The AI Training Campus for Top Teams: Inside Annie Liao's Journey to create Build Club
Generative AI is advancing shockingly fast, and many enterprises have made equipping their teams with AI platforms, such as ChatGPT Enterprise, a top priority. But despite easy access, "adoption rates for generative AI tools within businesses are only around 50%, with most activity centered around power users."
With enterprises’ spending on AI solutions showing no signs of slowing down, improving the utilization of AI tools has the potential to increase ROI massively.
Annie Liao encountered the utilization problem first-hand while working as Chief of Staff at Relevance AI, a Series B startup focused on selling AI agents for the enterprise. Although business leaders were eager to adopt AI agents, most hands-on stakeholders didn’t actually understand how they could use agents to automate their day-to-day workflows.
So she set out to build the “Duolingo for AI” and develop a platform that would make enterprise AI education scalable and engaging.
Introducing Build Club: The AI Training Campus for Learners, Experts, and Builders
Today Annie is leading Build Club, which combines enterprise AI education with a rapidly-growing AI enablement community to create the fastest and most effective way to learn AI skills.
For enterprise businesses, Build Club offers a four-week accelerator program designed to reskill employees for AI-native roles. Created in partnership with professors and leading AI founders, the program features gamified learning with build points and leaderboards, and culminates in internal hackathons that encourage participants to integrate AI into their everyday workflows.
Alongside enterprise engagements, Build Club’s runs a burgeoning AI community for young professionals, solopreneurs, and AI evangelists, which has grown to include over 10k members within just a year of launch. Members have shipped a total of 11k+ projects thus far, and some have been able to secure jobs at leading AI companies across the world.
As she looks towards the future, Annie aims for Build Club to scale toward its mission to "enable the next 1M of the world's top AI builders by 2026."
Annie’s Journey to Build Club
Although Annie has always been interested in entrepreneurship, she began her career in the corporate world, first as a data scientist at major Australian bank Westpac before joining Boston Consulting Group as an Associate.
But after moving into startups, beginning at a Venture Capital firm and and then as Chief of Staff at Relevance AI, she became captivated by the rapidly-expanding field of AI. Taking the lead on GTM and sales strategy at Relevance, she had direct exposure to the critical gap between AI tool procurement and real-world utilization within many enterprises.
After developing an initial community of keen AI builders, Annie raised a pre-product seed round from two of Australia’s leading VCs and set out to develop Build Club. Just a year later, as the platform has achieved notable initial growth, Annie’s aim is to scale towards the mission of "enabling the next 1M of the world's top AI builders by 2026."
Annie’s Advice for Fellow Founders
Build Club has grown rapidly in the year since launch. But the area in which Annie has learned it’s critical not to rush is hiring.
“Getting the core team right is so important. That's definitely something that I’m continuing to learn now," Annie says. In fact, a founder advised her to expect to “fire five times the amount of people you hire in the first year” in an effort to ensure you have the right founding team.
In practice, Annie has made an effort to schedule dedicated time for feedback with new hires, which creates the space for team members to have candid discussions. Additionally, the team has begun to implement work trial periods before employing people permanently as they build out their core team.
And as Build Club continues to grow, Annie is learning that building a company is as much an emotional marathon as it is a strategic one. “Emotional runway matters,” she explains. “Sometimes it's okay to take a step back and reflect in order to sprint faster later."
To learn more about Annie’s journey, you can follow her on LinkedIn and visit Buildclub.ai.
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