# mollick-valence-ai-hr-playbook-leader-lab-crowd-2025-07-23

## Veille

Valence summary of the virtual summit "AI & the Workforce: The Adoption Gap": Ethan Mollick lays out the Leader-Lab-Crowd framework, coins "HR is R&D now," and argues that the AI "shadow economy" and the collapse of the apprenticeship model force CHROs to become the architects of the transformation. Five actionable experiments for writing the AI-HR playbook.

## Titre Article

Writing the AI-HR Playbook with Ethan Mollick

## Date

2025-07-23

## URL

https://www.valence.co/blog/writing-the-ai-hr-playbook-with-ethan-mollick

## Keywords

HR is R&D now, Leader Lab Crowd framework, Ethan Mollick, AI playbook, shadow AI use, apprenticeship model collapse, CHRO leadership, AI fluency, power users, AI-First Role Design, performance review redesign, AI-Annotated Deliverables, destigmatize AI use, Wharton, Co-Intelligence, Valence, adoption gap, hiring with AI

## Authors

Alex McMurray (Valence) — synthèse de l'intervention de Ethan Mollick au sommet Valence "AI & the Workforce: The Adoption Gap"

## Ton

**Profile**: Valence corporate blog post (Fortune 500 AI coaching) summarizing an Ethan Mollick keynote. Pragmatic-prescriptive tone, structured as an actionable playbook. Dual voice: Mollick (academic authority, long quotes) + Valence (framing, examples). Target audience: CHROs and HR leaders at Fortune 500 companies, executives in charge of AI transformation, HR consultants.

**Style**: Article clearly organized in two major parts (conceptual framework, then 5 concrete experiments). Mollick speaks in his signature style: short punchy sentences ("HR is R&D now," "The leverage point for organizations is the HR function"), accessible metaphors ("come out of the shadows," "destigmatize use"), provocations aimed at leaders ("Have they used AI a lot?"). Valence acts as the transmission belt, giving the framework an actionable form. Urgent tone without alarmism: *"You can't wait for the manual."* The document's strength is its **dual register** — conceptual (why HR must drive) and operational (how to start as soon as tomorrow). It is the piece that turns Mollick's intellectual stance into an HR toolkit, and it circulates actively within CHRO communities.

## Pense-betes

- Pivotal Mollick quote: *"HR is R&D now. The leverage point for organizations is the HR function."* — the central argument that intellectually legitimizes the HR shift.
- Preliminary observation: massive **shadow AI**. *"People are turning to AI all the time as a coach and to help with work, but they're just not telling management about it."* Reasons: fear for one's job, unwillingness to hand over productivity gains.
- Collapse of the apprenticeship model: *"That training pipeline that was always implicit has broken, and it has to be reconstructed at the CHRO level."* Juniors no longer build skills through tasks that are now automated.
- **Leader-Lab-Crowd framework**: three organizational levers.
- **Leader**: *"Leaders must stop outsourcing AI understanding."* Test: have you used AI for every possible business decision? Challenge: for one day, run every task through a model.
- **Lab**: *"Your AI lab can't just live in IT. It needs to live in the business; it needs to live in HR."* Lightweight teams that prototype performance reviews, coaching, onboarding, L&D. Include **non-technical power users**.
- **Crowd**: those already using AI on the sly = the biggest underexploited asset. Mission: destigmatize usage, bring evangelists into the lab.
- Mollick aphorism: *"The skills that make you good at AI are not prompting skills, they're people skills."* — a good manager / a good teacher = a good AI user.
- **5 actionable experiments**: 1. **AI-Annotated Deliverables**: every internal deliverable accompanied by a note on AI usage and added value. 2. **Weekly "How Are You Using AI?"**: 5 minutes in leadership meetings to share new uses, live demos encouraged. 3. **AI-First Role Design**: before creating a position, the recruiting team spends 2 hours trying to augment that role with AI. The job description is then revised. 4. **Internal Hackathons**: low-stakes competition — what workflow have you improved with AI? 5. **Performance Review Redesign**: redesign the process to leverage continuous AI feedback (annual → ongoing nudges), not just use AI to write the reviews.
- Closing: *"There's no vendor, consultant, or AI lab that can tell you how to adapt your workforce better than your own people."* + *"If you're waiting for someone to hand you a fully built out instruction on how to use AI, you're gonna be waiting until everybody else already figured this out, and that's too late."*
- Key conclusion: *"This is HR's moment to lead. Not just AI procurement and deployment, but the reinvention of work itself."*
- Source: Valence virtual summit "AI & the Workforce: The Adoption Gap," Mollick interviewed by Parker Mitchell (CEO, Valence). Valence sells AI coaching to Fortune 500 companies (Experian, Prudential, Delta, General Mills, Coca-Cola).
- Conceptual piece that legitimizes the HR shift, as opposed to IT or consulting. This framework is what justifies why the **Moderna anecdote** becomes a **trend**.

