Ethan Mollick I am a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

“You don't get organizational productivity gains instantaneously from individual productivity gains. You can produce 100 times more code than you did before. … If you're an organization that's doing two week-long sprints and has to coordinate with marketing and has stand-up meetings every day, which is a rational way to organize work, that 100 times productivity gain can be a barrier. No one has time to deal with all of that code.”

Big Technology · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

Context

Alex Kantrowitz opened by asking why AI's power isn't showing up in productivity statistics, citing Dallas Fed data. Mollick's answer: organizations haven't adapted yet, citing 20 times more code producing only 30% more shipped products.

Listen to the episode → More from Ethan Mollick → More Tech Strategy & Big Tech quotes →

Transcript

Big Technology Around 01:43 into the episode

Ethan Mollick

Thanks for having me.

Alex Kantrowitz

…Expert jobs are seeing more productivity gains than the low AI Expert jobs, but they're actually seeing less productivity gains than they saw during COVID and even less productivity gains than they saw pre-COVID at some times. The spikes just do not reach the same heights. What's going on, Ethan?

Ethan Mollick

I mean, I think anyone who's an organization probably has the right answer to that problem, which is you don't get organizational productivity gains instantaneously from individual productivity gains. You can be 100%, produce 100 times more code than you did before. And that's great if you're a solo entrepreneur producing a lot of code. If you're an organization that's doing two week-long sprints and has to coordinate with marketing and has stand-up meetings every day, which is a rational way to organize work, that 100 times productivity gain is actually can be a barrier, right? No one has time to deal with all of that code. And we see that too in shipping stats. 20 times more code being produced, 30% more products being shipped, right? And so it's not an uncommon problem. We haven't adapted organizations to AI yet.

Alex Kantrowitz

Yeah, I mean, there have been some stats, I think you're referencing this, in the app store, where there have been many more apps shipped than previously, but even fewer reviews than before, right? So it's like the productivity, quote unquote, or the work looks like there's been more done. But when…

Ethan Mollick

Well, actually, those are two different things. So one thing is the flood of stuff, right? And we're seeing that everywhere. So there's a lot more novels, a lot more games, a lot more apps. But I'm actually talking directly. There's a nice set of studies looking at products shipped, right? And…

Alex Kantrowitz

Yeah, I've thought when it comes to these capabilities at the companies that are really going to at least in the near term, term pull ahead are going to be the ones that say individuals who are using this technology we're going to empower you to actually go ahead and you know break free from some…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Big Technology

“There's a lot of systems like the banking system and the customer service system that depend on friction. It's hard to make a phone call. It's annoying to file something. It takes effort to find that there's a problem and gather your paperwork, even lawsuits, things like that. And now we got those done at scale.” — Ethan Mollick, Big Technology

“I just think everyone's going to still buy into this because everybody is buying a story more than anything else. … I think investors will look at this and say, all right, we're going to be wrong about one of these, but we need to take the basket because the basket as a whole is going to be extraordinary for us. And if one of the groceries falls to the floor and splats like a tomato, we'll take that hit.” — Dan Primack, Big Technology