Erik Brynjolfsson is an economist whose work centers on the productivity and distributional effects of digital technology and, more recently, generative AI. He is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor at Stanford University, Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, and a Senior Fellow at Stanford HAI. He is a Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and was previously at MIT Sloan.
Roles
Brynjolfsson holds the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professorship at Stanford University and directs the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. He is a Senior Fellow at Stanford HAI and a Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He was previously based at MIT Sloan.
Research and frameworks
Brynjolfsson's earlier research addressed the IT productivity paradox (1990s–2000s) and the economics of digital technology. Wired for Innovation (2010) and Race Against the Machine (2011, with Andrew McAfee), the predecessor to The Second Machine Age, came out of this period.
The bounty and spread framework, articulated in *The Second Machine Age* (2014, with Andrew McAfee), holds that digital technology produces simultaneous aggregate wealth gains ("bounty") and sharply unequal distribution ("spread"). *Machine, Platform, Crowd* (2017, with McAfee) sets out a three-axis rebalancing (Mind↔Machine, Product↔Platform, Core↔Crowd) for understanding digital-era economics.
In the generative-AI period, the randomized controlled trial *Generative AI at Work* (2023, with Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond) studied customer-service agents and reported a 14% productivity gain from generative AI, with larger effects on less-experienced workers. The study is an empirical foundation for the hypothesis that AI disproportionately augments novices. *Generative AI and the Nature of Work* is follow-up work extending the framework to the LLM era.
Brynjolfsson is co-editor of the Digitalist Papers (Vol. 1, 2024; Vol. 2, 2025), with Pentland, Persily, Rice, and Aristidou. The project is structured as a Federalist-Papers-style multi-disciplinary synthesis, and his framings recur across its volumes.
Positions and debates
Brynjolfsson argues that productivity gains from AI are real and large, while also arguing that distributional outcomes depend on policy. His stance is neither utopian nor that of a bubble skeptic.
His position differs from that of several peers. Daron Acemoglu, in The Simple Macroeconomics of AI, is more pessimistic on aggregate productivity gains. Brynjolfsson and Narayanan and Kapoor disagree on the pace of diffusion and the magnitude of short-term effects; relative to the argument in Narayanan and Kapoor's book, Brynjolfsson is closer to the view that AI will be transformative on medium timelines than to the view that AI is mostly snake oil.
His Stanford Digital Economy Lab organized "We Must Act Now", an 88-word statement released July 13, 2026 and signed by more than 200 economists, executives, and researchers, warning that AI may become "radically more powerful" within a decade with risks of "large-scale job displacement" (Source: platformer.news). Brynjolfsson heads the featured signatory roster, which includes 16 Nobel laureates in economics and spans positions that ordinarily disagree about both the magnitude of AI's economic effect and the seriousness of catastrophic risk — a range the statement's deliberate minimalism, three hedged sentences with no policy recommendation, is what makes possible.
Relationships
- supports: The Second Machine Age — Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2014) / Machine, Platform, Crowd — McAfee and Brynjolfsson (2017) / Generative AI at Work / Generative AI and the Nature of Work / The Digitalist Papers (Stanford, Volumes 1–2) — works he authored or co-edited.
- supports: Bounty and Spread / Expertise Framework (Autor–Thompson) / AI and Productivity — concepts he grounds.
- related: Stanford HAI / METR — institutional affiliations.
- related: David Autor / Daron Acemoglu — peer economists.
- related: Andrew McAfee — frequent co-author.