MBA Professor Of The Year: Wharton's Ethan Mollick

Wharton’s Ethan Mollick is Poets&Quants’ business school Professor of the Year

ChatGPT’s debut in November of 2022 quickly became a viral sensation. It sparked widespread discussion and debate about the future of AI in education, work, and creativity. Critics warned of the potential misuse of technology, which could lead to misinformation, plagiarization, and job elimination. Optimists praised groundbreaking technology as a tool to vastly increase productivity, reduce costs, and rid humans of unsatisfying work.

Thousands of academics worldwide furiously attempted to become experts in generative artificial intelligence as universities and schools struggled to figure out how to leverage the technology in classrooms and ultimately the workplace. But one scholar above all has truly distinguished himself in the field: The Wharton School‘s Ethan Mollick.

Irreverent, eccentric, and unquestionably brilliant, the 49-year-old’s insights have become indispensable to any curious human being–students, scholars, working professionals, entrepreneurs, and executives. A provocative explainer of AI, he follows the technology and how it impacts education and work the way a world-class detective tracks down clues in a case.

MOLLICK COVERS AI’S ASCENDANCE WITH AN UNCOMMON SENSE OF HUMOR

Through his Twitter or X feed, a substack channel called oneusefulthing.org, and his New York Times best-selling book, Co-Intelligence: Living & Working With AI, Mollick’s influence goes well beyond the classroom where he has long been a master teacher. Poets&Quants first recognized him 10 years ago as one of the top 40 under 40 business professors in the world. Few business school profs rival Mollick in making a more valuable or impactful contribution to business practice.

No less important, he covers AI’s ascendance with a sense of humor uncommon among academics. Consider his LinkedIn page where Mollick lists his “mysterious and exciting path.” Among his hallucinated achievements, he writes about

Colleagues note his intellectual superpower. “Ethan has both the extreme brilliance and mild eccentricity characteristic of those MIT super-humans whose intelligence and productivity overshadow the rest of us,” writes Chuck Eesley, an associate professor at Stanford University who once worked with Mollick. “However, Ethan also has been blessed with enough charm and warmth to put the rest of the geniuses here to shame.”

ETHAN MOLLICK: POETS&QUANTS PROFESSOR OF THE YEAR

For his dogged intellectual pursuit of one of the world’s most disruptive technologies and his unparalleled mastery of the subject, Poets&Quants is naming Mollick its Professor of the Year in 2024. With his expertise in entrepreneurship and innovation, Mollick brings an important lens to all the emerging angst and exhilaration over the rise of artificial brains. He does so without hyping AI’s fundamental importance. He concludes his book, for example, with not a single prediction but four scenarios for AI’s future because, Mollick concedes, “nobody actually knows the future of AI.” It could come to a quick plateau, experience linear or exponential growth, or become the technology that finally matches or surpasses human cognitive capabilities.

On artificial intelligence, Mollick is neither a doomsayer nor an optimist. “I am a pragmatist,” he says flatly. “It is a general-purpose technology with massive implications. A lot of this is going to be good and bad and confusing. And it is hard to know in advance what it is going to be. Everybody comes to the same conclusion: that the jobs that will be most transformed will be the highest creative jobs. But transformed doesn’t mean they go away. It does mean transformative. If it’s doing the work for you then what is your role? This is where we have to stay ahead of the curve and I don’t have easy answers.”

Mollick, who speaks as quickly as ChatGPT can spit out answers to a prompt. believes there are a couple of misconceptions about the technology. “Number one is that some magic is required to use it when in reality it is like working with a person,” he says. “The first rule in my book is to spend ten hours doing the work and you will figure it out. The second thing is that AI is static, that it is a thing and not an ongoing process. People are over-indexing on what AI is today. They are treating this like blockchain. Slap a word on this and we will be fine. One-third of workers used AI at work in August. This is already done. The world is already AI-enabled.”

‘WORKING WITH AI IS A DIALOGUE, NOT AN ORDER’

His essential advice: Just use it. Mollick advises setting aside ten hours using AI on tasks that actually matter to you. “People treat AI like Google, asking it factual questions,” he says, “but AI is not Google and does not provide consistent or even reliable answers.”

Instead, counsels Mollick, interact with AI as a new colleague. “Treat AI just like an infinitely patient new coworker who forgets everything you tell them in each new conversation…You want to work with it, not just give it orders and you also want to learn what it is good and bad at. Working with AI is a dialogue, not an order.” Just as you would with a coworker, Mollick believes it is crucial to give AI examples of good and bad responses along with step-by-step directions of what you want to accomplish.”You can also give it feedback just as you would another human being asking for improvement or just request that it ask you questions about anything that is unclear,” says Mollick.

“There is nobody there to help you. You will learn fast by using AI.” Companies and universities, Mollick believes, need to set up their R&D labs to experiment with AI. “That is challenging because companies have given up on R&D and have given this over to consulting firms or software companies which impose an approach or structure on your company. It’s a good time for MBAs because we need deep thinking about this.”

SON OF A DENTIST AND ARTIST, MOLLICK WAS ‘ASSEMBLED’ IN MILWAUKEE

Son of a dentist and artist, Mollick jokes that he was “assembled” in Milwaukiee. His first entrepreneurial experience was selling cow-shaped door stoppers when in middle school. “I grew up in Wisconsin, which makes this slightly less weird, but only slightly,” he says.

As an undergraduate student at Harvard, he studied science, technology, and policy, graduating manga cum laude in 1997. After a brief stint in consulting, he launched a startup in New York, eMeta Corp., with a roommate. “My partner was the tech guy, and I was the sales guy,” adds Mollick. “We invented the paywall, used initially by the Wall Street Journal and others. It is guilt I will carry with me forever.”