How We Use AI to Create Courses at Scale (Without Compromising Quality or Humanity)

The small team at SmarterX is producing more educational content than ever before without a reduction in quality or human-centric education, thanks to AI augmentation.

Since reinventing AI Academy in August 2025, SmarterX has released three foundational course series, seven in-depth industry and department courses, and nearly 30 weekly Gen AI app installments. This defies traditional production timelines for a team of essentially three people creating content.

The secret isn't working harder. It's using AI to fundamentally reimagine what's possible while keeping human expertise at the center of every course.

On Episode 193 of The Artificial Intelligence Show, SmarterX founder and CEO Paul Roetzer and I explained how we're using AI to augment course creation and why this approach might serve as a blueprint for any team trying to scale knowledge work.

The Vision That Demanded Innovation

When Roetzer began reimagining AI Academy in fall 2024, he faced a fundamental problem: How do you create personalized learning journeys for professionals across dozens of industries, departments, and roles without an army of subject matter experts and course developers?

The answer required thinking differently about what AI could enable.

"When I laid out the vision, I was like, ‘OK, we're going to start with the fundamentals," says Roetzer. "What are the key things every knowledge worker needs to know?”

Then we'll go into piloting: How do you use it individually? Then we'll do scaling: How do you do that across a department? So that became the foundation collection."

But these foundations weren't enough. Roetzer envisioned a "choose your own adventure" approach where learners could branch into industry-specific courses, department-focused training, executive tracks, and career development paths, all available within months.

"The need to satisfy the vision for what we wanted to create mandated the innovative use of technology to make it possible," he says.

A Research Engine Built on Deep Research

The production process starts with AITA (AI Teaching Assistant), an AI teaching assistant trained on SmarterX's pedagogical principles and years of workshop and course development experience. This tool ensures every course stays aligned with proven learning frameworks rather than drifting into generic AI-generated content.

From there, the real acceleration begins with AI-powered research. For each four-hour course series, such as the upcoming AI for HR course series, the team runs five to seven deep research reports using the deep research feature within Google Gemini. Each report generates thousands of words of synthesized information, easily 60,000 words total per course.

Google's NotebookLM now allows deep research reports to be generated directly within the platform, then offers to import all source materials used in the research. With a single click, 40 to 50 different links, PDFs, and reports from each research brief are automatically added into a single notebook, where every claim can be traced back to its source for verification.

For the AI for HR course, this meant nearly 280 different sources were available for fact-checking and quality assessment, all grounded in the knowledge base, all searchable, all verifiable.

From Research to Reality

With research complete, the team builds out detailed course outlines, sometimes running to dozens of pages for a comprehensive series. These outlines translate into scripts, which get drafted with assistance from Claude, then refined through human editorial judgment.

The most recent advancement has been experimenting with Claude Code to help build presentation slides, a task that traditionally required enormous amounts of manual effort across hundreds of slides per course series.

It's critical to note: AI does not dictate what should be taught or create courses on its own. Every course is grounded in SmarterX's intellectual property, research frameworks, editorial judgment, and the expertise that comes from teaching thousands of professionals in person and virtually over the years.

The Real Value Is Quality

The time savings are real. Early courses in the new format took hundreds of hours each to produce. That cadence was simply unsustainable for releasing multiple courses per month. Today, however, AI has dramatically reduced production time.

But the more significant impact is what the newfound time allows.

With research and drafting accelerated, there's bandwidth to carefully construct even better learning journeys that make complex topics accessible. There's time to think even more deeply through the nuances of how AI applies differently across industries and departments. And there's even more capacity to create hands-on demos and examples that reflect the latest AI capabilities, sometimes incorporating features that launched just weeks before a course goes live.

Why This Matters for Every Knowledge Worker

Roetzer sees the AI Academy transformation as a template for how any organization can use AI to pursue ambitious goals that would have been impossible 18 months ago.

"This literally wouldn't have been possible a year and a half ago," he says. 

The key isn't that AI replaces human expertise. It's that AI amplifies and supports what expert humans can accomplish. Researchers become more thorough. Writers become more prolific. Teachers have more capacity to focus on what matters most: helping learners actually understand and apply what they're learning.

And the capability curve keeps growing. As tools such as Notebook LM add new features, new possibilities emerge. Voice capabilities, translation into multiple languages, more sophisticated research synthesis are all on the roadmap, all of it enabled by models that keep getting better.

"Think about AI as an innovation tool and what can you reimagine, reinvent within your own team, within your department, within your organization that wasn't possible 12 to 18 months ago," says Roetzer. 

AI Academy is an example of what becomes possible when a team commits to using AI not just for efficiency, but for innovation.

The courses still require deep expertise, careful editorial judgment, and genuine teaching skill. But AI has removed the bottlenecks that once made ambitious educational visions impractical for small teams.

"It's really hard to overstate how crazy the transformation has been for us internally," says Roetzer.