Most employees have access to AI tools, but not many know how to integrate them into workflows to drive real productivity and innovation.
Mike Kaput, Chief Content Officer at SmarterX and co-host of The Artificial Intelligence Show, will lead a hands-on AI for Productivity workshop in Columbus, Ohio, in July that is designed to help professionals move beyond experimentation and start using AI systematically. This means at the workflow level, not just for individual tasks.
Kaput has been researching and writing about AI for more than a decade and has become a trusted source in the field. He provides a peek into his productivity workshop by answering three key questions.
Kaput: What a lot of places lack is the zoomed-out picture of how your work, your workflows, and how your processes look today, and how they can change given what AI enables. Most organizations also lack a full understanding of what these tools can now do.
People are focused on things like, "How do I prompt better? Which tool will make me more productive?" That's all good, but those are little puzzle pieces, not the entire puzzle. The entire puzzle is zooming out and asking: at the team and organization level: What do we need to be doing around work transformation and workflow redesign to actually achieve meaningful productivity gains? That's the piece people will learn in the workshop.
Kaput: It's not that tools don't matter. But you have to be realistic at the organizational level: not everyone can just switch to whichever tool is best right now. It's sometimes impossible at an organization to say, "Well, Claude is obviously better at this; we should switch." Those are very real change management issues involving approvals, bureaucracy, procurement, legal, IT, and cost.
The workshop references plenty of specifics about tools and how to get more out of them, but it's designed to be tool-agnostic because how you approach the problem of getting more productive with AI is a workflow, process, and strategy problem, not really a tool problem.
Kaput: AI agents are what everyone's talking about, and I find them genuinely transformative but people are appropriately hyped on them. The one that's most underestimated is custom assistants. Custom GPTs or Gems in Gemini sound really simple, and frankly neither of the labs have changed much how they work in the last couple years.
A custom GPT is basically a custom version of ChatGPT. In a paid account, you click "Explore GPTs," hit "Create a GPT," and you're brought to a chat window where you can say something like, "I want to build a custom assistant to write my sales emails that sound like me. Here are some examples." It writes the instructions for a custom assistant, you save it with one click, and then you use it just like ChatGPT, but for that specific purpose.
The value is that you've given it instructions customized to you, which you don't have to re-prompt every time.
Yet 90% of people still aren't fully leveraging them. They're so easy to use that people sometimes underestimate them because they sound too basic.
But 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. You don't have to reinvent everything with AI agents to get massive productivity gains.
To register and find out more, visit: smarterx.ai/events/ai-for-business-bootcamp-columbus