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Ethan Mollick

Category: entity Last updated: 2026-04-07 Status: stub

Summary

Ethan Mollick is a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of the Substack newsletter One Useful Thing, which focuses on practical AI adoption for knowledge workers and organizations. He is known for accessible, research-grounded writing on how to use AI tools effectively.

Details

Work

Mollick writes the One Useful Thing newsletter (oneusefulthing.org), translating AI research into actionable guidance for practitioners. His February 2026 guide on AI tool selection introduced a widely-cited three-layer framework (Models, Apps, Harnesses) for understanding the modern AI landscape.

Key Contributions

  • Models/Apps/Harnesses framework — A conceptual model for understanding AI tools: Models are the underlying intelligence; Apps are the products users interact with; Harnesses are the environments that enable agentic, tool-using behavior. See guides/ai-tool-selection.
  • Characterizes the agentic shift as "the most significant change since ChatGPT's launch."

Sources