Ajay Agrawal

A renowned academic for more than 20 years, Professor Ajay Agrawal is the Geoffrey Taber Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, where he has served since 2003.

He joined the board of directors in 2019.

Professor Agrawal in 2012 founded and currently serves as academic director of the Creative Destruction Lab, where he oversees operations across multiple sites in Canada, Europe, and the United States that help incubate start-ups employing artificial intelligence and other technologies to address real-world problems.

Professor Agrawal serves as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass. He is co-author of the best-selling book “Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence,” which seeks to explain the role of artificial intelligence in business and government.

Professor Agrawal serves as advisor to the U.S. government as a member of a National Academies committee on Science and Innovation Leadership for the 21st Century. He also serves as advisor to the government of Japan as a member of the International Advisory Committee for the National Institute for Information and Communications Technology, Japan’s sole research and development agency specializing in information and communications technology.

Professor Agrawal co-founded Kindred, a company that makes artificial intelligence for robots. Kindred was 29th on MIT Technology Review’s 2017 list of the 50 smartest companies in the world. He also is a co-founder of Sanctuary AI.

Professor Agrawal holds a PhD in strategy and business economics, a master’s degree in business administration, and a bachelor’s degree in Applied Science, all from the University of British Columbia.