Most companies delegate AI strategy to middle management or IT. Ethan Mollick, associate professor at the Wharton School, says this guarantees failure - and offers a three-part alternative he calls Leadership, Crowd and Lab.
Mollick outlined the model in The Economist, drawing on his research into how organizations adopt AI, "Hvylya" reports.
Leadership, in Mollick's framework, means the CEO and senior managers must drive AI strategy personally. They must articulate a vision for how AI changes what the organization is - not merely how it operates - and create incentives that make experimentation safe. Crucially, they have to use these systems themselves.
If leadership gets it right, the Crowd follows. Mollick uses the term for a company's employees who, given access to AI tools and genuine permission to experiment, discover use cases the AI firms themselves never expected. "Since AI is most effective in the hands of experts, the Crowd is where the best ideas come from," he wrote.
The Lab is the piece Mollick finds most often missing. A dedicated team of technical and non-technical employees works on generative AI full-time, pushing boundaries and feeding discoveries back into the organization. "I am shocked by how many large companies still lack even this," Mollick wrote. Without it, companies rely on vendor demos and conference keynotes instead of building institutional knowledge - flying blind, as he put it.
"Hvylya" previously reported on how Sam Altman met the man who built his dog's cancer vaccine using ChatGPT.