Ethan Mollick Glossary
Ethan Mollick is a professor at the Wharton School whose public writing became one of the most useful guides to practical AI adoption in the ChatGPT era. His importance to this Dictionary is not that he coined a single controlling term. It is that he models a register: empirical, managerial, lightly humorous, early to the tools, and willing to revise as the systems change.
Mollick’s work sits in the same practical zone the Dictionary often inhabits: what happens when frontier-model capability moves from research demo to office work, teaching, student assessment, product design, and everyday institutional practice. He is especially useful because he refuses both easy extremes. AI is not a toy. It is not magic. It is not a finished replacement for judgment. It is a new collaborator whose usefulness depends heavily on the skill of the human setting the task.
For business-school readers, Mollick is a bridge figure. He translates the technical acceleration into questions managers can actually ask: what changes in work allocation, assessment, expertise, delegation, and training when every knowledge worker can summon a competent synthetic colleague?