As of January 2022, James Manyika is a senior partner emeritus at McKinsey & Company, and chairman and director emeritus of McKinsey Global Institute (MGI). He was previously a member of McKinsey’s board, known as the Shareholders Council. He is currently Senior Vice President of Technology and Society at Google, a newly-created position reporting directly to the CEO of Alphabet.
Based in Silicon Valley for more than 20 years, James has advised the chief executives and founders of many of the world’s leading tech companies on strategy and growth, product, and business innovation. He has also advised other chief executives outside the tech sector on issues related to innovation, the digital economy, and other global trends. In addition to his leadership of MGI, James has led research on technology’s impact on business and the economy, the future of work, productivity and competitiveness, and corporations in the 21st century. James published a book on AI and robotics earlier in his career, more recently published No Ordinary Disruption on global economic trends, and continues to publish numerous articles and reports.
James was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve as vice chair of the Global Development Council at the White House and by two US Commerce Secretaries to the Digital Economy Board and to the National Innovation Board as part of the Competes Act. He serves on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and is a member of the Trilateral Commission. He has served on several national and international taskforces, most recently cochairing CFR’s taskforce on innovation and national security, and appointed by the governor to cochair the state of California’s future of work commission.
He is involved in research institutes including serving on the board of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and advisory boards at Oxford, MIT, LSE, and Stanford, including as a member of the steering committee for the 100-year study of AI, and at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and
African American Research. He has been appointed a visiting professor at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, and a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s committee on responsible computing.
A Rhodes Scholar, James received a DPhil, MS, and MA from Oxford in AI and robotics, mathematics, and computer science, and a BS first class in electrical engineering from the University of Zimbabwe. He has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a distinguished fellow of Stanford’s AI Institute, a visiting fellow of All Souls, Oxford, a lifetime fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a research fellow of DeepMind.
James is on the boards of the Hewlett, MacArthur, and Markle philanthropic foundations and a trustee of the Aspen Institute. He was a nonresident senior fellow of the Brookings Institution in Economic Studies, a visiting scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Labs, and a faculty exchange fellow at MIT. At Oxford, he was a member of the Programming Research Group and the Robotics Research Lab, and was awarded a research fellowship and elected a fellow of Balliol College.
