Basic Prompts to Real Productivity
The report, produced by AI transformation firm Section, claims that “mastering AI” meant one thing in 2025 and much more difficult in 2026.
Last year, the focus was on basic literacy: understanding what AI is, how to avoid data leaks, and how to write a decent prompt. Many businesses can now check these boxes. The staff knows how to ask the AI to clean up an email to a broker or summarize a real estate appraisal.
But the bar has changed. Mastery now means integrating AI into meaningful, value-added tasks every week – not sporadic experiments. For mortgage companies, this could mean automated extraction of income and employment data from bank statements and payslips, first-pass affordability and DTI checks, automated risk reporting in extreme cases, systematic review of compliance documents, or AI-assisted fraud detection in application files.
The survey suggests that most organizations have not yet come close. Seventy percent (70%) of workers are “AI experimenters”: they use AI for very basic tasks such as summarizing meeting notes, rewriting emails, and getting quick responses. Another 28% are “AI novices” who rarely or never use AI. Less than 3% are practitioners or experts.
The impact on time saved is, as might be expected, modest. Twenty-four percent (24%) of workers say they save no time using AI; Another 44% save less than four hours per week. Only 6% report saving more than 12 hours per week – the kind of number that could actually be reflected in processing costs, processing times and fulfillment rates.
