AI and the Future: “Nobody Knows Anything”: Wharton Professor Ethan Mollick

Ethan Mollick is considered one of the top experts on the emerging world of generative AI, jobs and the economy, but you might not think so if you take his word for it.

“Management is not that far as an expert,” he told CNBC’s Sharon Epperson at the CNBC Executive Workforce Council Summit in New York on Tuesday.

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania professor, who says she has advised everyone from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to Jimmy Fallon on the new world of Generation AI, shared a blunt message with human resources officers at the CNBC event. “I can tell you, no one knows anything,” Mollick said.

This includes, he says, the best AI research labs in labor market and case utilization. “They don’t know what it’s useful for. They tell me they use my Twitter feed(s) to understand use cases,” he said.

Underlying his words was a simple point: no company can hire a worker today who has five years of experience using Generation AI. “They don’t exist,” Mollick said.

Certainly, there is evidence emerging of the AI ​​generation’s workplace productivity gains, and Mollick and HR leaders at the CNBC WEC Summit shared evidence from their research and real-world experience with workers, at companies from Walmart to Verizon and JPMorgan. But there was general agreement that there are more questions than answers left for business leaders today when it comes to AI and the workplace.

“We frankly don’t know what the future looks like,’ Claire MacIntyre, senior vice president and chief people officer of Sam’s Club, said in a separate summit session with CNBC’s Morgan Brennan. This is the worst version of technology we will use,” she said.

Need to move away from rewards based on all answers

Much of the progress within AI is operating in an area that technology experts describe as a “black box,” and experts at the CNBC event said there is a comparable gap that exists today in our understanding of AI’s impact on the economy that extends from early education through professional careers.

MacIntyre said modern career culture is based on rewarding yourself for having “answers” and it’s a process that began in the education system. But this is changing for leadership and workers. Leadership in particular, she said, “is no longer about having answers. It’s actually about asking brilliant questions, changing information and making decisions at Tiktok speed,” she added.

Verizon chief talent officer Christina Schelling, who spoke on the same panel with the Sam’s Club exec, agreed. For decades, she said, “We have been rewarded for perfection and being an over-the-top perfectionist in the job market.”

But with AI, Schelling says, “The outcome is rarely perfect or the one you need to move forward. Now, how quickly you can bounce back and continue to test and try new things is as likely to be the successful model as the way we’ve been rewarded since kindergarten, she said, even if it goes against the grain.

“What we’re trying to focus on is less learning as an action, and more as a mindset,” MacIntyre said. “Be curious and be able to unlearn, and be literate by feedback.” All of this, she says, is essential to how culture should evolve.

For employers, that makes hiring a more difficult equation, according to Kiersten Barnet, executive director of the New York CEO Jobs Council, which was launched by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and other CEOs of the city’s largest employers. “Everyone knows we’re going to need something a little different than before, but we don’t know what that’s going to look like in five, 10 years,” she told CNBC’s Brennan in a one-on-one interview at the summit.

She also drew a direct line to education, a focus for her organization, which works with New York City colleges and high schools to prepare workers for jobs that will require AI skills to build strong career paths and earning potential. “Think about traditional classrooms. They look the same as 100 years ago in terms of how we learn. Even though the content is different, you don’t learn critical thinking from a textbook,” she said.

She noted that the New York Jobs CEO Council is involved in an effort to make Gen AI a requirement for students, and Openai is working on certifications that she says will be quickly integrated and adopted into courses and ultimately lead job roles to applied use of AI technology, but she added that it remains an “if.”

“We don’t have that at the moment and it’s difficult to gauge everyone’s capability on the applied side of technology,” she said.

What we know about AI, workers and jobs

Barnet said there are bets she’s willing to make about what will work for workers in the future. On the one hand, the ability to learn flexibly and continuously “is a skill in itself,” she said.

Softer skills are more important than ever, she added, especially because of the “uncertainty of the future” and knowing what skills AI can do for us.

