How Progress Ends
Why technological breakthroughs do not automatically become sustained economic progress—and what institutions must get right.
← Keynote Speakers
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Carl Benedikt Frey
Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI & Work, Oxford Internet Institute · Director, Future of Work Programme
Fee information first. Availability is normally checked once there is a concrete intention to proceed.
WHY CARL
What Carl brings to the room.
An Oxford economist who places today’s AI transformation in the longer history of technology, institutions, innovation and labour-market change.
KEYNOTE TOPICS
Ideas built for the stage.
AI, Work and the Labour Market
A historically grounded view of how automation changes tasks, skills, occupations and the distribution of opportunity.
Innovation, Scale and Institutions
How organisations and economies balance decentralised experimentation with the coordination required to scale what works.
Carl Benedikt Frey is the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI & Work at the Oxford Internet Institute, a Fellow of Mansfield College and Director of the Future of Work Programme at the Oxford Martin School.
His work examines why some technologies generate broad economic progress while others deepen inequality, provoke resistance or fail to translate invention into growth. By combining economic history with current research on artificial intelligence and automation, he gives leadership audiences a longer and more disciplined view of technological change.
Frey is widely known for co-authoring The Future of Employment, a landmark study on the susceptibility of jobs to computerisation. His more recent work shifts the question from what technology can do to the institutional conditions under which innovation can spread, scale and create new opportunity.
His 2025 book How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations challenges the assumption that technological progress is inevitable. He has advised the G20, OECD, European Commission, United Nations and Fortune 500 companies, and contributes to publications including the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs and the Wall Street Journal.
ON STAGE
Watch Carl in action.
Why AI Is About Much More Than Tech
AI for Progress — DLD25
CONSIDERING CARL?
Interested in Carl?
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