Today, the Stanford @DigEconLab launches the AI Economic Indicators, a new platform for tracking how AI is reshaping work, productivity, adoption, and the economy.

1/6

We need more real time data on how AI may be impacting the economy - this is a really useful addition.

Each month, we will update it with new data, and periodically, we'll add new metrics and dashboards.

Check out the website: https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/project/indicators/

And let me know what you think!

6/6

👁️

Three key components:

1. The Canaries Dashboard (jointly with ADP Research) — labor market outcomes across occupations and worker groups with different levels of AI exposure.

This is the same data that we used for our "Canaries in the Coal Mine?" paper, updated monthly.

2/6

2. The Takeoff Tracker — macroeconomic indicators to give us an early warning of when and where better AI capabilities lead to an economic take-off.

3/6

The site (https://indicators.stanford.edu/) has three components at launch: (1) the Canaries Dashboard, (2) the Takeoff Tracker, and (3) the Adoption Monitor. Each will be updated regularly---(1) and (2) monthly.

3. The Adoption Monitor — AI adoption by consumers, workers and firms across multiple datasets.

4/6

We still have limited understanding of how AI will affect jobs in the real world. This sort of economic observatory with ongoing indicators is something we've needed to turn the conversation from speculation to analysis. Hats off @DigEconLab , @erikbryn

It's been a thrill to turn this idea into a public resource with colleagues across the Lab. Special thanks to @connacher_ , who leads the project, along with @therealcko, Susan Young, and Matty Smith — and to the many researchers behind it, including @NelaRichardson, @BharatKChandar, @RuyuChen, @Andrew Wang, @pawtrammell, and @I_Am_NickBloom.

5/6

(3) summarizes adoption survey work from many great researchers — all credit to them! Includes @I_Am_NickBloom, @iyotzov, @ProfDavidDeming, @Jon_Hartley_, @FilipJole, @BrendanDMoore, and many researchers I couldn't find on Twitter.

First, individuals.

In (2), @pawtrammell, along with @erikbryn and me, updates and extends Nordhaus (2021), "Are We Approaching an Economic Singularity?" His answer: "no." Our answer: "still no." But we will be updating the results monthly. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170105

May data coming soon!

We're also now integrating the job transitions framework data from @Alex_M_Richmond, @RonnieChatterji, and co.

The original paper details robustness checks.

I plan to write more on how Canaries fits into the portfolio of AI x labor market measurement

We have plans to expand each of these three products, including new cuts of Canaries (e.g., by gender) as well as next-generation exposure measures, new indicators of takeoff (e.g., unmeasured consumer surplus in GDP), and frontier model usage data.

@BasilHalperin I've interest-rate pilled (now realizing I should've credited you, Chow, and Mazlish in the tweet below)

And we hope to add more pages on changing skill demands, inference market structure, and model capabilities. Lastly, we look forward to expanding our geographic scope beyond the U.S.

Please get in touch with questions, comments, or ideas for extensions!

@connacher_ @DigEconLab @erikbryn been hoping for something just like this forever

If you're more interested in recent trends, we also summarize year-over-year changes on the site. With our monthly updates, we'll be able to track these results through changing economic conditions unrelated to AI.

(1) Extends the "Canaries in the Coal Mine" work of @erikbryn, @BharatKChandar, @RuyuChen, made possible by a collaboration with @AdpResearch. With updated data through April 2026, we largely match the findings of the original paper...

Early-career (22-25) employment correlates w/ Eloundou et al. exposure. As we move up in age, this pattern becomes less stark, then disappears. The 22-25 group is ~7% of our sample, so this divergence isn't enough to generate large-scale differences across workers of all ages.