Erik Brynjolfsson is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. He also is the Ralph Landau Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), Professor by Courtesy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Stanford Department of Economics, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

One of the most-cited authors on the economics of information, Brynjolfsson was among the first researchers to measure productivity contributions of IT and the complementary role of organizational capital and other intangibles. He has done pioneering research on digital commerce, the Long Tail, bundling and pricing models, intangible assets and the effects of IT on business strategy, productivity and performance.

Brynjolfsson speaks globally and is the author of nine books including, with co-author Andrew McAfee, best-seller The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, and Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future as well as over 100 academic articles and five patents. He holds Bachelors and Masters degrees from Harvard University in applied mathematics and decision sciences and a PhD from MIT in managerial economics.

AI2050 Project

AI-related benchmarks – such as the Turing Test – typically compare AI and human performance. These are important for helping improve AI systems, but they miss an emerging category of AI-augmented labor. Erik’s project will study AI-augmented human labor, a category that places workers at the center of value creation and decision-making. He will investigate labor-automating versus labor-augmenting innovations, identify drivers of human-replacing vs. human-augmenting technology, develop a new set of metrics of AI-augmented labor, and disseminate findings as business and policy recommendations. If successful, this work may lead to an increase in our understanding of and use of augmented human labor.

Project Artifacts

E. Brynjolfsson, D. Li, and L. Raymond. Generative AI at work. NBER Working Paper. 2023.

M.N. Baily, E. Brynjolfsson, and A. Korinek. Machines of mind: The case for an AI-powered productivity boom. The Brookings Institution. 2023

AI2050 Community Perspective — Erik Brynjolfsson (2023)