Ethan Mollick
Associate Professor of Management and Co-Director, Generative AI Labs, the Wharton School
Academic post at Wharton
Ethan Mollick is an Associate Professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also the Ralph J. Roberts Distinguished Faculty Scholar and a Rowan Fellow[1]. His faculty page lists his research interests as AI, innovation, entrepreneurship and education[1]. He studies the effects of artificial intelligence on work, entrepreneurship and education[1].
Mollick received his PhD and MBA from MIT's Sloan School of Management and his bachelor's degree from Harvard University[1]. Before his academic career he co-founded a startup company[1]. His faculty page says he was named one of TIME Magazine's most influential people in artificial intelligence, and that Poets and Quants named him MBA Professor of the Year for his work on using AI and simulations in classroom teaching[1].
Generative AI Labs at Wharton
Mollick is Co-Director of the Generative AI Labs at Wharton, which build prototypes and conduct research on how AI can help people while limiting its risks[1]. The labs say they have been designing educational simulations for more than a decade[2]. Their current initiative, Primer, aims to give every educator the tools to build simulations, tutors and other adaptive learning experiences without technical expertise[2]. The labs also run the Generative AI Studio, where students build working AI prototypes[2].
His recent research with co-authors includes AI Agents and Education: Simulated Practice at Scale, which looks at how generative AI can create adaptive educational simulations[1].
The jagged frontier study
Mollick is a co-author of Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier, a 2023 Harvard Business School working paper written with researchers including Fabrizio Dell'Acqua and Karim Lakhani[3]. The study was run with Boston Consulting Group and involved 758 knowledge workers in a preregistered experiment[3]. On 18 realistic consulting tasks inside the frontier of AI capabilities, participants using GPT-4 completed 12.2% more tasks and finished them 25.1% more quickly on average, with higher quality[3]. On a complex task chosen to fall outside that frontier, participants using AI were 19% less likely to produce correct solutions than those without it[3]. The paper uses the term jagged technology frontier for this uneven pattern, where AI helps with some tasks and hurts performance on others of similar difficulty[3].
Books and One Useful Thing
Mollick writes One Useful Thing, a newsletter that gives a research-based view of the implications of AI for work, education and life[4]. He states that he writes every post himself and only asks AI for feedback after finishing a complete draft[4].
His book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI was published on 2 April 2024[5]. The publisher describes it as a New York Times bestseller[5]. His faculty page adds that it was named a best book of the year by The Economist and the Financial Times[1].
Its successor, Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI, is published by Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Random House[6]. The book is framed as a guide to living and working with AI that is sometimes, but not always, better than people at a task[6]. It builds on the idea of the jagged frontier, where tasks that seem simple can sit outside what AI does well while tasks that look hard fall within it[6].
Known for
- Co-Intelligence (2024)
- Co-Existence
- One Useful Thing newsletter
- Co-directing Wharton's Generative AI Labs
- The jagged technological frontier study
Sources
- Wharton Management Department: Ethan Mollick faculty profile — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Wharton Generative AI Labs: home page — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Harvard Business School: Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier, working paper, 2023 — checked 6 Nov 2026
- One Useful Thing: About — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Penguin Random House: Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick — checked 6 Nov 2026
- Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI, official book site — checked 6 Nov 2026