Ethan Mollick

Ethan Mollick teaches at the Wharton School, writes One Useful Thing, was named to TIME 100 Most Influential People in AI 2024, and accepts no funding from AI companies. His research with Boston Consulting Group put 758 consultants on real tasks: 12.2% more tasks completed, 25.1% faster, 40% higher quality. On tasks outside what he called the jagged frontier, the AI-assisted group scored 60-70% accuracy against 84% for unassisted humans. Both halves of that result run through everything he has published since.

The recurring argument is that individual gains do not become organizational gains. He measures 70% of employees experimenting with AI against only 20% regular users, and roughly 40% sustained adoption from bottom-up approaches versus about 15% under mandate, with workaround behaviour. His answer is the Leader-Lab-Crowd framework and the claim that "HR is R&D now," with the AI lab living in HR and the business. In March 2026 he was still finding companies where IT and legal blocked AI outright, and traced the split between them and their competitors to whether a senior executive would carry the risk.

In February 2026 he turned organizational theory on agentic systems: spans of control, boundary objects, coupling. An orchestrator cannot supervise a hundred sub-agents. On 31 August 2026, with Lilach Mollick, he proposed the Twilight Factory, where a facilitator agent decides when to pull humans in on approval, expertise, variance and interest. Automating the interesting decisions, he argues, strips practitioners of the judgment they will later be asked to exercise.