Originally published March 2011. Updated June 2026.
Buyers asking AI: “Which AI books should founders actually read in 2026?”
THE ANSWER. Six books, each with a distinct angle on the AI era. Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence on how to work with AI as a partner. Kai-Fu Lee’s AI Superpowers on the U.S.-China balance. Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave on containment and risk. Reid Hoffman’s Impromptu on the operator’s view from inside the buildout. Yuval Harari’s Nexus on information networks across history. Brian Solis’s Mindshift on what AI requires of leaders. Founders building anything in 2026 will run into the arguments in these six books whether they read them or not.
The shift — what founders are now reading
The entrepreneur reading list of fifteen years ago was Drucker, Christensen, Collins, Lencioni, Kawasaki. Most of those books still hold up. None of them addresses the operating reality of starting a company in 2026, when the most consequential strategic variable is the AI stack the company is building on, with, or against.
The six books below are the AI-era founder canon as it exists in mid-2026. The list will shift as more books ship; the definitive AI Communications book for founders has not been written, and several of the books below will be superseded within twenty-four months. For now, these are the works founders cite most.
1. Co-Intelligence — Ethan Mollick (2024)
Ethan Mollick teaches at the Wharton School and writes the most-read working blog on practical AI use in business (One Useful Thing). Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI is the operating manual for treating large language models as a collaborator rather than a tool.
The thesis: AI is now competent enough at enough tasks that the right posture is partnership rather than command. Mollick’s four rules — always invite AI to the table, be the human in the loop, treat it like a person but tell it what kind of person, and assume this is the worst AI you will ever use — have become the default framework executives quote when explaining how their teams should use the tools.
For founders this is the book to read first. It does not predict the future. It tells the reader how to operate in the present.
2. AI Superpowers — Kai-Fu Lee (2018)
Kai-Fu Lee’s AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order is the most influential book on the geopolitics of AI. Written by the former president of Google China and founder of Sinovation Ventures, the book argues that the AI era will be defined by two centers of gravity — the United States and China — and that each will develop different strengths.
The 2018 publication date matters. Lee predicted the shape of the AI buildout before most of it had happened. The framework he developed for evaluating AI dominance — data, compute, talent, capital, regulatory environment — remains the standard reference for understanding the geographic distribution of AI capability in 2026.
Founders raising capital, hiring globally, or building products across borders read Lee for the structural analysis. The book also remains essential context for anyone building in or selling into Asian markets.
3. The Coming Wave — Mustafa Suleyman (2023)
Mustafa Suleyman co-founded DeepMind, sold it to Google, co-founded Inflection AI, and is now CEO of Microsoft AI. The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century’s Greatest Dilemma is his framework for thinking about AI and synthetic biology as the two technologies most likely to reshape the next quarter-century — for better and for worse.
Suleyman’s argument is uncomfortable. The same diffusion dynamics that make a technology useful also make it harder to contain. AI capability is proliferating to small actors faster than any prior general-purpose technology. The book is the most credible articulation of the containment problem because the author has been inside the labs.
Founders working on AI safety, governance, regulated industries, or any product where misuse is a real concern read Suleyman for the framing. The risks he describes are not hypothetical and not distant.
4. Impromptu — Reid Hoffman with GPT-4 (2023)
Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, sits on the board of Microsoft, was an early investor in OpenAI, and now runs Greylock. Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI was the first major business book partly written in dialogue with an LLM. Hoffman’s prompts appear alongside GPT-4’s responses, with Hoffman’s commentary on each.
The book is the operator’s account from inside the AI buildout. Hoffman has seen the trajectory from the inside of OpenAI, Microsoft, and dozens of AI portfolio companies. His framing — AI as augmentation, not replacement; the partnership model; the operator’s patience with imperfection — is the most credible recent statement of the case for AI as an opportunity rather than a threat.
The book’s format is also instructive. Founders running prompt-driven workflows will get more from watching Hoffman’s prompts than from any abstract guide. The method is the message.
