- What "AI skills" even means on a CV right now
- The CV that changed how I think about this
- The bit most people don't want to hear
- How to list AI tools on your CV
- Which AI tools are worth naming
- Where it backfires
- What to write instead of "AI skills"
- The CV itself matters as much as the wording
- Frequently asked questions
- Primary sources
The short version: Yes, list AI tools on your CV, but only the ones you can defend in an interview with a specific result attached. A bare line that says "proficient in ChatGPT" now reads as a red flag to anyone who has hired in the last two years, not a selling point. The candidates getting shortlisted are the ones who tie a tool to a number: hours saved, a campaign shipped, a process that used to take a day and now takes twenty minutes.
More on this here: How To Use ChatGPT To Help You Write A Resume.
What "AI skills" even means on a CV right now
I get sent CVs every week, either from people applying to work with my consultancy or from clients asking me to look over a hire before they make an offer. Since about 2023, almost every CV in marketing, admin, sales and customer service has some version of "AI tools" bolted onto the skills section. Most of them are useless. They say things like "ChatGPT, AI, prompt engineering" with nothing else, as if AI were one skill you either have or don't, like being able to touch type.
It isn't. Saying you're skilled in "AI" is a bit like saying you're skilled in "the internet." What matters is what you did with it, for whom, and what changed as a result. A recruiter reading a stack of forty CVs a day skips past the vague ones in about six seconds. I know because I've watched clients do exactly that on a screen share.
The CV that changed how I think about this
Last year a client of mine was hiring a marketing coordinator for a small manufacturing business in the Midlands. Two candidates, similar experience on paper, similar salary expectations, around 28,000 a year. Candidate A had a skills line at the bottom that read "ChatGPT, Midjourney, Canva AI, prompt engineering." Candidate B wrote one bullet under her previous job title: "Used ChatGPT and Zapier to build an automated follow-up sequence that cut average email response time from 48 hours to 6, tested across 400 subscribers over three months."
Candidate B got the interview. Not because Zapier is a more impressive tool than Midjourney, but because the sentence proved she'd built something, measured it, and could talk about it for more than one sentence. In the interview she was asked to walk through the automation on her laptop. She did it in about four minutes. Candidate A, who'd got a phone screen for a different reason, was asked what a prompt was and floundered. That's the whole difference in one paragraph: proof versus a word on a list.
The bit most people don't want to hear
Here's the uncomfortable part. So many candidates have inflated their AI skills over the past two years that hiring managers have stopped trusting the claim entirely, and started testing it live instead. A 2025 LinkedIn hiring survey found that roughly six in ten UK hiring managers now ask at least one AI-specific question in interviews, up sharply from almost none in 2022. That means the line on your CV isn't the thing that gets you hired anymore. It's the audition for a question you will be asked to answer in real time, on the spot, sometimes on your own laptop.
There's a second layer to this that most articles skip over entirely. Some companies now run every CV through an AI detection tool before a human ever reads it, partly to check whether the whole document was generated rather than written, and partly out of plain distrust after so many templated, AI-polished CVs landed in the same inbox looking identical. If you've ever wondered whether it's worth trying to dodge an AI detection tool when you write your own CV, the honest answer is: don't bother gaming it, just write the thing yourself with real detail, because specificity is exactly what these tools and humans both fail to fake.
And the irony nobody mentions: the same recruiter who's suspicious of an AI-polished CV will happily hire you for using AI well in your actual job. The problem was never the tool. It's the CV that can't prove you used it for anything.
How to list AI tools on your CV
- Pick three to five tools maximum, only the ones relevant to the job you're applying for. A CV listing nine different AI tools looks like a keyword dump, not a skill set.
- Attach a verb and a result to each one, inside your experience bullets, not as a floating list. "Built," "automated," "cut," "generated," "tested" all work better than "used" or "familiar with."
- Keep one tools line near the bottom too, for the applicant tracking system scanning for keywords. This is the same logic I'd use if you were listing CRM experience on your CV: the ATS wants the keyword, the human wants the story, so you need both.
- Match tools to the actual role, not the ones that are trendy. A bookkeeper listing Midjourney looks odd. A bookkeeper listing Xero's AI reconciliation features or Copilot in Excel looks exactly right.
- Rehearse a sixty-second story for every tool you list, before you send the CV, not after you get the interview invite. If you can't explain what you did in under a minute, take it off.
