Erik Brynjolfsson

Erik Brynjolfsson is Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI). He speaks to executives, boards, and policymakers on how artificial intelligence affects productivity, jobs, and business strategy, and on what organizations must change to capture its value.

Brynjolfsson is also 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 the Stanford Department of Economics, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Before joining Stanford in 2020, he spent 30 years on the MIT faculty, where he directed the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy.

He was among the first researchers to measure the productivity contributions of information technology and the role of organizational capital and other intangible assets. His recent research on generative AI includes a study of AI assistance for customer support agents, published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2025, and a Stanford Digital Economy Lab analysis of AI’s employment effects on early-career workers. He leads Stanford’s research program on the economics of transformative AI.

Brynjolfsson is co-founder and co-chairman of Workhelix, a company that helps organizations identify and measure the value of AI. He has authored nine books and more than 100 academic articles, and holds five patents. He was named to the 2025 Thinkers50 ranking of the world’s top management thinkers, and he and co-author Andrew McAfee received the Thinkers50 Digital Thinking Award. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in applied mathematics and decision sciences from Harvard University and a PhD in managerial economics from MIT.

Categories: AI Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Economics and Finance, Futurists and Future Trends, Technology and Science, TED Talk, Workforce Issues

Show More

View Erik Brynjolfsson's

Videos

Topics

Harnessing the Untapped Potential of AI

The Future of Work with AI Demands Reorganization, Not Replacement

Reevaluate Your Company’s True Contributions to the GDP

Management in the Second Machine Age

GDP-B: A New Metric for the Economy

Workhelix – The Future of Worth

The AI Awakening: The Future of Work

Books

The Economics of Transformative AI (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report)

The Economics of Transformative AI (National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report)

A thought-provoking examination of how AI might either spur or harm human economic progress.

You can purchase this book here

The Digitalist Papers: The Economics of Transformative AI

The Digitalist Papers: The Economics of Transformative AI

Inspired by The Federalist Papers, this second volume of The Digitalist Papers explores the economics of transformative AI—advanced systems that could drive changes as significant as the Industrial Revolution, but far more quickly. While technical progress is accelerating, and investments in the technology are surging, far less attention has been devoted to understanding the implications of what is being built for how we live and work together in society. This volume brings together leading economists, technologists, and policy thinkers to take that challenge seriously.

You can purchase this book here

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

From the authors of the best-selling The Second Machine Age, a leader’s guide to success in a rapidly changing economy.

You can purchase this book here

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

Drawing on years of research and up-to-the-minute trends, Brynjolfsson and McAfee identify the best strategies for survival and offer a new path to prosperity. These include revamping education so that it prepares people for the next economy instead of the last one, designing new collaborations that pair brute processing power with human ingenuity, and embracing policies that make sense in a radically transformed landscape. A fundamentally optimistic book, The Second Machine Age will alter how we think about issues of technological, societal, and economic progress.

You can purchase this book here

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy

Why has median income stopped rising in the US? Why is the share of population that is working falling so rapidly? Why are our economy and society are becoming more unequal? A popular explanation right now is that the root cause underlying these symptoms is technological stagnation-a slowdown in the kinds of ideas and inventions that bring progress and prosperity. In Race Against the Machine, MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee present a very different explanation. Drawing on research by their team at the Center for Digital Business, they show that there's been no stagnation in technology-in fact, the digital revolution is accelerating. Recent advances are the stuff of science fiction: computers now drive cars in traffic, translate between human languages effectively, and beat the best human Jeopardy! players. As these examples show, digital technologies are rapidly encroaching on skills that used to belong to humans alone. This phenomenon is both broad and deep, and has profound economic implications. Many of these implications are positive; digital innovation increases productivity, reduces prices (sometimes to zero), and grows the overall economic pie. But digital innovation has also changed how the economic pie is distributed, and here the news is not good for the median worker. As technology races ahead, it can leave many people behind. Workers whose skills have been mastered by computers have less to offer the job market, and see their wages and prospects shrink. Entrepreneurial business models, new organizational structures and different institutions are needed to ensure that the average worker is not left behind by cutting-edge machines. In Race Against the Machine Brynjolfsson and McAfee bring together a range of statistics, examples, and arguments to show that technological progress is accelerating, and that this trend has deep consequences for skills, wages, and jobs. The book makes the case that employment prospects are grim for many today not because there's been technology has stagnated, but instead because we humans and our organizations aren't keeping up.

You can purchase this book here

Wired for Innovation: How Information Technology Is Reshaping the Economy

Wired for Innovation: How Information Technology Is Reshaping the Economy

A wave of business innovation is driving the productivity resurgence in the U.S. economy. In Wired for Innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders describe how information technology directly or indirectly created this productivity explosion, reversing decades of slow growth. They argue that the companies with the highest level of returns to their technology investment are doing more than just buying technology; they are inventing new forms of organizational capital to become digital organizations. These innovations include a cluster of organizational and business-process changes, including broader sharing of information, decentralized decision-making, linking pay and promotions to performance, pruning of non-core products and processes, and greater investments in training and education. Innovation continues through booms and busts. This book provides an essential guide for policy makers and economists who need to understand how information technology is transforming the economy and how it will create value in the coming decade.

You can purchase this book here

Strategies for E-Business Success

Strategies for E-Business Success

From the Sloan Management Review and the Center for eBusiness at MIT comes a remarkable collection of articles written by highly regarded experts in the field of e-business. This second book in the MIT SMR series is aimed at those seeking to integrate e-business into their enterprises as a way of maintaining - or establishing - competitive advantage. Strategies for E-Business Success offers a roadmap of the fundamental principles and tools executives need.

You can purchase this book here

Understanding the Digital Economy: Data, Tools, and Research

Understanding the Digital Economy: Data, Tools, and Research

This book contains work presented at a conference held by executive branch agencies in May 1999 at the Department of Commerce. The goals of the conference were to assess current research on the digital economy, to engage the private sector in developing the research that informs investment and policy decisions, and to promote better understanding of the growth and socioeconomic implications of information technology and electronic commerce. Aspects of the digital economy addressed include macroeconomic assessment, organizational change, small business, access, market structure and competition, and employment and the workforce.

You can purchase this book here

Testimonials

Thank you so much for coming to MarTech to tell the story of The Second Machine Age. You delivered an electrifying presentation. The feedback I’ve heard from attendees has been nothing short of ‘that was amazing!’

Scott Brinker, Program Chair, MarTech

Insightful and empirical information about the impact of digital technology on business. Entertainingly and convincingly presented. Erik is generous with his time and his expertise, and presents with authority and humor.

Neil Jacobsohn, FutureWorld

Need Help?

Call us at 617-782-3111 and we will get back to you promptly!