Producing an in-depth report based on thousands of survey responses traditionally takes hundreds of hours.
SmarterX creates this type of report each year from our State of AI research. It started out as a State of AI for Marketing Report and this year, expanded into a State of AI for Business Report across departments with more than 2,100 respondents, a company record.
Another company record was how quickly our Director of Research pulled the data together: one day.
From hundreds of hours to one workday.
That's what happens when a team moves from using AI for individual tasks to redesigning how work flows at the process level. And it's the core skill Mike Kaput will teach at the AI for Business Bootcamp on July 16 in Columbus, Ohio.
The gap most organizations haven't closed
According to Kaput, the reason many companies haven't seen meaningful productivity gains yet isn't the tools. It's the approach.
"The whole point of this workshop is actually teaching you the approach that makes you more productive," Kaput says. "You'll learn plenty about what tools and platforms can do, and which ones to consider using, but it's more about how you approach this systemically."
That distinction, approach over tools, is what separates teams seeing real gains from those still stuck in the experimentation phase.
What real productivity looks like in practice
The State of AI for Business Report is just one example of super-charging productivity.
On a recent episode of The Artificial Intelligence Show, the weekly podcast Kaput co-hosts with SmarterX CEO Paul Roetzer, he described another dimension of this shift: delegating specific tasks to AI agents running in the background, freeing him to focus his full attention on deep work and single-tasking.
Two different use cases. The same underlying principle: AI isn't most powerful when it helps you do one thing faster. It's most powerful when it changes how your work is structured.
That's the difference between using AI as a tool and using AI to redesign how work actually flows.
Learn to be productive with any AI tool
Kaput's AI for Productivity workshop is deliberately tool-agnostic.
"How you approach the problem of getting more productive with AI is a workflow, process, and strategy problem, not really a tool problem," Kaput explains. "The workshop references plenty of specifics about tools and how to get more out of them, but you have to be realistic: not everyone can just switch to whichever tool is best right now."
The workshop focuses on four core AI capabilities that are reshaping how work gets done: general-purpose models, custom assistants, reasoning and deep research, and AI agents. Of these, Kaput says custom assistants are the most underestimated.
"If you start stacking custom GPTs and Gems across different parts of your workflows and the full scope of your job, that alone can be transformative," he says. "You don't have to reinvent everything with AI agents to get massive productivity gains."
The data makes the case
The urgency behind this kind of training isn't speculative. The data backs it up.
Nearly three in four business professionals say AI is "critically important" or "very important" to their success in the next 12 months. Among CEOs and founders, that number jumps to 89%.
Meanwhile, 58% of professionals say they want training on integrating AI into existing workflows. That's the single most-requested topic in the 2026 report, ahead of AI agents, ahead of prompting.
People know they need to move faster. They're looking for a structured way to do it.
Ready to power up your productivity?
Register at smarterx.ai/events. AI Mastery members receive discounted pricing.
Cathy McPhillips
Cathy McPhillips is the Chief Marketing Officer at SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute