Most companies treat artificial intelligence as just another piece of enterprise software - slot it into existing processes, assign it KPIs and hand it to the IT department for management. Ethan Mollick, associate professor at the Wharton School and author of "Co-Intelligence," calls this a profound strategic mistake.
Writing in The Economist, Mollick identified IT departments as the place where AI goes to die, "Hvylya" reports. The problem is not incompetence - IT professionals do essential work. But their mandate is to minimize risk.
"If they could take away your keyboards, they would sleep better at night," Mollick wrote. Every creative thing an employee does on a computer leaves a firm potentially vulnerable. AI demands the opposite: wild experimentation, tolerance for failure and acceptance that nobody yet knows the right way to use these tools.
Mollick described the mismatch as a category error. Handing sole control over AI to a department whose core mission is risk elimination means the technology will be tamed into low-value busywork - what he called "workslop." Setting targets like requiring 90 percent of employees to use AI weekly produces compliance, not transformation.
The Wharton professor compared the corporate approach to receiving a mysterious alien artifact and immediately using it as a paperweight. Companies are so eager to normalize AI that they strip away the very qualities that make it powerful - its unpredictability, its capacity to surprise, its ability to do things nobody planned for.
Also read: "Hvylya" reported on how one company fired 40 percent of its staff over AI and Wall Street rewarded it with a rally.