Videos
How Academic Research Can Help Businesses Turn AI into Value with Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson
Insights
- The future of enterprise AI lies in enhancing quality and innovation—not just reducing costs.
- To unlock true business value, leaders must prioritize customer experience and employee impact alongside technical performance.
- Sustainable competitive advantage will come from identifying and scaling intangible AI benefits like satisfaction, service, and new offerings.
How can businesses turn AI’s technical breakthroughs into real economic value?
Recorded at The Business and Economics of AI workshop co-hosted by Stanford University and Infosys on May 14, 2025, this thought-provoking interview features Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.
Erik explores how the focus of enterprise AI must shift from beating benchmarks to delivering real-world business outcomes—enhancing customer experience, driving productivity, and creating new value through AI-powered innovation.
Key takeaways include:
- Why the next wave of AI advantage will come from quality, not just cost savings
- How to uncover intangible business value like customer satisfaction and product innovation
- What leaders need to rethink in their AI strategies to achieve sustainable competitive advantage
A must-watch for business and technology leaders seeking to align AI capabilities with customer needs, employee value, and long-term impact.
Erik Brynjolfsson:
I'm Erik Brynjolfsson. I'm a professor here at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.
What can businesses learn from academic research on the economics of AI?
We've all been blown away by the amazing progress on the technical benchmarks. AI is beating the math Olympiad and lots of other benchmarks. However, what's really needed, especially in 2025 and beyond, is converting those capabilities into real business value. And what I'm excited about is understanding the customer needs, understanding the employee value so that we can take AI capabilities and turn them into productivity, customer service, and better quality.
What are you most curious about in the AI space?
I'm most curious about understanding where the real business value comes from. Everybody sees the opportunities for cost savings, but I'm seeing opportunities also for increasing quality, customer service, greater customer satisfaction, even new products and services. If we can understand some of those intangible benefits, I think we're going to create much more sustainable advantage.
