What I'm Reading - February 2026

Two business books in a row—who am I becoming? Someone must have snuck in during the night and switched my DNA!

But Ethan Mollick's Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI earned its place on my nightstand. Mollick is a Wharton professor who's been running real experiments on how AI changes knowledge work—not theorizing about it, but measuring it.

The book's central argument: We're not heading toward a world where AI replaces humans or one where humans simply "use" AI as a tool. We're heading toward something messier and more interesting—genuine collaboration between human and artificial intelligence, where the boundaries blur and both parties contribute something the other can't.

 What landed for me was his framework for thinking about AI's uneven capabilities. It's brilliant at some things, mediocre at others, and genuinely terrible at a few. Most people either overestimate AI across the board (leading to reckless deployment) or underestimate it across the board (leading to competitive disadvantage). Mollick's approach is granular: understand specifically where it excels, where it struggles, and design your workflow accordingly.

Sound familiar? It's essentially the argument I've been making about research: Don't ask "should we use AI?" Ask "where does AI create value, where does it create risk, and where is human judgment irreplaceable?"

Mollick also has a provocative take on expertise. AI compresses the advantage of experience in some domains while amplifying it in others. For routine analytical tasks, a junior person with good AI skills can now match a senior person without them. But for genuinely novel problems—the ones that require judgment honed over decades—experience still matters enormously.

That's the talent question in a nutshell. And it's why I keep saying: curiosity matters more than credentials right now. The people who will thrive are the ones willing to experiment, fail, learn, and adapt—regardless of their title or tenure.

If you're a research leader trying to figure out where AI fits in your organization, this book won't give you a playbook. But it will give you a better mental model. That's worth the read.