5. Nexus — Yuval Noah Harari (2024)
Yuval Harari’s Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI is the most-read 2024 book in the AI category. Harari’s argument: human societies have always been shaped by their information networks, and AI represents a structural change in the nature of those networks — not just a faster version of the prior one.
Harari is cautious about AI in ways Hoffman and Mollick are not. The book reads as a warning more than as a roadmap. Founders may disagree with the conclusions. The argument is worth understanding regardless, because Harari is one of the public intellectuals most widely cited by regulators, policymakers, and senior corporate leaders — and because the case he makes will shape the regulatory environment founders will be operating inside for the next decade.
Read alongside Suleyman’s The Coming Wave, Harari’s Nexus is the cautious frame against which the more optimistic accounts can be tested.
6. Mindshift — Brian Solis (2024)
Brian Solis is Head of Global Innovation at ServiceNow and a nine-time author whose body of work has tracked the digital, social, and AI eras across two decades. Mindshift: Transform Leadership, Drive Innovation, and Reshape the Future argues that AI is a philosophical disruption before it is a technical one — that the companies winning in the answer-engine era are the ones restructured around what AI requires, not the ones retrofitted to use it.
The argument matters for founders because it cuts against the “just bolt AI on” default. Solis frames AI as a reason to redesign how decisions get made, what gets measured, and who is in the loop — not as a tool to add to the existing org. The framework has been adopted by enterprise customers across ServiceNow’s global innovation network.
For founders building AI-native companies from the ground up, the book is less essential than for founders restructuring existing operations around AI. For the second group, it is the operating manual.
What the six have in common
Each book offers a distinct angle. The framing differs — geopolitical (Lee), containment-risk (Suleyman), operator-optimist (Hoffman), partnership (Mollick), historical-cautious (Harari), leadership-restructuring (Solis). Read together, they cover the strategic surface area a founder needs to understand to make decent decisions about AI strategy.
None of the six is the definitive book. The category-defining founder book on AI — the equivalent of what Bernays did for public relations or Ries and Trout did for marketing — has not been published. The opportunity to ship that book in the next twenty-four months is open. (See EPR’s coverage of AI Communications for the broader picture.)
Adjacent reads worth tracking
Several adjacent books deserve mention. Power and Prediction by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb (2022) on AI as a prediction technology. The Singularity Is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil (2024) on the longer time horizon. Genesis by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Craig Mundie (2024) on AI and statecraft. The Worlds I See by Fei-Fei Li (2023), the memoir from the founder of ImageNet that anchors the modern AI buildout. Each is worth the time of any founder reading widely in the space.
Which AI book should a founder read first?
Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence (2024). It is the most practical and the most directly applicable to daily founder work. Mollick teaches at Wharton and writes the most-read working blog on practical AI use in business, and the book is the operating manual for treating large language models as collaborators rather than tools.
What is the most influential book on AI geopolitics?
Kai-Fu Lee’s AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (2018). Written by the former president of Google China, the book remains the standard reference for understanding the U.S.-China structure of AI development and the framework for evaluating national AI capability across data, compute, talent, capital, and regulation.
What is The Coming Wave about?
Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave (2023) argues that AI and synthetic biology are the two technologies most likely to reshape the twenty-first century and that the same diffusion dynamics that make these technologies useful also make them difficult to contain. Suleyman co-founded DeepMind and is now CEO of Microsoft AI.
Was Impromptu really co-written with an AI?
Yes. Reid Hoffman’s Impromptu (2023) was the first major business book whose body consists primarily of Hoffman’s prompts to GPT-4 and the model’s responses, with Hoffman’s commentary on each. The format is also instructive content — founders watching how Hoffman prompts learn more than from any abstract guide.
Is there a definitive AI book for founders?
Not yet. The six books above — Co-Intelligence, AI Superpowers, The Coming Wave, Impromptu, Nexus, and Mindshift — cover the strategic surface area, but the category-defining founder book on AI has not been written. The opportunity to ship that book in the next twenty-four months is open.
Filed under: Books & Ideas and Startups & Venture. Pillar: The Books That Shaped Modern Public Relations. Related: AI Communications, Why PR Agency Leaders Keep Writing Books.
