Erik Brynjolfsson

Erik Brynjolfsson was born in Roskilde, Denmark, to Marguerite Reman Brynjolfsson and Ari Brynjolfsson, a nuclear physicist. He attended Wayland High School, in Wayland, Massachusetts, where he was the valedictorian.

In 1984, he earned his A.B., magna cum laude, and his M.S. in applied mathematics and decision sciences at Harvard University. He received a Ph.D. in Managerial Economics in 1991 from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

After graduating from college, he taught courses on Building Expert Systems and on Applications of Artificial Intelligence at Harvard Extension School with Tod Loofbourrow. In 1987, he co-founded the Expert Systems subgroup of the Boston Computer Society and shortly thereafter, co-authored a series of articles on the topic.

Brynjolfsson served on the faculty of MIT from 1990 to 2020, where he was a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business. He also taught at Harvard from 1985 to 1995 and Stanford from 1996 to 1998.

In 2001 he was appointed the Schussel Family Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. In February 2020, Stanford announced that Brynjolfsson would join its faculty in July, 2020. He also lectures, consults, and serves on corporate boards.

At Stanford, Brynjolfsson teaches a graduate course on "The AI Awakening: Implications for the Economy and Society" which has included guest lectures by Mira Murati, Jeff Dean, Eric Schmidt, Alexandr Wang, Mustafa Suleyman and others.

At MIT, he taught the course 15.567, The Economics of Information: Strategy, Structure, and Pricing, at MIT. He hosts a related blog, Economics of Information.

Along with Tom Mitchell, Brynjolfsson co-chaired two committees for the National Academies of Sciences, one on "Automation and the US Workforce" in 2017 and one on "Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work” released in 2024.

Brynjolfsson also directed the analysis of AI for the National Network for Critical Technology Assessment. …

Brynjolfsson is known for studying the economics of information systems and the economics of AI.

His early work measured the productivity contributions of IT and the complementary role of organizational capital and other intangibles. Along with Paul Milgrom, he wrote the lead article ("Complementarities in Organizations") in the NBER Handbook of Organizational Economics. Along with Daniel Rock and Chad Syverson, he wrote the lead article ("AI and the Modern Productivity Paradox") in the NBER volume on the Economics of Artificial Intelligence.

Brynjolfsson has done research on digital commerce, the Long Tail, bundling and pricing models, intangible assets and the effects of IT on business strategy, productivity and performance. In several of his books and articles, Brynjolfsson has argued that technology is racing ahead, and called for greater efforts to update our skills, organizations and institutions more rapidly.

Brynjolfsson is the author of several books, including Wired for Innovation with Adam Saunders, and Race Against the Machine, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies and Machine, Platform, Crowd with Andrew McAfee.

The Second Machine Age was described as "pioneering a fundamentally new economics, one based not on the old reality of scarcity but on a new reality of abundance that we are only just beginning to comprehend."

At the urging of Robert Solow, who first called attention to the gap between the computerization and productivity, Brynjolfsson wrote a review of the "IT Productivity Paradox".

In separate research, he documented a correlation between IT investment and productivity. His work provides evidence that the use of Information Technology is most likely to increase productivity when it is combined with complementary business processes and human capital.

A subsequent article, the Productivity J-Curve, described how these intangible investments might initially lead to stagnant or even lower productivity followed by a take-off.

Working with Avinash Collis, Felix Eggers, and others, Brynjolfsson developed new methods for measuring the digital economy using "massive online choice experiments". …

Brynjolfsson has been the co-founder of three companies (Foundation Technologies, Inc. Flexplay Technologies, Inc. and Workhelix, Inc) and has been awarded several U.S. patents. He also served on the Boards of Directors of two publicly traded companies, Computer Science Corporation (2010–2015) and CSK Holdings, Inc. (2005–2008).

Brynjolfsson designed the game software Dragonfire II. As an inventor, he's been awarded patents for forecasting of skills and tasks, as well as optical storage media.

Brynjolfsson co-founded Workhelix, Inc, a firm that helps companies assess their opportunities for using generative AI and other technologies. It applies the “task-based approach”, a methodology building on work by Brynjolfsson, Tom M. Mitchell and Daniel Rock for analyzing various technologies’ ability to augment or automate individual tasks.

Brynjolfsson was the co-founder of the MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge (IIC), a global tournament designed to encourage entrepreneurs to use technology to create a more equitable future. IIC winners have collectively generated over $170 million in revenue, raised over $1 billion in capital, created more than 7,000 jobs, and served 350 million people.