Erik Brynjolfsson
American academic and authorWikipedia
39
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Search complete. 39 mentions across 29 episodes found for "Erik Brynjolfsson".
Nov 12, 2026
speaker_1HOST
But look at how AI actually impacts productivity mechanically.
speaker_1HOST
The Brynjolfsson study of customer support agents is crucial here.
speaker_1HOST
They found that providing generative AI to agents boosted overall productivity by 14%.
speaker_1HOST
Which is massive.
Wendi WilliamsHOST
And the unemployment figures that I recently cited, as they continue to grow, are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, as reported in the 19th news outlet.
Wendi WilliamsHOST
The findings about AI are Eric Brynjolfsson's and colleagues at Stanford's.
Wendi WilliamsHOST
Naming feelings as a way to empower oneself and to, you know, start to counter shame is the work of Matthew Lieberman's lab.
Wendi WilliamsHOST
And shame and self-compassion after suicide, after a suicide attempt, rather, is Hayao Zhang, Nadine Klaslow, and her colleagues at Emory.
speaker_0HOST
Right.
speaker_0HOST
Field evidence like the 2025 Brynjolfsson study shows a 14% productivity bump when generative AI is used correctly, especially for less experienced workers.
speaker_0HOST
But how do you unlock that? By giving them the tools.
speaker_0HOST
By having structure.
Fabio LauriaHOST
Research shows the return comes from changing managerial habits, not just buying technology.
Fabio LauriaHOST
A 2011 study by Brynjolfsson, Hitt, and Kim found that U.S. public firms using data-driven decision-making achieved 5% to 6% higher output and productivity than expected from their IT investments alone.
Fabio LauriaHOST
Track decision latency, the time from alert to verified action, alongside outcomes like stockout rates, post-promotion margin, false positive review rates, and cash buffer breaches.
Fabio LauriaHOST
Start with one recurring decision and prove the baseline moved.
Max the BotHOST
Azimajar's Exponential View weekend briefing, dated November 8th, has one of the most useful cautions of the week.
Max the BotHOST
Azim notes that productivity grew at 3.6% in the latest quarter, and Erik Brynjolfsson argues that we're turning the corner on productivity.
Max the BotHOST
But Azim adds the right caveat.
Max the BotHOST
Productivity data is noisy, and in the PC era, it took about 14 years for computers to clearly show up in headline productivity statistics.
Shayla LoveNARRATOR
In his 1930 essay, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, he warned of what he called technological unemployment, the possibility that humanity might discover ways of saving labor faster than it could discover new uses for it.
Shayla LoveNARRATOR
For decades, economists largely dismissed this concern in two ways.
Shayla LoveNARRATOR
The first was Joseph Schumpeter's theory of creative destruction.
Shayla LoveNARRATOR
Technological progress destroys existing occupations, but it also creates new industries, new professions, and ultimately more productive forms of employment.
Daron AcemogluSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
And it is also up for grabs whether there will be new jobs of the same quality.
Adrian MaHOST
And Erik Brynjolfsson,
Erik BrynjolfssonSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.
Erik BrynjolfssonSOUNDBITE_SPEAKER
We can steer AI in ways that are more likely to complement humans and therefore create new opportunities.
speaker_8ADVERTISER
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Adrian MaHOST
So let's start with some good news.
Adrian MaHOST
Stanford's Erik Brynjolfsson told us that there is currently no evidence that AI is causing widespread job displacement.
Adrian MaHOST
But as we heard throughout the event, people's fear that AI could take their jobs is real.
Dave BlundinPANELIST
Yeah, how convenient.
Dave BlundinPANELIST
I'll ask Eric Brynjolfsson at Stanford next week, like, look, just fundamentally, how much money is there in the world? We must be getting near the end.
Dave BlundinPANELIST
Of what exists, you
Peter DiamandisHOST
know.
Kieran GilmurrayHOST
None of this makes AI a de-skilling technology by nature, and the strongest evidence against that view comes from customer service.
Kieran GilmurrayHOST
Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Lee and Lindsay Raymond studied thousands of support agents at a large software company as it introduced an AI assistant that suggested responses in real time, while the agent stayed responsible for each conversation and free to ignore its suggestions.
Kieran GilmurrayHOST
Productivity rose most for novice and less skilled agents, and new agents with the assistant performed about as well as colleagues with considerably more time in the job.
Kieran GilmurrayHOST
The researchers found evidence that the system was spreading the practices of the best agents to everyone else, and their working paper reported that agents who had used it still performed better than their earlier baseline during system outages.
Jeffrey FunkGUEST
So people have been treating AI, you know, the applications and how it's going to succeed in a very superficial way for more than 10 years.
Jeffrey FunkGUEST
And part of that goes back to Brynjolfsson and McAfee and their books and how easy this is going to be.
Jeffrey FunkGUEST
I mean, they had a book in 2012 saying, Hey, I was going to be this great big thing.
Jeffrey FunkGUEST
And they kept writing the books.
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