Ethan Mollick

The jagged frontier is Mollick's recurring instrument, a term from his «Boston Consulting Group» study of 758 consultants: AI assistance raised tasks completed by 12.2%, speed by 25.1% and quality by 40%, while on tasks outside that frontier AI-assisted consultants reached 60-70% accuracy against 84% for unassisted humans. «Ethan Mollick» teaches at the «Wharton School», writes «One Useful Thing», and takes no funding from AI companies.

His attention has moved from model capability to the organization that will not move. In March 2026 he described two companies in the same industry diverging entirely because one executive agreed to carry the risk; the blockers he named were IT and legal departments, not the technology. In February 2026 he applied organizational theory to agent design: spans of control, boundary objects, coupling, bounded rationality. He also counts the gap, 70% of employees experimenting with AI against only 20% regular users, and roughly 40% sustained adoption from bottom-up approaches versus 15% under mandate.

On 1 October 2026 he withdrew his own prediction that working with agents would mean managing them, calling himself a victim of the bitter lesson: better models absorbed the scaffolding he had expected humans to build. That withdrawal sits against his earlier argument that an orchestrator agent cannot handle an unlimited number of subagents, and against the Twilight Factory he proposed with Lilach Mollick, where a facilitator agent decides when a human is called back in for approval, expertise, variance or interest.