Ajay Agrawal Headshot

Ajay Agrawal

Faculty Affiliate

Professor, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

Ajay Agrawal is an Economist and Professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Ajay conducts research on the economics of innovation and serves on the editorial board of the scholarly journal Management Science. He is co-author of two best-selling books on the economics of artificial intelligence: “Prediction Machines” and “Power & Prediction,” both published by Harvard Business Review Press. 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 $29B in equity value to date. Ajay is also a co-founder of NEXT Canada. In addition to his role as a Faculty Affiliate of the Vector Institute of Artificial Intelligence, 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; and an Advisory Board Member at Carnegie Mellon University’s Block Center for Technology and Society in Pittsburgh. He is a co-founder of Sanctuary that has 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.

Research Interests

  • Robotics
  • Reinforcement learning
  • Economics of AI

Highlights

  • President’s Impact Award, University of Toronto (2023)
  • Order of Canada (2022)
  • Honorary Doctorate, University of Calgary (2022)
  • Outstanding Research Impact Award, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto (2021)
  • Distinguished Scholarly Contribution Award, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto (2017)