Q: How do I get AI experience if every job requires it?

Stop waiting for someone to give it to you. Create it. Three routes, in order of speed:

Your job. Pick one painful manual workflow your team already complains about and build the AI system that removes it. You already have the stakeholders, the data, and the permission. Some engineers can start Monday morning.

Your network. Your gym, your plumber, your lawyer, your dentist, a friend's company, a nonprofit. Every small and medium business is scrambling to get on top of the AI wave right now. They don't know where to start. They can't afford expensive consultants, and they don't even know if a consultant would be worth it.

You already know these people. And you're a senior engineer with decades of experience, someone they can actually trust.

So don't ask to be paid. The ask is a two-week project you're doing for free, not a job. It costs them nothing. Yes, you're giving up 2-4 weeks of your free time. In exchange you're getting real AI experience, and in an interview that experience adds an extra $20,000-$50,000 per year to your salary. Forever. That's a trade you should make any day.

Name their pain, be clear it's free, and be honest about the trade: they get the system, you get the case study.

Open source. One merged PR into a real AI tool outranks ten tutorial repos, because it's the only experience a recruiter can verify in two clicks.

"Do you have AI experience?" is a question about what you've built with real stakes. Not about who employed you to build it.