About the Talk:

As part of the Forum’s Future of Work series, Dr. Ronnie Chatterji, (Chief Economist at OpenAI), welcomes David J. Deming, (Danoff Dean of Harvard College and Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School), for a conversation on how AI is reshaping skills, education, and jobs.

They will share new findings about how ChatGPT is being used to solve real-world problems—and what those patterns reveal about the future of work.

About the Speakers:

David J. Deming, Dean @ Harvard College

David J. Deming is the Danoff Dean of Harvard College, the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a Professor in the Harvard Economics Department. He also served as Academic Dean of HKS from 2021 to 2024.

His research focuses on higher education, economic inequality, skills, technology, and the future of the labor market. He serves as a Principal Investigator—alongside Raj Chetty and John Friedman—at the CLIMB Initiative, an organization devoted to studying and improving the role of higher education in social mobility. He is also one of the faculty leads of the Project on Workforce, a cross-Harvard initiative spanning HKS, HBS, and HGSE that concentrates on the future of work.

Together with Ben Weidmann, he recently co-founded the Skills Lab, which develops performance-based measures of “soft” skills such as teamwork and decision-making.

In 2018, he received the David N. Kershaw Prize for distinguished contributions to public policy and management granted to individuals under the age of 40. In 2022, he was awarded the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to Labor Economics.

His writing appears semi-regularly in The New York Times and, more recently, The Atlantic. He also maintains his newsletter at Forked Lightning.

Ronnie Chatterji, Chief Economist @ OpenAI

Aaron “Ronnie” Chatterji, Ph.D., is OpenAI’s first Chief Economist. He is also the Mark Burgess & Lisa Benson-Burgess Distinguished Professor at Duke University, working at the intersection of academia, policy, and business. He served in the Biden Administration as White House CHIPS coordinator and Acting Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, shaping industrial policy, manufacturing, and supply chains. Before that, he was Chief Economist at the Department of Commerce and a Senior Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He is on leave as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and previously taught at Harvard Business School. Earlier in his career, he worked at Goldman Sachs and was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Chatterji holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in Economics from Cornell University.