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.

A common pattern is pulling existing teams apart. A company takes its best senior engineer, puts that engineer with a subject matter expert and a marketing or strategy person, and gives the group impossible projects. One company he spoke with had a $200 million plan to migrate old mainframe data. A few months ago the company renegotiated the plan to $20 million. The CTO is thinking about doing the migration for $2 million in a couple of months. The shift means pulling teams apart, deciding what the company wants to do, and starting projects over from the beginning.

Job boundaries inside companies are dissolving at the same time. Coders are doing design work, designers are doing coding work, and product managers are doing everything. Some companies assign everyone the role of builder and have them work with AI. Others gather talented people who already get returns from AI, give them hard challenges and high token budgets, and see how far they get. When the projects fail, which happens some of the time, the aim is to learn something formally rather than burn tokens and move on.