Dr. Joe Davis, Global Chief Economist at Vanguard, argues that AI is poised to be more transformative than the personal computer and the internet — a minority view among economists, most of whom project continued low productivity growth. Drawing on Vanguard's proprietary research modeling technological change across every job occupation, Davis contends that the decades-long productivity stagnation since the 2007 global financial crisis can be reversed, and that AI will drive the greatest shift in how we work in roughly 50 years.

In this talk, you'll learn how economists measure productivity and why it matters for wages and living standards, how AI functions as both a complement and substitute across different occupations, why the "lump of labor fallacy" leads organizations to make poor decisions when automating, and what the knock-on effects of general purpose technologies like AI could mean for industries beyond tech.