Big Tech hires more economists to study AI impacts and faces bias questions

In short: Tech companies are hiring more economists to measure how AI is changing work and society, and critics are asking how independent that research can be.

What's going on

Economists, the people trained to study jobs, wages, and how markets change, are becoming more common inside big tech companies. A recent episode of the Financial Times podcast The Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes focused on why this is happening.

The podcast featured Ara Kharazian, chief economist at Ramp, and Peter McCrory, chief economist at Anthropic. They discussed how companies want clearer answers about what AI is doing in the real world, especially to office work and hiring. One reason companies value in-house economists is access to proprietary data, which means private information a company collects through its own products (like having a view from inside the building, not just looking through the window).

The episode also raised a tougher question. If the same companies building AI tools also pay for research on AI’s effects, can the results be trusted? This is a potential conflict of interest, which is when someone’s job or funding could sway their conclusions, even without anyone meaning to.

What to watch

Expect more debate about how AI impact studies are funded and checked. Watch for companies sharing more data with outside researchers, and for clearer rules on disclosure, which is simply stating who paid for the work and what access they had. The more AI shapes everyday work, the more people will ask for research that is independent, repeatable, and easy to verify.

Source: Financial Times