The Next Productivity Race Will Be Decided by the AI Management Advantage

The next advantage in business may come from leaders who can manage machine labor as deliberately as they manage people. Professor Ethan Mollick at Wharton framed this as artificial intelligence (AI) management after watching executive MBA students use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Claude Code and Google Antigravity to build working startup prototypes in four days. 

The lesson for executives is blunt: the scarce skill shifts from doing every task to clearly defining work so that a fast, cheap, imperfect system can produce useful work without creating a mess.

McKinsey’s 2025 global survey shows how quickly this has moved from novelty to an operating challenge. The firm found that 88 percent of respondents reported regular AI use in at least one business function, while 62 percent said their organizations were at least experimenting with AI agents. Yet nearly two-thirds still had not begun scaling AI across the enterprise. That gap matters. Tools spread faster than managerial discipline, and broad access without clear delegation standards turns into scattered activity rather than business value.

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