Dozens Of B-School Profs Warn: ‘We Must Act Now’ On AI’s Economic Upheaval

A coalition of more than 200 economists and AI researchers, including 16 Nobel Laureates, is calling on policymakers, business leaders, and academics to urgently prepare for what they describe as an economic transformation potentially larger – and faster – than the Industrial Revolution. On that list of signatories are 40 business school professors, spanning schools from Harvard Business School to Toronto Rotman to SDA Bocconi.

The statement, titled “We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy,” was released July 13 and organized by Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson, Rotman School of Management’s Ajay Agrawal, University of Virginia economist Anton Korinek, and METR researcher Tom Cunningham. It does not offer policy prescriptions but argues that AI capabilities are outrunning economists’ understanding of their consequences – and that the window to build the right institutions before disruption hits is closing fast.

The statement calls for deeper research into AI’s economic effects and for building “the incentives, guardrails, and institutions” needed before disruption fully arrives. Organizers say the signatory list continues to grow.

THE CORE WARNING

Toronto Rotman’s Ajay Agrawal: “We cannot afford to wait for the full transformation to arrive and in the meantime rely on institutional scaffolding that was optimized for a pre-high-fidelity-prediction world.” Courtesy photo

“AI capabilities are advancing far faster than our understanding of the economic implications. In that gap lie the greatest opportunities of our era,” says Brynjolfsson, the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor at Stanford and director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. “We must act now to guide AI to complement humans rather than simply imitate them – and to generate prosperity for the many, not just the few.”

Nobel Laureate Michael Spence, professor emeritus at NYU, frames it as a call for “an ‘all hands on deck’ approach,” given the uncertainty over how big AI’s economic impact will be and when it will land. Fellow Laureate Daron Acemoglu of MIT says he is “so happy to join other leading experts in calling for the urgent need to redirect AI so that its risks are minimized.”

Korinek – currently on leave from UVA at Anthropic – puts the urgency in historical terms: “Steam, electricity, and computers each gave societies decades to adapt; AI may give us only a few years. We cannot improvise our strategy and institutions in the middle of the transformation.”

Rotman’s Agrawal adds that the outcome is not predetermined: “Whether rapidly advancing AI broadly elevates global living standards or severely concentrates wealth is not predetermined; it depends on how we choose to re-architect our political and economic systems today. We cannot afford to wait for the full transformation to arrive and in the meantime rely on institutional scaffolding that was optimized for a pre-high-fidelity-prediction world.”

“Whether rapidly advancing AI broadly elevates global living standards or severely concentrates wealth is not predetermined; it depends on how we choose to re-architect our political and economic systems today. We cannot afford to wait for the full transformation to arrive and in the meantime rely on institutional scaffolding that was optimized for a pre-high-fidelity-prediction world,” says Ajay Agrawal, professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

BUSINESS SCHOOLS ARE WELL REPRESENTED

While the statement’s marquee names are economics Nobel Laureates, business school faculty make up a meaningful share of the roughly 200 signatories. A review of the list turns up 40 professors with primary appointments at B-schools, led by Harvard Business School.

Six HBS profs signed on: Raffaella Sadun, Ebehi Iyoha, Shai Bernstein, Rebecca Henderson, Rembrand Koning, and Soumitra Shukla, alongside senior lecturer Reza Satchu. MIT Sloan contributes four – Christian Catalini, Neil Thompson, Sinan Aral, and Thomas Malone – and HEC Paris three: Thomas Åstebro, Sebastian Becker, and Carlos Serrano.

Elsewhere, Wharton (Prasanna Tambe, Lynn Wu), Boston Questrom School of Business (Laurina Zhang, Andrey Fradkin), and SDA Bocconi in Milan, Italy (Alfonso Gambardella, Arnaldo Camuffo) each have two signatories. Single signatories come from Yale School of Management (Judy Chevalier), UC Berkeley Haas School of Business (Abhishek Nagaraj), Emory Goizueta Business School (Alexander Oettl), Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management (Maryam Farboodi), Georgetown McDonough School of Business (Marc Busch), IESE in Spain (Sampsa Samila), Imperial Business School (Ramana Nanda), Columbia Business School (Andrew Koh), Smith School of Business (Jean-Etienne de Bettignies), USC Marshall School of Business (Georgios Petropoulos), W. P. Carey (Christos Makridis), and Stanford Graduate School of Business (Riitta Katila), among others.

Notably absent from the roster: any current B-school dean. The signatories skew toward faculty working directly on AI (MIT Sloan’s Thompson), labor markets (Wharton’s Tambe), innovation (HBS’s Henderson), and entrepreneurship (HBS’s Koning), rather than school leadership.

The full statement and current list of signatories are at wemustactnow.ai.

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