New experts join Google’s AI & Economy team

Google announced it is expanding its AI & Economy Research Program, adding economists and academic advisors to study how artificial intelligence affects jobs, productivity, and economic activity worldwide. The program is led by Anu Madgavkar and Daniel Rock as Directors, working alongside Alex Imas, Director of AGI Economics at Google DeepMind, and Zanna Iscenko, AI & Economy Lead in Google's Chief Economist's Office.

Philippe Aghion joins as an Academic Advisor. He is a 2025 Nobel Laureate in Economics and holds the Kurt Björklund Chaired Professorship at INSEAD and the Collège de France. He joins an advisory group that includes Nobel Laureate Michael Spence and Cambridge's Dame Diane Coyle, bringing his work on innovation-led growth and creative destruction to modeling AI's long-term macroeconomic trajectory.

Ajay Agrawal joins as a Visiting Fellow, working with David Autor, a current Fellow and head of MIT's Department of Economics. Agrawal holds the Geoffrey Taber Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation and is a Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. His research will cover the economics of AI and scientific discovery, AI and robotics, and how AI can expand the frontier of human welfare.

Madgavkar joins from the McKinsey Global Institute, where she was a Partner, following a two-decade career leading research on labor markets, technology adoption, and structural economic transitions, and advising governments, multilateral institutions, and business leaders. At Google she will lead empirical research on global AI diffusion, small business ecosystems, and the workforce impacts of generative AI. Rock joins from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and is an AI2050 Early Career Fellow and MIT Digital Fellow; he will bridge frontier model telemetry with econometrics to analyze enterprise productivity, labor restructuring, and scientific discovery.

The program focuses on the future of work, productivity and growth, global technology diffusion, and AI's impact on scientific discovery. It follows the launch of the AI & Economy ATLAS v1.0 and its interactive open-access site, which examine how people use Google's AI tools at work and daily life. The expanded team will inform future ATLAS updates and empirical research. Research publications and global data are available at ai.google/economy.

Why it matters: The expanded team will inform ATLAS updates and research aimed at identifying organizational practices, policy frameworks, and training programs, affecting how organizations, workers, researchers, and policymakers interpret AI's economic impact.