At OpenAI, understanding AI’s impact on jobs is a job in itself.
Employees on the company’s economic research team are tasked with studying how the technology is affecting workers, businesses, institutions, and the broader economy.
The ChatGPT maker’s chief economist, Ronnie Chatterji, says thriving in these roles takes a particular mix of skills and mindsets because AI’s rapid evolution can quickly send the work in new directions.
For example, recursive self-improvement — the ability for AI systems to improve themselves — wasn’t on Chatterji’s radar a year ago but is now a topic his team is studying.
“The job description is changing a lot,” he told Business Insider.
From the White House to OpenAI
Chatterji came to OpenAI in 2024 after stints at the highest levels of economic policymaking. He served in the Biden White House as coordinator of the $52 billion CHIPS program and as acting deputy director of the National Economic Council. Before that, he was chief economist at the Commerce Department. He has also spent much of his career at Duke University, where he is a professor of business and public policy.
OpenAI wasn’t on Chatterji’s radar. He was planning to write a book about his experience in government when a former colleague who had moved to the company reached out. They initially discussed supply chains and semiconductors — subjects Chatterji had studied and that mattered to OpenAI as it thought about the computing infrastructure needed to train and run its models. Eventually, the conversations broadened into how the company should think about the economics of AI.
“This is a whole emerging category, and that’s when the chief economist role got created,” said Chatterji, who reports to OpenAI’s finance chief, Sarah Friar.
Three big questions
Chatterji, 48, now leads a research team of about a dozen people, including economists, data scientists, business professionals, and former teachers and government workers. He said he’s looking to hire more people, though he declined to specify how many.
“We built the team around three sets of questions: How AI is changing work today; how businesses are adopting and reorganizing around AI; and what increasingly capable AI could mean for the economy tomorrow,” said Chatterji.
The challenge, he added, is that those questions are changing almost as quickly as AI evolves, which is why thriving on his team requires flexibility.
“We need people who can bring rigorous economic thinking to what’s happening today, but who are also comfortable tackling questions where we don’t have all the answers yet,” Chatterji said. “You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.”
He pointed to his own background as an example. His academic research centered on innovation and entrepreneurship, but at OpenAI, his work spans a much broader set of issues, from labor markets to enterprise adoption.
Collaboration, speed, and self-direction
To work on Chatterji’s team, a willingness to collaborate with others is also imperative.
“We get a lot of questions from our colleagues about economics,” said Chatterji, adding that his team also works closely with third parties such as governments and universities. In a recent blog post explaining this approach, the team said no single entity has the tools or resources to answer these economic questions alone.
Speed matters, too, with Chatterji describing the pace of innovation at OpenAI as “a little insane.” He pointed to a study whose dataset ended in June that some people were already dismissing as dated by August.
The work also requires a degree of self-direction. Chatterji said team members need to help determine which problems are worth solving and for whom their work is intended, rather than simply following a fixed mandate.
Despite the challenges, Chatterji said he’s discovered an upside to studying AI’s impact on work.
“If you’re an economist at a cocktail party or on the sidelines of your kid’s soccer game, usually you’re not very popular,” said Chatterji. Now, he said, people want to know: “What’s AI going to do in the job market?”
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