#220: AI Answers - The 2026 State of AI for Business Report

**Paul Roetzer** (0:00)
I sit in meetings all day long as a leader of our organization, where I'm hearing things that I didn't tell people to do. I didn't put it in place like go do this, go pursue this. Because we're empowering AI forward professionals, they every day are challenging the traditional way of doing things and say, well, what about this? Why can't we just build an app for that? Why can't I build a skill for this? And so once that happens, then all of a sudden you start looking at people and be like, you're not even doing the role you were hired for anymore. You're literally functioning in this whole new role that we almost have to rewrite your job description.
Welcome to AI Answers, a special Q&A series from The Artificial Intelligence Show. I'm Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute. Every time we host our live virtual events and online classes, we get dozens of great questions from business leaders and practitioners who are navigating this fast-moving world of AI. But we never have enough time to get to all of them. So we created the AI Answers series to address more of these questions and share real-time insights into the topics and challenges professionals like you are facing. Whether you're just starting your AI journey or already putting it to work in your organization, these are the practical insights, use cases, and strategies you need to grow smarter. Let's explore AI together.
Welcome to Episode 220 of The Artificial Intelligence Show. I'm your host, Paul Roetzer. This is a special episode, Mike. We have a special guest today. This is rare. We don't usually get another guest with us. But so Mike Kaput is with me as always. And we are joined today by Taylor Radey, who is our Director of Research at SmarterX. Welcome, Taylor.

**Taylor Radey** (1:44)
Thank you. Yeah, long time listener, first time guest.

**Paul Roetzer** (1:48)
There we go. So Taylor, Mike and I worked together for years at my agency. And then Taylor went off and built a wonderful agency of her own. And then we were lucky enough to have her rejoin us on the team in January of this year. And she's now heading up research. She works closely with Mike in our studio, creating a lot of the content, the curriculum, the research reports, the blueprints.
So Taylor actually led the charge on our State of AI for Business research, which we just published. Did that come out in May, guys? Is that when that came out? Okay. So that came out in May. And so what we're doing with today's episode, this is part of our AI Answers series. So this is in addition to our weekly podcast. This is our 19th episode of the AI Answers series. And so what we're going to do is kind of a unique format. Taylor's going to actually walk us through 10 of the key findings from the State of AI for Business research, which you can actually download at stateofbusiness.ai. You can go and grab this report yourself. But she's going to walk us through key findings. And then Mike is going to lead kind of a Q&A and discussion with Taylor and myself, just around some reactions to those findings and some of the information we've been hearing from people who've been kind of reading and digesting the information. We've actually seen some cool spin-off content from this research. People have sort of taken it and run with it and done some of their own things. So that's going to be the format today. It's going to be kind of a top 10 things to take away. You're going to have access to the report immediately. If you can go download it, throw it in Notebook LLM, have a conversation with it if you want.
And then we're going to go through the Q&A. So this episode is brought to us by AI for Business Bootcamp by SmarterX, which is coming to Columbus, Ohio on July 16th. This is a single-day event from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the Hilton Columbus at Easton. And it's built for professionals and leaders who are ready to accelerate AI adoption and value creation.
The day kicks off with a keynote that I'm going to do on the state of AI for Business, kind of where we are, where it's going. Part of that will infuse some of the research we're going to talk about today. And then we're going to transition into two highly interactive workshops. Mike is going to kick off the day with AI productivity workshop. That's going to be all about use cases, workflows, optimization of existing approaches. And then I'm going to focus on AI innovation. How do we accelerate growth and innovation through AI technology in the afternoon? So, you're going to get real AI powered workflows, strategic frameworks that you can use to accelerate transformation. And you're going to leave with an immediately actionable plan for yourself and your teams.