Harnessing AI for Entrepreneurial Innovation

Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on AI — a practical guide for experimenting and engaging with artificial intelligence. Ethan Mollick, Wharton School associate professor of innovation and entrepreneurship, AI visionary, and best-selling author walks us through the hype, fears, and potential of this transformative and complex technology. 

AI is reshaping business, society, and education with unprecedented speed. Ethan Mollick urges business leaders and educators to get in there and figure it out for themselves — to experiment and discover, rather than sitting on the sidelines waiting for AI to come to them. His latest book, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, is a practical guide for thinking and working with AI so you can determine how and where it can be utilized most effectively.

Mollick believes that AI can help entrepreneurs at every stage of business, including coming up with the very idea for the business itself. “AI out-innovates people in most cases,” he says, “so you should probably be using it to help you generate ideas.” In fact, he encourages us to think about AI as a co-founder to bounce ideas off. Mollick also acknowledges that people need to push through those initial couple hours of resistance when exploring AI. “There's a lot of reasons people stop using AI. It's weird. It freaks them out. It gives them bad answers — initially. You need to push through, like there is a point of expertise with this, where you start to get what it does and what it doesn't. Ten hours is my loose rule of thumb for how much time you have to spend using these systems to kind of get it.”

Mollick’s Four Essential Rules for Integrating AI into Work and Life

1. Always invite AI to the table. 

“You don't know what AI is good for or bad for inside your job or your industry. Nobody knows. The only way to figure it out is disciplined experimentation. Just use it a lot for everything you possibly can.”

2. Be the human in the loop.

“The AI is better than a lot of people in a lot of jobs, but not at their whole job, right? And so, whatever you’re best at, you're almost certainly better than the AI is.”

3. Treat AI like a human 

AI models are “trained on human language and they're refined on human language. And it just turns out that they respond best to human speech. Telling it and giving tasks like a person often gets you where you need to go.” 

… (but tell it what kind of human to be)

“AI models often need context to operate. Otherwise they produce very generic results. So a persona is an easy way to give context. ‘You are an expert marketing manager in India, focusing on technology ventures that work with the US’ will put it in a different headspace than if you say you're a marketer or if you don't give it any instructions at all.”

4. Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use.

“We're early, early days still. I mean, there's a lot of stuff still being built.”

Listen to Ethan Mollick’s insights on how AI can level the playing field for startups and how entrepreneurs and teams can use it to enhance creativity, efficiency, and innovation. Also, be sure to subscribe to Mollick's Substack blog/newsletter One Useful Thing, a research-based view on the implications of AI, where Mollick offers free resources and prompts.

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