## RésuméDe400mots

Valence published, in July 2025, a summary of Ethan Mollick's talk (Wharton, *Co-Intelligence*) at its virtual summit "AI & the Workforce: The Adoption Gap." The document proposes an operational framework for CHROs and clarifies why the HR function is becoming the primary lever of AI transformation.

Mollick starts from an empirical observation: AI is being used massively within companies, but in **shadow** mode. *"People are turning to AI all the time as a coach and to help with work, but they're just not telling management about it,"* he says, because employees fear the consequences for their position if they reveal their productivity gains. Worse, the automation of junior tasks **breaks the implicit learning pipeline**: *"That training pipeline that was always implicit has broken, and it has to be reconstructed at the CHRO level."*

Hence the pivotal formula that structures everything else: ***"HR is R&D now. The leverage point for organizations is the HR function."***

The **Leader-Lab-Crowd** framework organizes the response into three circles. **Leader**: leaders must stop outsourcing their understanding of AI. Mollick issues a simple challenge — spend one day using an AI model for every task. Leaders' AI fluency is *motivational*: it legitimizes usage by bringing employees out of the shadows. **Lab**: *"Your AI lab can't just live in IT. It needs to live in the business; it needs to live in HR."* The lab prototypes performance reviews, coaching, onboarding, L&D — and includes non-technical power users, often the best ones (managers and teachers, whose *people skills* are the real AI skills). **Crowd**: the mass of employees who are already using AI on the sly. Mission: destigmatize, bring evangelists into the lab, provide the rest with the missing tools or training.

Five actionable experiments close out the playbook: (1) **AI-Annotated Deliverables** with a note on AI usage; (2) a weekly 5-minute "How are you using AI?" ritual in leadership meetings; (3) **AI-First Role Design** — 2 hours of AI augmentation before writing any job description; (4) internal hackathons; (5) redesigning performance reviews to leverage continuous feedback, not just delegating their writing to AI.

The closing message leaves no room for doubt: *"There's no vendor, consultant, or AI lab that can tell you how to adapt your workforce better than your own people. If you're waiting for someone to hand you a fully built out instruction on how to use AI, you're gonna be waiting until everybody else already figured this out, and that's too late. This is HR's moment to lead — not just AI procurement and deployment, but the reinvention of work itself."*

It is the **conceptual piece** that turns the Moderna anecdote into an underlying trend and intellectually equips CHROs to take the lead.

## GrapheDeConnaissance

- Ethan Mollick —affirme_que→ HR is R&D now (CONCEPT, 0.98)
- Ethan Mollick —a_créé→ framework Leader-Lab-Crowd (METHODOLOGIE, 0.97)
- Framework Leader-Lab-Crowd —permet→ écriture du AI-HR playbook (CONCEPT, 0.95)
- Ethan Mollick —travaille_chez→ The Wharton School (ORGANISATION, 0.98)
- Ethan Mollick —a_créé→ Co-Intelligence (DOCUMENT, 0.97)
- Shadow AI —est_instance_de→ usage IA caché par les employés (CONCEPT, 0.95)
- IA —réduit→ modèle d'apprentissage par tâches juniors (CONCEPT, 0.93)
- Ethan Mollick —recommande→ reconstruction du pipeline de formation au niveau CHRO (CONCEPT, 0.92)
- Ethan Mollick —recommande→ ancrage du AI lab dans HR et le business (CONCEPT, 0.95)
- Ethan Mollick —affirme_que→ les compétences IA sont des people skills (manager, enseigner) (AFFIRMATION, 0.92)
- Ethan Mollick —recommande→ 5 expérimentations RH-IA (METHODOLOGIE, 0.95)
- AI-First Role Design —utilise→ 2h d'augmentation IA avant fiche de poste (CONCEPT, 0.93)
- Performance Review Redesign —utilise→ feedback continu IA (CONCEPT, 0.92)
- Valence —a_créé→ AI & the Workforce: The Adoption Gap (EVENEMENT, 0.95)
- Parker Mitchell —dirige→ Valence (ORGANISATION, 0.95)
- Ethan Mollick —affirme_que→ la fonction HR est le levier principal de la transformation IA (AFFIRMATION, 0.98)

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Canonical: https://www.thekb.eu/en/fiches/mollick-valence-ai-hr-playbook-leader-lab-crowd-2025-07-23/