Ajay Agrawal

Ajay Agrawal is one of the four named organisers behind Stanford's "We Must Act Now" statement, published 13 July, alongside Erik Brynjolfsson, Anton Korinek and Tom Cunningham. The letter went on to gather backing from well over 200 economists and AI researchers, a roster that came to include 16 Nobel laureates. That places him among the handful who framed the statement's argument rather than the several hundred who simply signed it.

He holds the Geoffrey Taber Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation and is professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. He founded and directs the Creative Destruction Lab, an accelerator for AI and deep-tech startups, and is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

His research models AI as a fall in the cost of prediction rather than a wholesale substitute for judgement, an argument developed across two Harvard Business Review Press books: "Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence" (2018) and "Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence" (2022), both widely cited in the economics-of-AI literature.

That body of work gives him standing as one of the field's more institutionally minded voices, someone who has argued for a decade that AI's disruption is a matter of preparedness and policy design rather than an inevitability to be merely observed.