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

“What happens, though, is as adoption spreads, what happens when every, you know, every hotel is getting these messages. The only defense they have is agents of their own. This is a sort of mass denial of service attack in some ways, but authorized by you.”

The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

“What happens, though, is as adoption spreads, what happens when every, you know, every hotel is getting these messages. The only defense they have is agents of their own. This is a sort of mass denial of service attack in some ways, but authorized by you.” — Ethan Mollick, The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway

Galloway imagines an AI agent that negotiates hotel deals for him. Mollick says that already works over email. He predicts companies will answer with agents of their own, and that systems built on human friction, such as low-yield savings accounts, will start to break.

Transcript

The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway Around 24:28 into the episode
Scott Galloway

…remarkably similar endpoints in terms of an agreement. Can you think of specific sectors where you'll be able, where it just makes sense for agents on both sides, the demand and the supply side, to come sort of to come to some sort of I travel a shit ton and I stay in a lot of hotels. I spend a

Speaker 2

…your hotel brand here agent and saying if there's a deal to be done. A, do you think that's going to happen? I assume the answer will be yes. B, when do you think it's going to happen? And which sectors do you think will have more like agent to agent? agent as opposed to human-to-human negotiation.

Ethan Mollick

…you're doing email exchanges, there is no doubt that a dot class model agent could actually just do that for you right now. Exchange multiple emails over time, attach PDFs, engage in forms, right? So the call is the missing piece. You absolutely can do that with current systems. And I think that they would support that enough to make that work, given my experience with them and what I've seen. What happens, though, is as adoption spreads, what happens when every, you know, every hotel is getting these messages. The only defense they have is agents of their own. This is a sort of mass denial of service attack in some ways, but authorized by you. Like you will be pissed off if your agent isn't allowed to talk to a customer because it's your representative, right? To a customer service person is your representative. It's not the same thing as a mass emailing, right? This is my representative doing something on my behalf. Of course, you have to answer it. So the only way companies will be able to respond is probably with agents of their…

Scott Galloway

Let's talk a little bit about higher education. You teach a Wharton, and what has your experience been with seeing how your students have been

Speaker 2

using AI?

Ethan Mollick

So, you know, I introduced my class to ChatGPT a few days after it came out. You know, I'd been using the earlier versions of GPT-3 before ChatGPT. And, you know, the first, I teach an entrepreneur of class. So in the very first class, one of my students tuned out entirely and by the end of class…

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