Erik Brynjolfsson

Erik Brynjolfsson is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor at Stanford University and director of its Digital Economy Lab. His research examines how digital technologies, including artificial intelligence, affect businesses, workers and the wider economy. He is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

With Andrew McAfee, Brynjolfsson co-authored The Second Machine Age and Machine, Platform, Crowd, books about the economic and organizational implications of digital technology. In the research paper Generative AI at Work, he, Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond studied the introduction of an AI assistant for customer-support workers. They found productivity gains, particularly among less-experienced workers. That study concerns AI assistance to people, not autonomous agents; it is useful evidence about how technology can change work without establishing how every AI deployment will perform.