Management as AI superpower
One Useful Thing Ethan Mollick
A University of Pennsylvania professor ran a four-day startup creation competition where MBA students used AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT to build prototypes, achieving roughly an order of magnitude more progress than students typically accomplish over a full semester. The key finding was that success depended on the students' ability to effectively specify requirements and evaluate outputs—a management skill—rather than AI expertise, with GPT-5.2 achieving 72% parity or superiority to human experts on complex tasks. Effective delegation to AI agents follows an equation balancing human baseline time, probability of AI success, and evaluation overhead, meaning management skills and domain expertise become the bottleneck rather than AI capability.
Why it matters
Thriving in a world of agents
