New experts brought on board for Google's AI & Economy team
Google has expanded its AI & Economy Research Program with world-class economists, including 2025 Nobel Laureate Philippe Aghion as Academic Advisor and Ajay Agrawal as Visiting Fellow. New directors Anu Madgavkar and Daniel Rock will lead empirical research on AI diffusion, workforce effects, and productivity. The team will shape future ATLAS updates, helping policymakers and workers navigate AI's economic transformation.
Google has broadened its AI & Economy Research Program, adding world-class economists including 2025 Nobel Laureate Philippe Aghion to help organizations, workers, researchers, and policymakers understand how artificial intelligence is transforming work, business, and daily life. The expansion follows the recent release of the AI & Economy ATLAS v1.0 and its interactive open-access site, which tracks how people use Google's AI tools. As AI reshapes economies in real time, the company argues that navigating this shift demands combining fine-grained data with rigorous economic analysis.
Deepening scientific expertise and collaboration
The company emphasizes that technological transitions rarely happen overnight, and the program is designed to measure and analyze this evolution as it unfolds. Core research areas include the future of work, productivity and growth, global technology diffusion, and AI's impact on scientific discovery.
An agenda of that scale, Google notes, requires close collaboration among academia, industry, and policymakers. To build that capacity, two prominent scholars are joining as Academic Advisors and Visiting Fellows:
- Philippe Aghion, Academic Advisor: The 2025 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Kurt Björklund Chaired Professor at INSEAD and the Collège de France, joins an advisory group that already includes Nobel Laureate Michael Spence and Cambridge's Dame Diane Coyle. He will apply his work on innovation-led growth and creative destruction to modeling AI's long-term macroeconomic trajectory.
- Ajay Agrawal, Visiting Fellow: Holder of the Geoffrey Taber Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation and Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, Agrawal will work closely with current Fellow David Autor, head of MIT's Department of Economics. His focus will include the economics of AI and scientific discovery, AI and robotics, and how AI can expand the frontier of human welfare.
Two new directors to steer empirical research
To guide empirical projects and integrate findings across the agenda, Google is bringing in two researchers as Directors of the AI & Economy Research Program.
Anu Madgavkar joins after two decades at the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), most recently as a Partner, where she led global research on labor markets, technology adoption, and structural economic transitions. She has advised governments, multilateral institutions, and business leaders, and contributes regularly to the World Economic Forum and the United Nations. At Google, she will lead empirical work on global AI diffusion, small business ecosystems, and the workforce effects of generative AI.
Daniel Rock arrives from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he built a reputation as a leading economist on AI and labor and co-authored foundational papers on technological transitions. An AI2050 Early Career Fellow and MIT Digital Fellow, he will bridge frontier model telemetry with econometrics to study enterprise productivity, labor restructuring, and scientific discovery.
Madgavkar and Rock will lead the program alongside Alex Imas, Director of AGI Economics at Google DeepMind, and Zanna Iscenko, AI & Economy Lead, in Google's Chief Economist's Office.
What comes next for the program
Google frames the expansion as a long-term commitment: maximizing AI's economic upside while limiting disruption will require sustained partnership. The enlarged team is intended to act as a scientific bridge, directly shaping future ATLAS updates and empirical research.
Priorities include identifying the organizational practices, public policy frameworks, and training programs needed to ensure AI upskills workers, democratizes expertise, and spreads prosperity broadly. Researchers and the public can explore the program's publications and global data at ai.google/economy.
Meta description: Google expands its AI & Economy Research Program, adding Nobel Laureate Philippe Aghion and two directors to study AI's economic impact.
Tags: Google, AI & Economy Research Program, ATLAS v1.0, AI economics, future of work
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