Asking for a raise is easier when you walk in with proof instead of a feeling. If AI has made you meaningfully more productive this year, that is leverage, but only if you can show it in terms your manager can defend to their own boss.
Anchor the ask to a number, not an effort
Do not open with how much you use AI. Open with what it produced: hours returned to the team each week, work that used to take a day now taking an hour, a cost per task that dropped. A raise conversation runs on outcomes.
Show the value is durable, not a one-off
A single good month is easy to wave away. Bring a trend that spans the year, so the value reads as a new baseline you set rather than a lucky streak. Durable value is what justifies a permanent change in pay.
Tie your impact to money where you can
The strongest version of the ask connects your AI work to revenue or cost. If a workflow you built saves the team real money or speeds a revenue-driving process, that number is the one that funds your raise.
Here is the part nobody warns you about. Your best AI work is invisible. You build something that saves your team hours, and it lives on your laptop and in your chat history, uncredited. The people who move up are the ones who can prove their impact, not only the ones doing the strongest work.
Bring the record, not the story. A documented trail of impact is far harder to negotiate against than a verbal claim.
Make your AI impact impossible to ignore
Oberhahn shows how your AI work actually moves through your organization: the workflows you built, how many teams adopted them, and the results they produced. It turns work that usually disappears into a record you can put in front of your manager. Get started free at oberhahn.com.