Google appointed economists Anu Madgavkar and Daniel Rock to direct an expanded AI & Economy Research Program, the company announced Friday. The program measures how artificial intelligence adoption affects workforce structures, productivity, and macroeconomic activity.
Madgavkar, formerly a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, spent two decades researching labor markets and technology transitions. She frequently advised governments, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum. At Google, she will oversee empirical research covering global artificial intelligence diffusion, small business ecosystems, and generative artificial intelligence workforce shifts.
Rock joins from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he co-authored foundational papers on technological transitions. As an AI2050 Early Career Fellow and MIT Digital Fellow, Rock will link frontier model telemetry with econometrics to assess enterprise productivity, labor restructuring, and scientific discovery. Both directors will run the program alongside Alex Imas, Director of AGI Economics at Google DeepMind, and Zanna Iscenko, AI & Economy Lead in Google's Chief Economist's Office.
Academic advisors and visiting scholars are also joining the division. Philippe Aghion, the 2025 Nobel Laureate in Economics from INSEAD and the Collège de France, joins existing advisors Michael Spence and Dame Diane Coyle. Aghion will apply research on innovation-led growth and creative destruction to analyze macroeconomic trajectories.
Ajay Agrawal, a professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, joined as a Visiting Fellow. Agrawal will collaborate with MIT economics department head David Autor to investigate the economics of artificial intelligence, robotics, and scientific discovery.
The expanded group will feed findings into Google's AI & Economy ATLAS v1.0, an interactive data initiative hosted at ai.google/economy to track workplace tool adoption.
