Ethan Mollick, associate professor at the Wharton School and author of Co-Intelligence, shares his astonishment at how many companies still have AI effectively blocked by their IT and legal departments, and for outdated reasons. He highlights the paradox: companies operating in highly regulated industries have already found ways to deploy enterprise AI solutions like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, including command-line tools like Claude Code, without encountering any apparent issue.
Mollick describes what he calls one of the strangest gaps he observes: two companies in exactly the same industry can have radically different approaches. One has been using AI productively for 18 months, while the other has set up a committee that must approve every individual use case and still worries that current AI models automatically train on company data - a fear Mollick directly refutes by pointing out that this is not the case with enterprise versions.
In a follow-up comment, Mollick deepens his analysis by identifying the root cause of this divergence. The decisive factor is generally the willingness of an executive - often the CEO, but not always - to take on the risk and responsibility associated with AI adoption. When the answer is no, the risk-reduction forces within the organization (IT and legal departments foremost) have every incentive to avoid anything that could even be suspected of causing a problem.
His conclusion is clear: this is fundamentally a leadership issue. It is not a technical, regulatory, or data security problem - it is a matter of managerial courage and strategic willingness to embrace change. Companies that move forward are those whose leaders accept calculated risks, while those that stagnate are paralyzed by an institutional risk aversion that translates into bureaucratic approval processes and unfounded fears.
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