Keystone, the leading strategy, economics and technology consultancy providing AI-driven services to large companies, government agencies and law firms, announced the appointment of Dr. Susan Athey as Chief Scientific Advisor. Drawing from an illustrious and multidimensional career in academia, Big Tech and government, Athey will contribute economic and econometric counsel to the firm’s CoreAI division, which offers operational and commercial AI services, algorithms and systems to large enterprises, and advise its Global Economic and Technology Advisory (ETA) group, which provides economic analysis and expert testimony in legal disputes and regulatory matters. Her appointment marks the fourth senior executive hire to the CoreAI team in the past 12 months and underscores the firm’s continued expansion of its team of world-class data scientists, economists and engineers.
“Dr. Athey is one of the most widely respected economists in the United States, and her skills and leadership are unique in that they have always been multidisciplinary. For over 20 years, she’s been the leading voice on the value of combining technical expertise with rigorous economic analysis and business insight – a philosophy we share, as our firm was designed around these practices from the start,” said Jeff Marowits, President of Client Services at Keystone. “We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Athey back to the firm in this new role and look forward to continuing our work together to solve the most complex operational and regulatory AI challenges facing organizations today.”
As Chief Scientific Advisor, Dr. Athey will provide strategic guidance on CoreAI’s solutions. She joins a distinguished team that includes Patrick Bajari, CoreAI’s Chief Economist and former Chief Economist of Amazon, and Devesh Mishra, President of CoreAI and former Vice President of Global Supply Chain at Amazon. CoreAI offers a powerful combination of pre-trained foundation models, customized algorithms and personalized services.
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“CoreAI works with clients to build, operate and transfer customized AI/ML solutions solving specific operational challenges and automating deep decision-making for functions including supply chain optimization, forecasting, attribution and more,” said Mishra. “Susan’s expertise in AI/ML, economics and business will be invaluable in delivering transformative solutions to our clients.”
Reflecting on her decision to rejoin the firm, Dr. Athey said, “Keystone is the only consultancy with the distinct combination of expertise in economics, technology and strategy that mirrors my own training and work. I’ve been a longtime admirer of the firm Marco Iansiti and Greg Richards founded and am pleased to return as an advisor to help companies navigate this next wave of machine learning and show academics that they can play an important role in solving these new causal problems we’re facing.”
Dr. Athey has had a stellar academic career over the last three decades. She is currently the Economics of Technology Professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, where she was a founding associate director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and currently serves as the founding faculty director of the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford GSB. She previously served on the faculty of the economics departments at Harvard, MIT and Stanford. Dr. Athey is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and is the recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded by the American Economic Association to the economist under 40 who has made the greatest contributions to economic thought and knowledge. She was also the 2023 President of the American Economic Association.
Outside of her academic career, Dr. Athey is celebrated as one of the first “tech economists.” She served as the Chief Economist of Microsoft for six years, where she worked on operation and strategy for the Bing search engine as well as the strategy that took the company into cloud computing with the launch of its Azure platform. She also helped create and grow a team of researchers working at the intersection of social science and machine learning. Subsequently, she served on the boards of directors of multiple technology firms, including Expedia, Lending Club, Rover, Turo and Ripple.
Most recently, she served as Chief Economist of the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice, completing her two-year term as of June 30, 2024. Dr. Athey played a leading role in drafting the 2023 Merger Guidelines which addressed new topics such as platform competition, and led the DOJ to build a new internal team of data scientists and technologists.
“Dr. Athey is the premier thought leader in AI- and ML-enabled econometric modeling, and few, if any, other experts have the unique combination of government and business experience she has,” said Jennifer Redmond, Keystone Partner and co-head of the firm’s Antitrust & Competition practice. “The emergence of ChatGPT has unleashed a series of regulatory questions and concerns from both regulators and business leaders amid increasing competition enforcement. Dr. Athey will be an important thought partner on critical regulatory and legal matters for our clients and will strengthen our capacity to deliver unrivaled econometric techniques to improve businesses’ operating models.”
SOURCE: PRNewsWire