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The AI Skills Everyone Will Need (But Almost Nobody Is Learning) 👀
Two-Thirds of Americans Say AI Is Moving Too Fast in 2026 🤖
Gina Acosta
June 21, 2026
Sponsored by
Welcome to another edition of Horizon AI,
In today's issue, we take a look at a conversation with Wharton professor and bestselling author Ethan Mollick, exploring the practical reality of living and working with AI. Mollick shares grounded, actionable strategies for navigating a rapidly shifting workforce, why human judgment and experience matter more than ever, and how we can use these tools to enhance our thinking rather than replace it.
Let’s jump right in!
Read Time: 4.5’ min
Here's what's new today in the Horizon AI
Chart of the week: Youngest Billionaires
Americans Embrace AI, But with a Skeptical Eye
AI Findings/Resources
AI tools to check out
Video of the week
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Chart of the week
Youngest Billionaires
According to Forbes' 2026 Billionaires List, 35 people under the age of 30 make the cut, representing about 1% of the world's billionaires.
Of the 35, most inherited their fortunes, but 12 are self-made, having built their wealth primarily in AI, tech, and prediction markets.
The youngest among them are Surya Midha, Brendan Foody, and Adarsh Hiremath, the trio behind AI recruiting startup Mercor.
Other notable names include Sweden's Fabian Hedin, 26, who co-founded AI coding startup Lovable, and Cursor founders Michael Truell (25), Aman Sanger (25), and Arvid Lunnemark.
AI News
AI RESEARCH
Americans Embrace AI, But with a Skeptical Eye
A new Pew Research Center survey shows that while AI chatbot usage continues to grow rapidly across the United States, public skepticism remains high, with nearly two-thirds of Americans believing the technology is advancing too quickly.
Details:
49% of Americans now report using AI chatbots at least occasionally, up significantly from 33% in 2024.
Despite increased adoption, 63% of Americans believe AI technology is advancing too quickly.
Although younger respondents were most likely to have tried AI, it is actually adults between the ages of 30 and 49 who use it the most, with 34% saying they use AI chatbots at least once per day. The survey suggests this may be driven in part by workplace adoption.
Approximately 40% of Americans report using AI for work-related tasks. Among respondents, 30% say AI improves their productivity, while 28% believe it helps them stay better informed.
Public sentiment remains largely cautious, with only 16% of respondents believing AI will have a positive impact on society. Younger Americans are the most skeptical, with 48% of adults aged 18–29 believing AI will have a negative impact on society, compared to just 14% who expect a positive one. In contrast, older age groups tend to use AI less, but hold a more favorable or neutral view of it.
AI Findings/Resources
😐 Amazon investigating engineers who criticized AI data center expansion
💼 Jeff Bezos says AI will create more jobs for humans, not replace them
AI Tools to check out
👉 Dola AI: AI chat assistant for intelligent conversations, writing, translation and programming.
📢 Okara Influencer: The world's first influencer Agent. Tell it what you want to promote and it finds creators, reaches out, manages campaigns, handles payments, and gets content live.
🌐 Framer: AI tools to design, build, and improve websites.
🦾 IvaBot: AI SEO tool that finds and fixes SEO issues, discovers niche keywords, and writes content that people read, Google ranks, and AI tools cite.
✅ Tictable: A minimalist data studio for the AI age.
Video of the week
The AI Skills Nobody is Teaching (And Everyone Needs)
In this conversation, Mollick shares grounded, actionable strategies for navigating our rapidly shifting workforce. They discuss how AI is dismantling traditional career ladders, why human "taste" and experience are becoming the ultimate competitive advantages, and how we can intentionally use these tools for cognitive augmentation rather than outright automation.
The Practical Middle Ground
Mollick consciously rejects both the "doomer" and "zealot" camps of the AI debate. Instead, he frames AI as a general-purpose technology (akin to the internet) that is deeply woven into human systems. He emphasizes that rather than being passive bystanders, we maintain an immense amount of agency over how these tools are personally and professionally integrated.
The Breaking of the Talent Pipeline
For millennia, specialized skills were passed down through apprenticeship and "grunt work" evaluated by middle management. Mollick warns that this foundational structure has broken. Because current AI models outperform entry-level workers at basic tasks, managers are tempted to delegate solely to machines, threatening the survival of traditional corporate talent pipelines.
Commoditization and the Premium on Taste
As AI models like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude commoditize high-quality work, standing out in the job market will no longer depend on basic technical proficiency. When anyone can generate flawless code or clean copy, a human's unique competitive edge shifts entirely to their personal taste, vision, and distinct point of view.
Practical Strategies for Cognitive Augmentation
Mollick shares explicit, high-value tactics to instantly level up your interactions with modern thinking models:
The Power of Persona Demands: Don't just ask the AI for a generic critique. Instruct it to review your ideas from highly specific, varied perspectives, such as a harsh social media critic looking for flaws, an industry novice, or a specific professional archetype.
Forcing the Critic: Naturally polite, AI defaults to agreeing with your inputs. To push your thinking further, explicitly command the model to act as a harsh critic and challenge your underlying assumptions.
The Style Guide Trick: To bypass generic "AI voice," feed the tool a large sample of your authentic writing. Ask it to analyze and write a two-page summary detailing your tone, vocabulary, and structural habits, then paste those rules into your custom instructions.
A Shift in Job Burdens
Jobs are composed of many interconnected tasks. Mollick explains that AI rarely automates a whole job out of existence; instead, it eliminates specific operational bottlenecks [31:10]. In writing and coding, the heavy lifting is shifting away from raw production toward high-level architecture, rigorous editing, and rapid evaluation.
Personalized Education: The Holy Grail
While structural shifts create widespread organizational chaos, Mollick highlights a profound silver lining in education: personalized AI tutoring [48:34]. Armed with an effective "theory of mind," these systems can dynamically adapt to an individual student's learning speed, meet them at their current cognitive level, and generate hyper-tailored analogies based on their specific personal interests.
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Gina 👩🏻💻