The practical "which AI should I use" guide has stopped being about chatbots

Ethan Mollick’s rewritten guide, covered on 27 July 2026, drops the chat-model comparison that framed the 2025 version and organises around agentic modes instead — systems "capable of doing the equivalent of many hours of real human work in one go." Gemini comes out of the recommendation set on the grounds that Google has no established agent product against ChatGPT Work or Claude’s Cowork. Much of the guide is spent on naming, which Mollick argues does not map across vendors: the hosted-computer mode is ChatGPT Work in ChatGPT and Cowork in Claude, while the local desktop apps call the equivalent Codex and Code. Switching the ChatGPT mobile app from Chat to Work also gives the code-interpreter container internet access it does not have in Chat.

What it means Anyone writing AI training this quarter is teaching the wrong surface if the curriculum still opens with prompt-craft in a chat box — and the vendor naming is now itself the first teachable obstacle.