Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
When it comes to AI, many of us are zoomed in on the day-to-day, looking to streamline our ever-growing task lists and offload the unnecessary to what’s commonly referred to as an LLM (Large Language Model), such as ChatGPT. Some of us (including this writer) find ourselves often hushing that voice that asks whether AI could soon render us expendable. Wherever you are on the AI-curious scale, a new book has hit the shelves that can help us all navigate these uncertain waters.
Author Ethan Mollick, a professor of management at Wharton, specializes in entrepreneurship and innovation—a particularly beneficial skill set when analyzing the effects of AI on businesses. However, Mollick’s Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI doesn’t limit its subject range to balanced budgets and supersonic deck generation. Instead, it provides the reader with a wide-ranging analysis of the current state of AI—without weighing down audiences with a subject that could easily span several volumes. Rather, Co-Intelligence clocks in at a manageable 210 pages, crafting what could be an overwhelming amount of information into a digestible—and entertaining—storyline.
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Mollick addresses apocalyptic concerns that have shaken the public over the years, perhaps no more so than in 2023, when the CEOs of every major AI company co-signed a one-sentence statement that read, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” While these concerns are true and valid, Mollick posits that civilization can greatly benefit in innumerable ways thanks to AI—if it is managed appropriately.
AI is classified as a “General Purpose Technology,” commonly known as a GPT (not to be confused with “Generative Pre-Trained Transformer,” referenced in ChatGPT’s product name). Past and present GPTs include electricity, the steam engine, the internet, plastics and biotechnology—and many experts believe AI could far surpass the impact of anything on that list, especially when one considers that ChatGPT reached 100 million users faster than any product ever invented.
With all that power, how can we best use AI? Co-Intelligence is an excellent resource when deciding which tasks to offload and which to leave to a human—and why. Rather than a simple “this or that” checklist, Mollick delves into why the distinction is important and what can be gained or lost during that decision-making process. Both short- and long-term considerations go hand in hand; yes, you want that lingering deliverable you’ve been avoiding to magically appear in a chat thread, but is doing it yourself an exercise that helps you gain knowledge? If so, shirking it off to AI might actually do more harm than good. What’s more, if AI provides you with a “good enough” response rather than one that exceeds your own abilities, you are weakening your work’s impact.
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I tested this theory while researching a Smart Meetings article on international celebrations of Global Meetings Industry Day on April 3, and the results only made me more confident in Mollick’s research. ChatGPT provided a modest list of international GMID events, only expanding slightly following several rounds of prompts. While AI provided me with marquee events, such as MPI’s, it left out others I discovered through email campaigns and word-of-mouth. As with so many other aspects of the meetings and events industry, the human touch was essential to achieving the best outcome.
While there is a clear consensus that AI will soon touch the overwhelming majority of professions, one of Mollick’s lines rang out like a shot in the night of my worries. “Getting rid of some tasks doesn’t mean the job disappears. In the same way, power tools didn’t eliminate carpenters but made them more efficient,” he wrote in part. With enough care and attention, AI can be shaped in a way that exponentially increases our abilities—rather than rendering them useless.
This article appears in the May/June 2025 issue. Subscribe to the magazine here.