Schelling pointed out that it has long been known that empathy, curiosity, agility and decision-making skills are all important for success. But they are going to be more heavily weighted now and considered in a more complex job market in an AI world. It’s already a data influx into hiring and career advancement, but at the same time it’s also becoming “something largely unknown or new, so the gray takes on a little more meaning,” she said.

Mollick says logically this makes sense, because current AI is much more human-like than machine-like, so people who are good with people can use it to succeed.

He also highlighted evidence from a study he worked on with Boston Consulting Group that showed significant improvements in work productivity from using AI generation, as well as a Procter & Gamble study that found employees and teams performed better when assisted by AI.

“We know the impact is there,” Mollick said, but he stressed that when it comes to job replacement fears, he sees it as leadership choice facing and executing poorly. “I worry without imagination, organizations will think automation is the way to go,” Mollick said. And he said that in today’s environment, workers will be reluctant to adopt AI if they feel like productivity gains won’t accrue to them in the form of additional benefits.

Companies including Sam’s Club and Verizon are already seeing results today from early adoption. At the Walmart Company, more than 100,000 frontline workers have used Gen AI over the past 18 months, including frontline managers using ChatGpt to help them manage their businesses, as well as computer vision on autonomous scrubbers that go around and perform inventory counts and other mundane tasks that can now skip.

At Verizon, the focus is also on frontline workers who interact directly with customers, but Schelling said the company has reached the stage of moving from pilots to “a complete enterprise transformation … an AI overlay to the enterprise.”

One of Verizon’s biggest projects was using Gen AI to sift through all publicly available information on the company’s more than 100,000 employees to build a better AI system for match workers with potential career paths. The company’s AI was able to clean its role and skills data to identify career paths in the abstract, but couldn’t match it to actual workers without more comprehensive information about their lives.

“We didn’t have enough employee data,” Schelling explained. We found that they were more likely to update external profiles than internal profiles. So we pulled all publicly available employee information with AI and merged it with internal employee profiles,” she added.

Employees were part of the process – although they had to opt-out rather than opt-in – and were asked to edit and amend information if it was inaccurate. Ultimately, Verizon went from less than 5% complete data sets to almost 100%, and it works to benefit employees – pushing them jobs that can scale based on their skills, as well as suggestions for training and certifications that help establish a job they want “10 years in the future,” Schelling said.

While workers were initially hesitant at first about merging external and internal data, she says it is seen as adding value, including less than a 1% attrition rate in the pilot group.

#1 Tips That Cost $20 a Month

Mollick had three structural pillars to suggest for organizations to move forward constructively: developing AI in leadership, creating an AI lab, and bringing AI out to the crowd.

And everything changes very quickly. “Almost everything we knew about training people no longer applies. None of the incentives from four months ago work,” he said. “Rapid engineering doesn’t matter anymore. Saying the right words or being nice doesn’t matter, but giving it context that we give humans to make decisions is important,” Mollick said. “You need to ‘snoop’ the best users of AI and take ideas from the crowd and turn them into products that people use right away,” he added.

And there’s only one way to start doing it, according to Mollick. “My No. 1 tip is to pay $20 a month for (Anthropic’s) Claude or (Openai’s) GPT or (Google) Gemini and use it for whatever you can legally use it for.”

Mollick says to use AI for a minimum of 10 hours per week. “It’s not that hard,” he said, and you’ll quickly learn what he’s good at and what he’s not good at. “You can’t push it down. You have to use it yourself as a leader. You can’t say you’re going to create time to do it,” he added.

As for all tool sales people, he says most are just relaunching from GTP, Gemini, or Claude and don’t have better access to AI than anyone else. “I can’t tell you and no one can tell you unless your lab tries it,” he said.

“Let everyone ‘do’ and some people will be good as a result and they will become the laboratory and the innovation,” Mollick said. “Waiting for answers or letting it take hold are the biggest mistakes HR leaders can make,” he added. “As soon as you turn them into tools, you can find use cases.”

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