Stanford Digital Economy Lab Launches the AI Economic Indicators, Tracking AI's Impact on the Economy

The platform's first set of indicators is live at indicators.stanford.edu, offering frequently updated data on AI's effects on labor markets, economic growth, and technology adoption

STANFORD, Calif., June 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The Stanford Digital Economy Lab, part of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), today announced the launch of the AI Economic Indicators, a freely accessible platform to track how artificial intelligence is reshaping work, productivity, and value creation in the economy.

The AI Economic Indicators presents regularly updated data, interactive dashboards, and research-based methods in one place, giving policymakers, researchers, employers, and workers tools and information to help them make sense of a powerful new technology.

"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 (DEL). "We need timely, trusted evidence to understand where AI is creating value and where it is disrupting work."

Closing the gap

Traditional economic statistics weren't built for a technology that can fundamentally change work down to the task level or deliver value to consumers in ways that conventional price measures can't capture. That can lead to real shifts, positive or negative, being missed or recognized well after they occur.

The Indicators is meant to close that gap as an accessible source of curated information meant to empower policymakers, business executives, and individual workers to make better-informed decisions.

Phase one

The AI Economic Indicators launches with three dashboards, regularly updated at their own frequencies based on their distinct datasets.

The Canaries Dashboard. A collaboration between ADP Research and the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, this dashboard draws on DEL's access to anonymized ADP payroll data to track labor market outcomes on a monthly basis. It builds on the study Canaries in the Coal Mine: Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence (Brynjolfsson, Chandar, and Chen, 2025), focusing on AI-exposed occupations and industries as potential early signals for broader employment and wage trends.

"This data set is a breakthrough for the AI economy, giving economists, business leaders, and policymakers something they have long needed: a near real-time view of how AI is reshaping work," ADP chief economist Dr. Nela Richardson said. "By analyzing the millions of jobs represented by ADP payroll data, we can track wages, hiring patterns, career mobility, and more to see how technological change is affecting the labor market."

The Takeoff Tracker. Are advances in AI capabilities transforming the economy? This dashboard tracks a set of metrics of "AI takeoff" in the spirit of Nobel laureate William D. Nordhaus's research on the economic singularity. Productivity, capital stock, infrastructure and other inputs are translated into signals categorized by their strength of evidence of an AI-powered economic takeoff.

The Adoption Monitor. This dashboard tracks AI adoption by workers and firms using surveys and international data sources. Monitoring adoption helps show where AI is spreading and can indicate where economic effects may appear next.

Additional dashboards, datasets, and measurement efforts are planned in the coming months.

"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 DEL. "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."

About the Stanford Digital Economy Lab

The Stanford Digital Economy Lab is an interdisciplinary research group that studies how digital technologies are transforming work, organizations, and the economy. The Lab's insights help companies, policymakers, students, and professionals respond to the complexities and promise of technological change. The Lab is part of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) and is co-sponsored by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).

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SOURCE Stanford Digital Economy Lab