Carl Benedikt Frey is the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI and Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and a Fellow of Mansfield College, University of Oxford. He is also director of the Future of Work Programme and Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at the Oxford Martin School. His research connects the economics of AI with the history and political economy of technological change.
Frey studied economics, history and management at Lund University and completed his doctorate at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in 2011. He subsequently joined Oxford, where he established the Future of Work programme. His academic work examines innovation, employment, cities and the institutions influencing economic development.
He co-authored the 2013 study The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation, which helped shape debate about automation. That work concerns susceptibility to technical change, not a timetable predicting when particular people will lose their jobs. The distinction remains important when its findings are used in public or organisational discussion.
His book The Technology Trap examines how technological revolutions redistribute economic and political power, including the difference between long-term prosperity and the immediate experience of workers. His 2025 book, How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations, asks why innovation does not guarantee sustained progress. It extends his historical lens into the conditions under which societies adapt, stagnate or lose momentum.
For executive audiences, Frey is relevant when a technology agenda needs a more serious account of transition and opportunity. A useful brief might concern the workforce implications of AI, the conditions supporting innovation or why resistance develops around a promising technology. His perspective invites leaders to examine institutions, incentives and human consequences, rather than assuming that technical possibility alone establishes a desirable or inevitable economic future.
