Making AI Work: Leadership, Lab, and Crowd
Once again, Ethan Mollick delivers an interesting piece. I absolutely feel the need for the things he describes in my own experience.
Leadership
- Function: Vision Setting
- People: Company leaders (e.g., CEOs, executives)
The Crowd
- Function: Performance Innovation
- People: Employees across departments
The Lab
- Function: Product Development
- People: Subject matter experts, technologists, and non-technologists
An overall vision is not enough, however, because leaders need to start to anticipate how work will change in a world of AI.
[…]
I am increasingly seeing organizations start to experiment with radical new approaches to work in response to AI. For example, dispersing software engineering teams, removing them from a central IT function and instead having them work in cross-functional teams with subject matter experts and marketing experts. Together, these groups can “vibework” and independently build projects in days that would have taken months of coordination across departments.
[…]
When research that once took weeks now takes minutes, the bottleneck isn’t the research anymore, it’s figuring out what research to do. When code can be written quickly, the limitation isn’t programming speed, it’s understanding what to build. When content can be generated instantly, the constraint isn’t production, it’s knowing what will actually matter to people.
[…]
The key is treating AI adoption as an organizational learning challenge, not merely a technical one.
