The Lavin Agency Speakers Bureau
A speakers bureau that represents the best original thinkers,
writers, and doers for speaking engagements.
A speakers bureau that represents the best original thinkers,
writers, and doers for speaking engagements.
Artificial Intelligence is disrupting every industry. You must act today to turn this disruption into opportunity.
Artificial Intelligence is disrupting our entire economy, and we’re just at the beginning—which means massive opportunity for those who take advantage of it today. Economist Ajay Agrawal can show you how to leverage AI right now. Ajay is the founder of the Creative Destruction Lab, which boasts the greatest concentration of AI start-ups of any program on the planet, as well as co-author of Prediction Machines and Power and Prediction, which former World Bank Chief Economist Lawrence H. Summers calls “the best book yet that considers what AI will mean for all who participate in our economy.” Ajay’s talks illuminate how machine prediction gives us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to optimize the way we do business, run governments, and provide healthcare, leaving us the space to be human where it really counts: decision-making.
Ajay Agrawal reveals where artificial intelligence is taking us by separating hype from reality, while delivering a steady stream of fresh insights. He speaks in a language that top executives and policy makers will understand.Dominic Barton, Global Managing Partner, McKinsey & Company
Ajay 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. 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.
He is coauthor of two best-selling books on the economics of artificial intelligence: Prediction Machines and Power and Prediction, both published by Harvard Business Review Press. 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, which is on 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.
As founder of the University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab, Ajay unpacks the full potential of AI and machine prediction in his talks. His first book, Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence is a must-read survey—and practical toolkit—for anyone seeking to leverage the disruptive, transformative power of AI in the coming decades. His new book, Power and Prediction, is a must-read guide for any business leader or policy maker on how to make the coming AI disruptions work for you rather than against you. As AI prediction machines improve, old ways of doing things will be upended, and this process will have winners and losers. How can businesses leverage, or protect, their positions?
Ajay has been awarded Professor of the Year by MBA classes at the Rotman School seven times, the Martin-Lang Award for Excellence in Teaching, and most recently the Distinguished Scholarly Contribution Award, among several other honors. He conducts research on the economics of artificial intelligence, science policy, entrepreneurial finance, and the geography of innovation. He serves on the editorial boards of multiple management and economics journals and holds a Ph.D. in Strategy and Economics and an M.Eng./MBA from the University of British Columbia. He served as a Visiting Scholar at MIT, London Business School, and Harvard University, as well as a Visiting Professor at Stanford.
CEO & co-founder of XLabs and Ribo One of Forbes's 30 Women in AI to Watch Quantum computing expert
CEO of Trend Hunter New York Times bestselling author of Create the Future
Bestselling author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus Activist and scholar
Award-Winning Black Transgender Activist Author of The Risk It Takes to Bloom Co-Founder of the Transgender Week of Visibility and Action
Celebrity chef Bestselling author of Fresh Off the Boat Writer and director of Boogie and Tuna Melt
Pulitzer Prize-Winning author of Stay True New Yorker staff writer CBS Sunday Morning contributor
Founder and CEO of Obsidian Strategies Fmr. VP of the Amazon Web Services Machine Learning Solutions Lab Fmr. Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
CEO of Wavelo Former Head of Product at Verizon
Professor Author of Atlas of AI Leading scholar of AI and society
Grit, more than talent, IQ, looks, or wealth, is a powerful indicator of success.
There isn’t a beat you can cover in America—education, housing—where race is not a factor.
Great brands don’t simply reach customers: they create real emotional bonds with them.
Racism has a cost for everyone—but there are ways we can prosper together.
Stories of queer identity and Black joy have the power to educate us on diversity, inspire social justice activism, and build community.
Artificial intelligence has been with us for decades. But today’s machines are gaining the ability to learn from data and make sophisticated predictions—more cheaply, and more accurately, than human beings. Like the advent of the Internet and the dot-com explosion, machine learning is set to affect foundational changes to our lives (think driverless cars—but that’s just the beginning). From navigation to the Internet of Things, manufacturing to agriculture, health care to the robotic workers set to replace even top-level positions, deep learning will open as many doors as it will close. And to understand these shifts, experts turn to Ajay Agrawal. A leading authority in AI, the co-author of Prediction Machines—and, as a business speaker, a great explainer of complex economic forces—he translates the sweeping power of machines and breaks down why it all matters. How can we take advantage of the growing market for AI? How can we allocate capital and investments today to best prepare for tomorrow? How do we prepare for the disruptions—to long-standing industries, to millions of jobs, and to age-old notions about work, employment, and leisure—that will result? No matter who you are or where you work—a company, an investor, a university or government—Agrawal will help you adapt, and thrive, throughout this economy-wide transformation.
To Rotman professor, Creative Destruction Lab founder, and machine learning speaker Ajay Agrawal, many western nations have a problem with productivity. We’re educated—and we’ve got plenty of innovative ideas—but problems with scale and commercialization leave us underperforming. However, countries now have a new opportunity to compete globally—if we decide to take a lead in the realm of artificial intelligence and machine learning. In this keynote, Agrawal outlines the ways businesses, funding agencies, universities, and other institutions can pioneer research into A.I. and become global leaders. In other words, when inventors, scientists, programmers, and entrepreneurs are working at the very frontiers of deep and reinforcement learning, there are nearly limitless applications for business. If you invest now, and secure your global presence, you can transform your productivity and win on a world stage. Drawing on his work with the Creative Destruction Lab and the NextAI, Agrawal outlines how investors and business leaders can seize these new opportunities, capitalize on foresight, and reap the benefits of an early engagement with the next great shift in economics.