Ajay Agrawal

Ajay Agrawal is an economist and professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He is the founder of the Creative Destruction Lab, a not-for-profit program with a mission to enhance the commercialization of science for the betterment of humankind. Startup graduates of the program have created over $25B in equity value to date. He is coauthor of two bestselling books on the economics of artificial intelligence: Prediction Machines and Power & Prediction, both published by Harvard Business Review Press.

Ajay is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts; an academic advisory council member at the Center on Regulation and markets at Brookings in Washington, DC; an advisory board member at Carnegie Mellon University’s Block Center for Technology and Society in Pittsburgh; and a faculty affiliate at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto. Ajay conducts research on the economics of innovation and serves on the editorial board of the scholarly journal Management Science.

Professor Agrawal served as advisor to the U.S. government as a member of a National Academies committee on Science and Innovation Leadership for the 21st Century. He currently serves as advisor to the government of Japan as a member of the International Advisory Committee for the National Institute for Information and Communications Technology, Japan’s sole R&D agency specializing in Information and Communications Technology (ICT). He is founder of Mind Lab 56: a studio that creates startups building enterprise AI solutions that leverage generative AI. He is a co-founder of Sanctuary that has a mission to create the world’s first human-like intelligence in general purpose robots. Ajay was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2022.