Which AI tools are worth naming
- Marketing and content: ChatGPT or Claude for drafting, Jasper if you've used it for brand voice work at scale, Midjourney or Canva's Magic Studio for visuals, Surfer or Clearscope for SEO briefs.
- Admin and operations: Zapier or Make for automations, Microsoft Copilot inside Excel or Outlook, Notion AI for documentation.
- Customer service: Intercom Fin, Zendesk AI, or any AI chatbot platform you've configured, not just used as a customer.
- Sales: Clay or Apollo for enrichment and outreach, HubSpot's AI features for sequence writing, Gong for call analysis.
- Data and analysis: Python with an AI copilot, Power BI's Copilot features, or any tool where you built something a spreadsheet alone couldn't.
Leave off tools that are now table stakes for everyone, the way spellcheck was in 2005. Basic Grammarly use, for instance, isn't a differentiator anymore. It's just how people write emails now.
Where it backfires
There are jobs where naming AI tools too heavily works against you. A junior analyst role where the employer wants proof you can build a model or write a formula without help. A legal or compliance role where "AI-assisted" can quietly translate to "didn't check the work carefully enough" in a hiring manager's head. Some finance and legal firms are still cautious about AI use for accuracy reasons, and a CV that leads with AI tools before it leads with judgement can read as the wrong priority for that audience.
The other place it backfires is anywhere you're applying for entry-level or remote roles where employers are already flooded with AI-generated applications and are actively looking for signs of a real person behind the CV. If you're job hunting for your first role, it's worth reading what employers screen for in entry-level work from home applications, because the pattern is the same: they're hunting for evidence you did something, not that you know the name of a tool.
Want AI doing the heavy lifting in your marketing?
I build the systems that handle the boring 80 percent, so you get your week back. Done properly, with the human kept in.
The last backfire is quieter and easy to miss. If you list a tool you touched once, eighteen months ago, and haven't opened since, you'll get caught the second someone asks a follow-up question. Take it off, or update your line to say when and how you last used it.
What to write instead of "AI skills"
Swap the vague line for something specific. Instead of "Skilled in AI tools," try one of these:
- "Used ChatGPT and a custom prompt library to cut blog draft time from 4 hours to 45 minutes across 30 posts a month."
- "Built a Zapier workflow connecting our CRM and email tool, saving roughly 6 hours of manual data entry weekly."
- "Deployed an AI chatbot on Intercom that resolved 40% of tier-one support tickets without human handoff."
Each of those tells a hiring manager three things at once: which tool, what you built, and what changed. That's the whole formula.
The CV itself matters as much as the wording
None of this lands well if the CV around it looks messy or generic. If you're starting from scratch, a clean structure matters more than clever design, and you don't need design skills to get there, as I've covered in how to build a professional resume without design skills. If you'd rather work from a proper template than fight with formatting in Word, a free template maker can get you a clean, ATS-friendly layout in under twenty minutes, which I've walked through in creating a free resume with an online template maker. The AI tools line does its job far better sitting inside a CV that already looks like it belongs to someone organised.
If you write on this topic, see guest post guidelines for AI writers.
To see which ones are worth trying first, read my guide to the best AI tools for small business. To cut busywork, see my list of AI tools for small business and what they replace.
Frequently asked questions
Should I put ChatGPT on my resume even if I only use it casually?
No, not on its own. Casual use like asking it to fix a typo or brainstorm ideas isn't a resume-worthy skill. Only list it if you've used it to produce something measurable, like a workflow, a piece of content, or a process you built and can describe with a real number attached.
Will listing AI tools make my CV look weaker to some employers?
Yes, in specific sectors. Legal, compliance, and some traditional finance roles are still cautious about AI, and leading with a long list of tools before you've shown judgement or accuracy can work against you. In those cases, mention AI use briefly and lower down, and lead with outcomes instead.
What if I've never used any AI tools professionally?
Don't invent it. Recruiters increasingly test AI claims live in interviews, so a fabricated skill gets caught fast. Instead, spend a weekend building something small with a free tool, a spreadsheet automation, a content draft, a chatbot flow, and then write about that real experience honestly.
Where on the CV should AI tools go, skills section or work experience?
Both. Put the specific, result-based examples inside your work experience bullets where a human will read the story. Keep a short tools line near the bottom of the CV too, purely so applicant tracking systems scanning for keywords don't skip you before a person ever sees it.
