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Back to This AI Expert Argues We're Underestimating AI's Productivity Impact — With Ethan Mollick, with Ethan Mollick.

Are Large Companies Seeing a Return From AI?

Ethan Mollick says surveys show 85 percent of companies had positive ROI from AI as of last year. The major transformation has not happened yet, except it is starting in some organizations. A company with 100,000 employees still has to map processes, decide who gets tokens, and adopt agentic models that are less than a year old.

Productivity and cost savings are already there. Colleagues at Wharton surveyed a thousand large companies, and as of last November, 85 percent of large companies with over a billion dollars in revenue reported positive ROI from AI use. Detailed breakdowns of cost savings versus spend are not in that survey.

Transcript

This AI Expert Argues We're Underestimating AI's Productivity Impact — With Ethan Mollick ·

Big Technology Podcast

More from this episode

  1. Why Don't Companies See AI Productivity Gains Yet?Ethan Mollick says you do not get organizational productivity gains instantly from individual ones.
  2. How Did a $200 Million Data Migration Drop to $20 Million?Ethan Mollick says no single move unlocks the full potential of AI inside a company. The work is structural change, and for many organizations it takes years.
  3. How Much of America's 20th-century Edge Came From Management?Ethan Mollick says 40 percent of the advantage of American companies in the 20th century came from better management, according to a paper by Raffaella Sadun…
  4. What Is the AI Capability Overhang?Ethan Mollick calls the overhang a huge gap between current AI capabilities and future capabilities.
  5. When Did Practical AI Agents Become Possible?Ethan Mollick says practical agents were not possible until models reached Opus 4.6 level or 4.5 level around November and December of last year.
  6. Why Do Superforecasters Keep Getting AI Wrong?Ethan Mollick says superforecasters keep getting AI wrong because an exponential is hard to predict. The labs have been right.
  7. Do AI Tutors Actually Help Students Learn?Ethan Mollick says a universal tutor of high quality now exists in AI, and when the tool is set up as a tutor the evidence seems to show positive effects in a…
  8. Will AI Replace All Human Labor by 2035?Ethan Mollick says nobody really knows what happens to jobs.
  9. Why Are AI Token Prices Falling?Ethan Mollick says AI token prices face real downward pressure because a huge move for token efficiency is underway and costs will decrease even as more…
  10. Will Personal AI Agents Flood Customer Service?Ethan Mollick says a perfectly legal distributed denial of service on customer service departments is coming, authorized by millions of consumers, once it is…

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