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Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School, recently pointed to early signs that AI may be widening the gap between companies. A new OpenAI study, “How Organizations Use AI: Evidence from ChatGPT,” shows a small group of “frontier” firms using AI far more than typical firms, and the gap is growing fast. By June 2026, the top 10% of enterprises were generating about 8 times as much AI output per user as typical firms. And those high-adoption firms tend to be the ones that already had the most productive employees.
That matches what I see. And the real benefits come from teams and the organization as a whole using AI to unlock what they can do together.
There are three big categories of teams and AI:
- Some folks are still behind on adopting AI in their personal workflows.
- There’s a large group changing their personal workflows to do more with AI. Individually, they’re way, way more productive, but they’re becoming overwhelmed and falling out of sync with each other.
- The magic, and what’s rare so far, is using AI both individually and collectively.
