Ethan Mollick

Confidence 0.80 · 2 sources · last confirmed 2026-06-20

Associate professor at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Co-director of the AI Initiative at Wharton.

Co-author on the Jagged Technological Frontier paper (Dell’Acqua et al., Org Sci 2026), one of the canonical empirical studies of generative AI’s effect on knowledge work — the source of the jagged frontier term (jagged-frontier). Author of Co-Intelligence (and the forthcoming Co-Existence) and the One Useful Thing newsletter; the wiki’s deliberately non-doomer, non-zealot practitioner voice.

In the [[2026-06-16-mollick-simon-sinek-ai-skills-experience-edge|A Bit of Optimism interview]] (with Simon Sinek, June 2026) Mollick lands several of the wiki’s live theses from the social-science chair: experience beats “AI-native” youth (the durable-skills / returns-to-expertise finding, via the BCG junior-worse-at-AI study); taste as the differentiator as output commoditises (“the death of the movie star”); the apprenticeship model just broke (the ai-deskilling talent-pipeline mechanism); the model/app/harness three-layer framing (agent-harness); and a heavy reliance on GDPval (2025-10-05-patwardhan-et-al-openai-gdpval, 48%→84%) for “how good the work is.”