Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI by Ethan Mollick
Published in April 2024
How many artificial intelligence and higher education meetings have you attended where much of the time is spent discussing the basics of how generative AI works? At this point in 2025, the biggest challenge for universities to develop an AI strategy is our seeming inability to achieve universal generative AI literacy.
Given this state of affairs, I’d like to make a modest proposal. From now on, all attendees of any AI higher education–focused conversation, meeting, conference or discussion must first have read Ethan Mollick’s (short) book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI.
The audiobook version is only four hours and 37 minutes. Think of the productivity gains if we canceled the next five hours of planned AI meetings and booked that time for everyone to sit and listen to Mollick’s book.
For university people, Co-Intelligence is perfect, as Mollick is both a professor and (crucially) not a computer scientist. As a management professor at Wharton, Mollick is experienced in explaining why technologies matter to people and organizations. His writing on generative AI mirrors how he teaches his students to utilize technology, emphasizing translating knowledge into action.
In my world of online education, Co-Intelligence serves as an excellent road map to guide our integration of generative AI into daily work. In the past, I would have posted Mollick’s four generative AI principles on the physical walls of the campus offices that learning designers, media educators, marketing and admissions teams, and educational technology professionals once shared. Now that we live on Zoom and are distributed and hybrid—I guess I’ll have to put them on Slack.
Mollick’s four principles include:
- Always Invite AI to the Table
When it comes to university online learning units (and probably everywhere else), we should experiment with generative AI in everything we do. This experimentation runs from course/program development, curriculum and assessment writing to program outreach and marketing.
- Be the Human in the Loop
While anything written (and very soon, visual and video) should be co-created with generative AI, that content must always be checked, edited and reworked by one of us. Generative AI can accelerate our work but not replace our expertise or contribution.
- Treat AI Like a Person (But Tell It What Kind of Person It Is)
When working with large language models, the key to good prompt writing is context, specificity and revision. The predictive accuracy and effectiveness of generative AI output dramatically improve with the precision of the prompt. You need to tell the AI who it is, who the audience it is writing for is and what tone the generated content should assume.
- Assume This Is the Worst AI You Will Ever Use
Today, we can easily work with AI to create lecture scripts and decks. How long will it take to feed the AI a picture of a subject matter expert and a script and tool to create plausible—and compelling—full video lectures (chunked into short segments with embedded computer-generated formative assessments)? Think of the time and money we will save when AI complements studio-created instructional videos. We are around the corner of AI’s ability to accelerate the work of learning designers and media educators dramatically. Are we preparing for that day?
How are your online learning teams leveraging generative AI in your work?
What other books on AI would you recommend for university readers?
What are you reading?