Ethan Mollick, Wharton professor and one of the most-followed voices on AI, told several hundred corporate executives at the New York Public Library: "Nobody knows anything. We're all making this up as we go along. Anyone who's like, 'We have the playbook' - they're lying to you." Bank of America estimates AI is currently lifting economy-wide productivity by 0.1% per year.
The most cited AI-for-work expert just told a room of execs that the entire AI-corporate-strategy industry is improvising. Worth listening to.
Mollick borrowed William Goldman's 1983 line about Hollywood - "nobody knows anything" - and aimed it at every AI consultant selling "the playbook." The 0.1% productivity number from Bank of America is the punchline. The same BofA report calls AI bigger than electricity and the internet combined. Both can't be true. Either AI is in the slow-burn phase before exponential payoff (the bull case) or the corporate narrative is ahead of measurable economic reality.
For PMs: stop benchmarking yourself against pitched "AI maturity models." For execs: discount the playbook-sellers and run your own experiments. For board narratives: "this time is different" is the riskiest phrase to ship.
⚡ Why this matters
- Mollick is the corporate-AI training voice. When he tells executives nobody knows what they're doing, that's the strongest skeptic line in the discourse this week.
- The 0.1% BofA productivity number is the first hard counter to the prevailing "AI is transforming every workflow" narrative.
- Pairs with Dan Shipper's "After Automation" (May 21) and the broader uncertainty about what AI deployment is actually producing economically.
🔍 What happened
- May 25, 2026. Fortune publishes "Nobody knows anything and this time is different: the phrases that define - and haunt - the AI economy."
- Source event: Mollick speaking to "several hundred corporate leaders" at the New York Public Library, May 22 or earlier.
- Mollick: "I spend my time talking to AI labs, famous people, I talk to CEOs all the time, and nobody knows anything."
- Mollick: "We're all making this up as we go along. So anyone who's like, 'We have the playbook' - they're lying to you."
- Reference: William Goldman's 1983 memoir on Hollywood, "nobody knows anything" - the original line about industry unpredictability.
- Bank of America estimate: AI is lifting economy-wide productivity by 0.1% per year.
- Same BofA report: AI is bigger than electricity and the internet combined.
💬 Smart takes
- Ethan Mollick (NY Public Library): "Nobody knows anything. We're all making this up as we go along. Anyone who's like, 'We have the playbook' - they're lying to you."
- Fortune framing: "This time is different" and "nobody knows anything" are the two phrases that haunt the AI economy - one is the bull story, one is the warning.
- Counter-take (BofA): a 0.1% economy-wide productivity bump is consistent with the early phase of a major general-purpose technology. Electricity took 30 years to show in the numbers.
- Skeptic: Mollick's own published work argues AI does shift productivity in controlled studies. The gap between the lab results and the macro number is the unsolved question.
🧭 Where this goes
- More public skeptic voices follow within 30 days. Gary Marcus, Ed Zitron, and macro economists (Goldman Sachs, Brookings) lean in on the productivity gap.
- Bank of America publishes a follow-up report attempting to reconcile the 0.1% productivity number with the "bigger than electricity" framing.
- Corporate AI training programs start adopting Mollick's "no playbook" framing - against the consultancies selling proprietary maturity models.
- By Q3 2026, the productivity number from BLS or BEA becomes the single most-watched macro print for AI bulls and bears.
🎯 Implication
- For PMs: when a vendor pitches you an "AI maturity assessment" or "AI playbook," treat it as marketing, not insight.
- For execs: run small in-house experiments. Publish what you find. The macro narrative will follow the operators, not the consultancies.
- For comms teams: if your board deck has "this time is different" in it, redraft. That's the phrase Fortune just called the dangerous one.