James Manyika is senior vice president for research, technology & society at Google, where he focuses on advancing Google’s most ambitious innovations in artificial intelligence (AI), computing, and science, and on areas with potential to benefit society. He is also responsible for leading and overseeing Google Research and Google Labs. 

Previously, Manyika spent more than twenty-five years at McKinsey & Company, including serving on its board, and is now senior partner emeritus and chair emeritus of the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), which he helmed for thirteen years and where he led research on technology and the economy. Based in Silicon Valley, he has worked with the chief executives of many leading technology companies.

Manyika was appointed vice chair of the Barack Obama administration’s Global Development Council and served on the Commerce Department’s Digital Economy Board and the National Innovation Board. He serves as vice chair of the U.S. National AI Advisory Committee established by Congress to advise the president on AI; as co-chair of the UN secretary-general’s AI Advisory Body; and on the U.S. Secretary of state’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board. Manyika has served on task forces related to technology and the economy and co-chaired the CFR Task Force on U.S. Innovation and National Security and the California Future of Work Commission.

He is a visiting professor at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and a member of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s committee on responsible computing. Manyika serves on the board of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and on the advisory board of research institutes at Harvard, Oxford, MIT, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Toronto, and Stanford University, where he has also served on the steering committee of the hundred-year study of AI. 

Manyika has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a life fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a distinguished fellow of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, a distinguished fellow in ethics and AI at Oxford, a fellow of DeepMind, and a visiting fellow of All Souls College and Balliol College, Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar, Manyika received his BSc in electrical engineering from the University of Zimbabwe and his MA, MSc, and DPhil from Oxford in AI and robotics, mathematics, and computer science, respectively.