Ethan Mollick

Ethan Mollick is an associate professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies innovation and entrepreneurship. When ChatGPT arrived he became something rarer than an AI researcher: a rigorous, relentlessly practical explainer of what the models can actually do, through his newsletter One Useful Thing and his 2024 New York Times bestseller Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI.

The professor who made AI homework

While many universities were banning chatbots, Mollick made AI use mandatory in his Wharton classes, requiring students to work with the models and document where they helped and where they failed. Co-Intelligence distills that stance into four rules, the first being “Always invite AI to the table” — because, as he argues, nobody knows what AI is good or bad at inside a given job, and the only way to find out is disciplined experimentation.

He also co-authored some of the most influential field research on AI at work, including a 2023 study with Boston Consulting Group showing consultants with GPT-4 finished tasks faster and at higher quality — while warning about the “jagged frontier” where the same tools quietly fail. His June 2023 line that “today’s AI is the worst AI you will ever use” became one of the most quoted sentences of the AI boom.

Mollick is not a cheerleader for any lab — he writes candidly about hallucination, deskilling, and the strangeness of working with an alien intelligence. His consistent position is that the technology is here, transformative, and best met with engaged experimentation rather than prohibition.