Tracking AI’s Impact: Latest Insights from the AI Economic Indicators

Erik Brynjolfsson is one of the world’s leading experts on the economics of technology and artificial intelligence. He 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.

Dr. Nela Richardson is ADP’s Chief Economist and ESG Officer. Nela is the head of the ADP Research Institute (ADPRI), where she leads economic research and provides reliable and timely analysis for the public, global and local businesses, and policymakers. Her background and expertise cross many industries, including finance, technology, housing and labor.

Connacher Murphy is a research manager at DEL, where he works with lab scholars to turn their research on the economic impacts of AI into low-latency, regularly updated measures of the economic impacts of AI. He also pursues new research partnerships for this work. These efforts are housed under the forthcoming Stanford AI Economics Observatory.

Connacher is interested in the economic and social impacts of AI, both for their relevance to policy and as strong proxies for capabilities.

Bharat Chandar is a labor economist working on understanding AI’s impact on work. His recent projects include work with Erik Brynjolfsson and Ruyu Chen tracking “canaries in the coal mine” for entry-level employment changes in jobs exposed to AI. He also recently surveyed the state of knowledge about AI and labor markets.

His ongoing work has focused on three areas. The first asks, how will workers adjust if we see AI-driven changes in hiring? Which workers will have an easier or more challenging time if displaced, and where should we target support? The second asks, how can we use AI to make it easier for people to learn new things and pursue new forms of work? Third, how will impacts of AI differ across the world?

She focuses on two main areas: information technology adoption and firm performance, where she examines the drivers of IT adoption within firms and its impact on innovation and market performance; and AI and the future of work, where she leverages large-scale payroll data to study how emerging technologies, particularly generative AI, are reshaping employment, wages, skill demands, and organizational structures. Her work has been published in leading academic journals, including the Strategic Management Journal.