to build and why.

At LinkedIn Career Trailblazer Camp, that future became visible through five finalist teams, one winning project, and a room full of young builders learning that AI is not only something happening to work.

It is something they can help shape.

With thanks

ChatAndBuild thanks the LinkedIn team, including Heather Koh, Pratap Kaul, and Holly Fang, for building Career Trailblazer Camp and inviting ChatAndBuild to support the AI build track.

A special thank you to the students who brought their ideas, questions, and first builds to the finals. The strongest part of the camp was seeing them move from learning about AI to using it on problems they understood personally.

LinkedIn Career Trailblazer Camp: ChatAndBuild Helps Students Build New Career Workflows with AI