Erik Brynjolfsson

In 1984 he received an AB in applied mathematics magna cum laude and an SM in applied math and decision science from Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry, and in 1991 a PhD in managerial economics from the MIT Sloan School.⁠[1]

He joined the MIT Sloan School as an assistant professor in 1990, became associate professor in 1995 and was Schussel Family Professor of Management from 2001 to 2020.⁠[1]

In December 1993 he published “The Productivity Paradox of Information Technology: Review and Assessment” in Communications of the ACMAustralian Community MediaAustralian Community Media (ACM) is an Australian regional and rural news publishing group with more than 100 brands, including The Canberra Times; in 2019 Nine sold it to a company controlled by interests associated with Antony Catalano and Thorney Investment Group.Open the full entry, opening with the observation that delivered computing power in the US economy had increased by more than two orders of magnitude since 1970, yet productivity, especially in services, seemed to have stagnated.⁠[2]

In 2009 he published Wired for Innovation with Adam Saunders. In an MIT News interview he said the US productivity resurgence since about 1995 stemmed largely from organizational innovations complementing information technology, and suggested that the Great Recession might be “The Great Restructuring”.⁠[3]

In 2011 Digital Frontier Press published Race Against the Machine, which he co-wrote with Andrew McAfee. The book argues that weak US job growth stems not from a decline in innovation but from its acceleration: computers are rapidly performing tasks that once required humans, while workers are not adding new skills fast enough.⁠[4]

On July 9, 2013, MIT Sloan announced the Initiative on the Digital Economy to study the economic, social and business consequences of digitization, to be led by him, then director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, together with Andrew McAfee.⁠[5]

On January 20, 2014, Norton published The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, written with McAfee, which argues that digital technologies are giving mental power an unprecedented boost that brings benefits but also economic disruption that leaves some workers behind.⁠[6]

The book became a New York Times bestseller.⁠[7]

In 2017 Norton published Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future, co-written with McAfee and structured in three parts on machines, platforms and crowds, which together form what the authors call a “triple revolution”.⁠[8]

On September 24, 2019, as director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, he testified at a hearing of the Research and Technology Subcommittee of the US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on artificial intelligence and the future of work.⁠[9]

In his testimony he said: “We are not facing the imminent end of work; but we are facing a major restructuring of work.”⁠[10]

On February 24, 2020, Stanford HAI announced that he would join Stanford that July as a senior fellow at HAI and the Ralph Landau Senior Fellow in Economic Growth at SIEPR, with courtesy professorships in economics and at the Graduate School of Business, and would lead the launch of a new Digital Economy Lab.⁠[11]

In July 2020 the newly created Digital Economy Lab joined Stanford HAI, with him as principal investigator and Christie Ko, former associate director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, as executive director; its research topics include the impact of robotics and automation on jobs and the economic effects of free digital goods.⁠[12]

On November 25, 2020, he appeared on episode 141 of the Lex Fridman Podcast, titled “Economics of AI, Social Networks, and Technology”, discussing exponential growth, productivity, social media, AI and the nature of work, universal basic income and the effect of COVID on the economy.⁠[13]

In January 2022 he published “The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence”, arguing that an excessive focus on human-like AI makes machines substitutes for human labor and erodes workers’ economic and political bargaining power, whereas AI aimed at augmenting humans creates far more value.⁠[14]

On May 10, 2023, he, Martin Neil Baily and Anton Korinek published “Machines of mind: The case for an AI-powered productivity boom” at Brookings, arguing that large language models such as ChatGPT make workers more productive and raise the rate of innovation, laying the foundation for a significant acceleration in economic growth.⁠[15]

That year he, Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond studied the contact center of a Fortune 500 software company and found that agents with access to a conversational AI assistant were 14% more productive, with the least experienced and lowest-skilled workers gaining the most.⁠[16]

In a September 2023 interview he predicted that AI would double productivity over the next decade, describing productivity as “an elixir” that makes problems such as the federal budget and health care much more solvable.⁠[17]

In April 2024 Workhelix, which he co-founded with Andrew McAfee and CEO James Milin, launched with AI Fund as a SaaS platform to help companies identify and capture the value of generative AI.⁠[18]

In August 2025 he, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen released the working paper “Canaries in the Coal Mine?”, using data from the largest US payroll software provider, and found that since the widespread adoption of generative AI, early-career workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations had experienced a 13 percent relative decline in employment.⁠[19]

On January 30, 2026, he received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Uppsala University’s winter graduation ceremony, after giving an honorary doctorate lecture in the University Main Building the day before.⁠[20]

As of October 2026 he is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow at Stanford HAI, Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and a Research Associate at NBER; in October 2026 “A Research Agenda for the Economics of Transformative AI”, written with Anton Korinek and Ajay Agrawal, appeared in Communications of the ACM.⁠[21]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.brynjolfsson.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[22]

X: Public account: https://x.com/erikbryn (opens in a new window)⁠[13]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikbrynjolfsson/ (opens in a new window)⁠[22]

Stanford Digital Economy Lab: Official website: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[14]