PIONEERING A 21ST-CENTURY VOCATION
A Profile of Cael Julander, AI Coach
By Patrick McConville
October 14, 2026
The career you will have in five years may not exist yet.
Cael Julander discovered this firsthand. A senior accounting major at the University of Iowa, Cael is one of the AI Lab's most sought-after AI Coaches. Five years ago, the vocation of AI Coach felt like science fiction.
Training experienced professionals on proper AI usage is what has made AI Coaching an emerging field. Crucially, AI Coaches are not here to reskill. AI Coaches upskill.
Cael wasn't the slightest bit aware of AI Coaching until recently.
Three years ago, Cael was playing baseball at Iowa Central Community College. Once he transferred to the University of Iowa, Cael and his brother started a bookkeeping business in their hometown of Altoona. The pragmatism to recognize bookkeeping as an essential service to the business world is what distinguishes Cael from your average 21-year-old. As ChatGPT went mainstream, Cael took notice: "I was a little worried that AI was going to take over my bookkeeping company."
At the time, Cael had been reluctant to use AI as it carried a stigma, especially in college: "Up until this year, when you thought of AI as a student, it was... 'this other kid's using AI and they're cheating.'" AI use was an ethical arms race, pressuring students to get in line or fall behind.
Working with AI changed Cael's perspective.
Cael first experimented with the emerging technology to "know thy enemy." He quickly found that AI was not going to render bookkeeping obsolete, but instead, would make bookkeeping more efficient and essential: "People who can build the best systems...through AI will get to that finished outcome faster, with higher quality."
Soon, Cael joined a university club called Applied AI. His career trajectory changed when Applied AI hosted AI Lab CEO Ryan Kurt as a guest speaker. Through his advisory work with the University of Iowa's Tippie College of Business, Ryan offers guidance to current students about the evolving world of tech.
His talk made an impression on Cael: "Ryan said... 'look for a job where you're working for people that motivate and inspire you. You want to work with someone you can look up to, and be happy to work for them.'" Inspired, Cael walked away from that speech knowing exactly where he'd want to work. With summer approaching, Cael contacted Ryan, inquiring if there were any positions available. He started working with the AI Lab, and shortly thereafter, found himself coaching clients.
"People are starting to realize that AI can be used for a lot more than homework."
Critics of AI portray it as a way to outsource basic living skills to technology. They warn of a world where everyone wants to use AI as a digital servant mowing the lawn while the user kicks back in a hammock drinking a mai tai. The reality is different, Cael notes. "People are starting to realize that AI can be used for a lot more than homework." Artificial Intelligence is a tool you can use to advance your work, with speed and accuracy. Moreover, this tool inspires creativity, both in the output and in the process, transforming traditional working methods.
That kind of productivity is a paradox. "From a student's point of view, (AI) is a tool that can distinguish students as it evens the playing field."
Cael discovered the importance of supplying AI with context. "If you want to get a good application out of (AI), ask how good of a system you can build around what you're doing?" People focus on a desired result from the task rather than the process required to accomplish that task. Understanding the end-to-end process you are looking to streamline provides AI the context necessary to find the most relevant result—and even utilize AI to accomplish your task in a new, more efficient fashion.
That understanding informed how Cael coaches others on how to properly use AI. With community-based level coaching, Cael helped create the AI Lab's original AI 101 training, the entry-level coaching session for AI Lab members seeking to get more value out of frontier models like Claude and ChatGPT. Not only did Cael develop the presentation's framework, but he also delivered it five times over the summer.
When most hear the word "coach," they think of sports. A coach teaches an athlete to maximize their potential. Consider how much of a coach's job is conditioning athletes, making them run wind sprints to get them in the best physical shape. Athletes need a taskmaster to instill discipline. A coach guides, but the athlete does the heavy lifting.
Naturally, AI Coaching extends to the concept of "sprints." If a novice AI user has a coaching session, Cael notes the purpose of the session is to learn: "How can we get them from the level they're at right now to their highest potential as an AI user?" Sprints are designed to sharpen skills. It's a much more efficient use of tokens than merely handing employees AI as a tool to play with freely. This is the first session. The next two sessions are dedicated to building AI Brains.
What is an AI Brain? It's a memory base connecting to your personal drives, email, and Slack so that you can instantly recall past work without having to explain yourself repeatedly. Imagine being able to carry a storage room stuffed with filing cabinets, and being able to retrieve a desired file with a quick prompt. AI Brains provide indefinite retention of institutional knowledge, which gets smarter with each interaction. Cael explains, "Context management is one of the steps everyone needs to take to...really use AI well." The AI Brain has greater benefits than simply offering easier access to information. It's a more cost-effective method of accessing that information. The wiki format and front-matter tagging in the AI Brain require fewer tokens. "I found in my own tests that (a Brain) uses ~80% less tokens than if I didn't have the brain set up," Cael illustrates, because the Brain manages the context window, as stored information is easily swapped without losing data.
~80% fewer tokens used with an AI Brain in place, in Cael's own tests.
It's worth noting that Cael was the 'brain' behind the AI Brain. He came to the AI Lab with a fresh perspective, standardizing the operational knowledge that had been siloed in the minds of a few AI Lab executives. Within a day, Cael had built an AI Brain. Within a week, he was answering questions about the business, following up on tasks that had slipped through the cracks. Working with this bespoke AI Brain clued us in to how transformative reorganizing our work around a digital brain can be. We realized that if we can reap benefits from an AI Brain in one week's time, what can our community members do with this capability?
Cael structures his coaching sessions around helping clients set up their own AI Brain. Not just for archival purposes, but for the clients to walk away from the session being able to instantly extract productivity from their AI Brain. The approach is adapted from the work of leading AI researcher Andrej Karpathy.
Curiosity is one of Cael's greatest strengths, as a professional and a coach. Entering the AI Lab as an intern and "AI-Native," Cael approaches business pragmatically, going beyond 'the way things have always been done.' This learner's mindset exemplifies what it means to have a "human in the loop." The AI Lab isn't hired to do the work for employees. Our coaches collaborate with members to make them capable of doing the work independently of the Lab.
What the AI Lab offers its community is simple: "If you come in at a 101-Level, we want to make you as good at AI as possible." Through coaches like Cael, it upskills workers through prompting, verifying, and automating where they can make an immediate impact with AI tools.
AI is such a catch-all term for tech that it's become deeply polarizing. Torn between doomerism and boosterism, Cael sees Artificial Intelligence with practical clarity. "I like to think of AI as a tool you can use to make yourself more productive." Still, doomerism is dominated by fears around technology, raising the question: What will become of Gen Z as they enter a workforce with fewer entry-level jobs?
Cael Julander provides a template for his peers. He exemplifies the non-traditional approach to traditional business, representing a key demographic determining how AI is deployed, both in public and private lives. They understand the difference between having AI work FOR you and having AI work WITH you. AI Coaching offers the opportunity to absorb the expertise of experienced professionals in exchange for the technical wherewithal to utilize that experience. This exchange strengthens the workforce by shoring up institutional knowledge with forward-thinking tech.
Five years ago, the AI Coach was not a job that existed, let alone one that Cael believed he would ever be doing. Now, when Cael's not in class in Iowa City, he's in the AI Lab coaching professionals on how to use this revolutionary technology. Coaching requires a collaborative mindset, one that Cael Julander embraces.
It's entirely possible that the career Cael Julander will thrive in has not yet been invented. Rest assured, when that career becomes essential to the business world, Cael will be ready for success.