Can I use AI to write my cover letter?

Using AI in an application — what applies

No rule forbids AI and no duty requires disclosing it. Nobody has been caught for using AI — people are caught by letters that could have been sent to any company. As of 7 September 2026.

The question ends at the promise, not at the tool

Look for a prohibition and you will not find one — and you are looking in the wrong place. Swiss law takes no interest in how a text was produced, only in what it claims. Two articles of the Code of Obligations do that work, and neither of them mentions technology at all.

The first is Art. 28 CO. A party induced to enter a contract by the other party's wilful deception is not bound by it, and the article says so even where the resulting error was not a fundamental one. That covers an invented qualification exactly as it covers an invented span of control. It applies to you regardless of who typed the sentence: a model cannot deceive in your name, you deceive by sending its sentence.

The second bites later and is rarely thought about at application time. Art. 337 CO lets either party terminate the employment relationship without notice for good cause, defined as any circumstance which, judged in good faith, makes continuation unreasonable for the terminating party. A cover letter is therefore not a document that expires on interview day. It reaches into the probation period and beyond.

The working rule that follows is simpler than the question. Delegate anything that is not an assertion of fact: structure, sentence rhythm, length, register, translation. Everything else you read back line by line before sending, and you must be able to affirm it. Not because a rule says so, but because your name is at the bottom.

Nobody is in a position to grant the permission

Part of the anxiety comes from looking for an authority that this market does not have. The applications in our index lead to more than two thousand distinct destinations: roughly half into applicant tracking software with a form, roughly half to a company's own website or an inbox. Each of those could in principle set its own rule. Almost none of them does.

That has a concrete consequence for your letter. Where there is a form, the letter is one field among many, sometimes optional, read alongside structured answers. Where there is an email address, it is the first thing somebody opens and carries correspondingly more weight. The more useful question is therefore not whether you may use a tool, but how much attention your text will get where it lands.

It is also worth noticing how much of the other side is assembled from blocks. Among the adverts we analysed, 16.3 per cent share their opening twelve words with another advert. Paste one of those into a model with "write me a cover letter for this" and you have a template answering a template. The result is rarely wrong and almost always interchangeable.

The order of work that follows costs about ten minutes. First read the advert for what is not boilerplate — the task described in concrete terms, the location, the one requirement phrased unusually. Only then reach for a tool. A model cannot make that selection for you, because making it requires having read many adverts from this particular market.

English-language postings are the segment most exposed to this

If you are applying in English in Switzerland, you are in a distinct part of the market. English-language postings are about a fifth of our index, and they are far more likely than German ones to be about artificial intelligence in the first place: 13.4 per cent of English-language adverts mention it, against 0.9 per cent of German-language ones and 0.4 per cent of French-language ones.

The practical reading of that gap is reassuring rather than alarming. Employers who write their adverts in English are disproportionately the ones building with these tools themselves. The idea that such an employer would treat a drafted letter as a moral failure does not survive contact with their own job descriptions.

The same segment carries the opposite risk, though. English-language recruiting in Switzerland is where imported conventions arrive: the long narrative opener, the achievements paragraph stacked with percentages, the closing that asks for the meeting. Models produce all three fluently, because that is the register they have read most of. Swiss reading habits are drier and the one-page convention still holds.

So the segment where you are least likely to be judged for using a tool is also the one where an unedited draft is most likely to sound like it came from somewhere else. Those two facts point at the same edit: keep the tool, cut the imported flourishes.

Your data, other people's data, and your current employer's secrets

In data protection terms your own use is unremarkable. Art. 2 para. 2 (a) of the Federal Act on Data Protection excludes personal data processed by a natural person exclusively for personal use. Typing your own career history into a text box to turn it into a letter is not a grey area; it sits outside the scope of the Act.

The exemption ends the moment your letter involves other people, and a cover letter involves plenty: the named contact at the company, former managers, referees, occasionally clients. Those details are not yours to hand over. Placeholders are entirely sufficient for a drafting tool — it will write the same paragraph whether the referee is named or described as "a former finance manager".

Then there is a duty applicants routinely forget. Under Art. 321a para. 4 CO an employee must not exploit or reveal facts that are to be kept confidential, in particular manufacturing and business secrets learned in the employer's service, and that duty continues after the employment ends so far as the employer's legitimate interests require. Copying a live project brief, with its figures, into a chat window in order to harvest one strong paragraph is exactly the situation the article describes.

The Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner has stated that the Act is drafted in a technology-neutral way and therefore applies directly to AI-supported processing, and that users have a legal right to know whether the data they enter is being used to improve the programs. Checking that setting before you upload a dossier is the one technical precaution in this whole question that genuinely matters.

When there is a machine on the other side as well

The question is usually asked in one direction only, although Swiss law addresses the other one explicitly. Art. 21 of the Data Protection Act requires the controller to inform you of a decision that is based exclusively on automated processing and that has legal effect for you or significantly affects you. On request, you must be given the opportunity to state your point of view, and you may demand that the decision be reviewed by a natural person.

The conditions are narrow and worth reading precisely. The decision has to be taken exclusively by automated means; a rejection that a person signs off does not qualify. And it has to carry legal consequences or affect you significantly. Whether a rejection during hiring clears that bar has not been settled, but the right exists, and asking about it politely is entirely legitimate.

Meanwhile the tools are simply present on both sides of the table. Around four per cent of the adverts we hold mention artificial intelligence as part of the job at all, and the distribution is very uneven: in technical roles the share is several times what it is in retail or the trades. An employer whose own advert asks for prompt-engineering experience is not going to disqualify you for drafting.

That symmetry is the best reason to put the original question down. It leads nowhere testable. The question that changes the outcome is different: what survives in my text when a person who has to fill this role reads it?

The three sentences you write yourself

The first is why this employer. Not "your innovative company", but the thing you noticed while reading the advert: the task that lines up with your last job, the location, the shift pattern, the workload. A model cannot supply that sentence, because it rests on an observation only you made.

The second is every statement about your role, your scope and your result. This is the territory where Art. 28 and Art. 337 CO operate, and the only place where a wrong sentence becomes expensive. Write it so that you can repeat it at interview without a run-up.

The third is the line about availability, notice period and, if the advert asks, salary expectations. Here a model guesses, and it guesses according to the conventions of the larger foreign market it has read most of. That line commits you in a negotiation that happens four weeks later.

Everything else can come out however it comes out. If those three places are yours and true, the original question has answered itself: you may, and nobody has grounds to hold it against you. The federal jobseeker guidance calls the cover letter your "personal business card", the place where you demonstrate your communication skills and express yourself. That part stays your work, whatever produced the draft.