Valence published, in July 2025, a summary of Ethan Mollick's talk (Wharton, Co-Intelligence) at its virtual summit "AI & the Workforce: The Adoption Gap." The document proposes an operational framework for CHROs and clarifies why the HR function is becoming the primary lever of AI transformation.
Mollick starts from an empirical observation: AI is being used massively within companies, but in shadow mode. "People are turning to AI all the time as a coach and to help with work, but they're just not telling management about it," he says, because employees fear the consequences for their position if they reveal their productivity gains. Worse, the automation of junior tasks breaks the implicit learning pipeline: "That training pipeline that was always implicit has broken, and it has to be reconstructed at the CHRO level."
Hence the pivotal formula that structures everything else: "HR is R&D now. The leverage point for organizations is the HR function."
The Leader-Lab-Crowd framework organizes the response into three circles. Leader: leaders must stop outsourcing their understanding of AI. Mollick issues a simple challenge — spend one day using an AI model for every task. Leaders' AI fluency is motivational: it legitimizes usage by bringing employees out of the shadows. Lab: "Your AI lab can't just live in IT. It needs to live in the business; it needs to live in HR." The lab prototypes performance reviews, coaching, onboarding, L&D — and includes non-technical power users, often the best ones (managers and teachers, whose people skills are the real AI skills). Crowd: the mass of employees who are already using AI on the sly. Mission: destigmatize, bring evangelists into the lab, provide the rest with the missing tools or training.
Five actionable experiments close out the playbook: (1) AI-Annotated Deliverables with a note on AI usage; (2) a weekly 5-minute "How are you using AI?" ritual in leadership meetings; (3) AI-First Role Design — 2 hours of AI augmentation before writing any job description; (4) internal hackathons; (5) redesigning performance reviews to leverage continuous feedback, not just delegating their writing to AI.
The closing message leaves no room for doubt: "There's no vendor, consultant, or AI lab that can tell you how to adapt your workforce better than your own people. If you're waiting for someone to hand you a fully built out instruction on how to use AI, you're gonna be waiting until everybody else already figured this out, and that's too late. This is HR's moment to lead — not just AI procurement and deployment, but the reinvention of work itself."
It is the conceptual piece that turns the Moderna anecdote into an underlying trend and intellectually equips CHROs to take the lead.