The Stanford Digital Economy Lab launched the AI Economic Indicators on June 10, a free platform designed to track how artificial intelligence is affecting work, productivity, and value creation across the economy, according to a press release.
The lab, which is part of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, said the platform’s first set of indicators is live at indicators.stanford.edu and includes frequently updated data on labor markets, economic growth, and technology adoption.
The AI Economic Indicators brings together regularly updated data, interactive dashboards, and research-based methods for policymakers, researchers, employers, and workers seeking to understand the economic impact of AI.
“We are flying blind into one of the most consequential periods in world history. We cannot afford to rely on anecdotes or lagging indicators of AI’s effects,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, professor at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. “We need timely, trusted evidence to understand where AI is creating value and where it is disrupting work.”
Stanford said traditional economic statistics were not built for a technology that can change work at the task level or create consumer value in ways that conventional price measures may not capture.
The platform is designed to close that gap by giving policymakers, business executives, and individual workers a curated source of information to support better-informed decisions.
The first phase includes three dashboards that will be updated at different frequencies based on their underlying datasets:
- The Canaries Dashboard, developed through a collaboration between ADP Research and the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, uses anonymized ADP payroll data to track labor market outcomes on a monthly basis.
- The Takeoff Tracker examines whether advances in AI capabilities are transforming the economy.
- The Adoption Monitor tracks AI adoption by workers and firms using surveys and international data sources.
The AI Economic Indicators website organizes the project around five core questions: how AI affects employment and wages across occupations and worker groups; whether those effects are reflected in broader productivity and gross domestic product measures; whether AI benefits are captured in traditional economic metrics; how worker skill requirements are changing; and how AI is being used to complement or replace human labor.
Additional dashboards, datasets, and measurement efforts are planned in the coming months, the lab said.
“This is not a one-and-done, static website. It’ll be constantly growing and evolving to meet the challenges of the day,” said Christie Ko, executive director at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. “What we are showing at launch is the tip of the iceberg. Not only will it be of immense value to decision-makers who need better data, but running the project will itself be a vehicle for academics to do cutting-edge research.”
