Wharton School

«Ethan Mollick» is an associate professor at the «Wharton School», the University of Pennsylvania's business school, and the institutional address behind the newsletter One Useful Thing and the book Co-Intelligence. The school figures as a vantage point. What recurs across his writing is the habit of putting numbers on questions usually argued from anecdote.

His research with Boston Consulting Group, covering 758 consultants, produced the "jagged frontier": inside it, assisted workers completed 12.2% more tasks, worked 25.1% faster and scored 40% higher on quality; outside it, they landed at 60-70% accuracy against 84% for unassisted humans. Underperformers gained the most (+43%). His survey work on organizational adoption found roughly 70% of knowledge workers had experimented with AI tools while only about 20% became regular users, and that exploration-led rollouts reached around 40% sustained adoption versus roughly 15% for mandates.

By March 2026 he was describing companies where IT and legal still blocked AI outright while competitors in the same industry ran ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and «Claude Code» without incident. He located the difference in one executive's willingness to carry the risk.

By August 2026, with Lilach Mollick, the question had shifted. Against StrongDM's dark factory, where no human writes or reviews the code, they proposed the Twilight Factory: agents do most of the work and a facilitator agent decides when to call humans in. Automating the committing decisions while leaving people the approvals and the failures, he argues, automates the wrong half of the job.