Carl Benedikt Frey Keynote Speaker

Carl Benedikt Frey is the Dieter Schwartz Associate Professor of AI & Work at the Oxford Internet Institute.  He is Director of the Future of Work Programme and Oxford Martin Citi Fellow at the Oxford Martin School. He is also a Fellow of Mansfield College, University of Oxford.  Carl is regarded as a global thought leader and keynote speaker on the future of work and how technology is altering the workforce and our economies.

His book ‘How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations‘  was published in September 2025 by Princeton University Press.  It is on shortlist for the prestigious  FT / Schroders Business Book of the Year 2025.  In this important new book, he analyses the delicate balance between innovation and bureaucracy over time and why so many efforts fail – he also outlines the key lessons for nations, including the US, China and Europe.

In his prior book, “The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation”, Carl examines the interplay of technological revolutions and the social and political shifts that accompany them. Taking the long-term view, he sees big innovations accompanied by periods of often severe disruption and pain for many, but eventually a more prosperous, equal society emerges. From the industrial revolution to digital and AI, he considers how political, financial and social capital are changed by the spread of technologies. ‘The Technology Trap’ was selected as a Financial Times Best Book of the Year 2019. The book also won Princeton University’s prestigious Richard A. Lester Prize.  In the New York Times Book Review, David Byrne said it “the last great book I’ve read.”

In 2013, Carl co-authored “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization”, estimating that 47% of jobs are at risk of automation. With over 12,000 citations, the study’s methodology has been used by President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, the Bank of England, the World Bank, as well as the popular automation risk-prediction tool of the BBC. In 2019, the paper also featured on the Last Week Tonight Show with John Oliver.

Frey has served as an advisor and consultant to international organisations, think tanks, government, and business, including the G20, the OECD, the European Commission, the United Nations, and several Fortune 500 companies. He is also an op-ed contributor to the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, and the Wall Street Journal, where he has written on the economics of artificial intelligence, the history of technology, the future of cities, and remote work.

In 2012, Carl became an Economics Associate of Nuffield College and Senior Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, both University of Oxford. He remains a Senior Fellow of the Department of Economic History at Lund University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). In 2019, he joined the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on the New Economic Agenda, as well as the Bretton Woods Committee. And in 2020, he became a member of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) – a multistakeholder initiative to guide the responsible development and use of AI, hosted by the OECD.

His academic work has featured in over 100 media outlets, including The Economist, New York Times, Time Magazine, the New Yorker, Le Monde, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In addition, he has frequently appeared international broadcast media such as CNN, BBC, PBS News Hour, Al Jazeera, and Sky News

Carl completed his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in 2011.