James Manyika

Last updated
James Manyika
Tallinn Digital Summit. Fireside chat with James Manyika (36682380574).jpg
Manyika speaking in 2017
Born
Zimbabwe
Nationality Zimbabwean, American
Other namesJames M. Manyika, [1] J Manyika
Alma mater University of Zimbabwe (BSc)
Oxford University (MSc, MA, DPhil)
Occupation(s)Academic, consultant, business executive
Years active1989–present
Employer(s) McKinsey Global Institute
(Chairman Emeritus)
McKinsey & Company
(senior partner emeritus)
Google (Senior Vice President)
Spouse Sarah Ladipo Manyika

James M. Manyika is a Zimbabwean-American academic consultant, and business executive. He is currently a Senior Vice President at Google-Alphabet and a member of the senior leadership team. [2] He is also known for his research and scholarship [3] into the intersection of technology and the economy, including artificial intelligence, [4] robotics automation, and the future of work. [5] He is Google's first Senior Vice President of Technology and Society, reporting directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. He focuses on "shaping and sharing" the company's view on the way tech affects society, the economy, and the planet. [6] [7] In April 2023, his role was expanded to Senior Vice President at Google-Alphabet and President for Research, Labs, Technology & Society and includes overseeing Google Research and Google Labs and focusing more broadly on helping advance Google’s most ambitious innovations in AI, Computing and Science responsibly. [8] He is also Chairman Emeritus of the McKinsey Global Institute. [9]

Contents

Previously, Manyika was director and chairman of the McKinsey Global Institute, [9] [10] where he researched and co-authored a number of reports on topics such as technology, the future of work and workplace automation, and other global economy trends. [11] During the Obama administration, Manyika served as vice-chair of the United States Global Development Council at the White House. [12] He has served on various advisory boards to US Secretaries of Commerce and State and as the vice chair of the National AI Advisory Committee established by Congress to advice the President on AI. [13] [14]

As a board-member, trustee, or advisor, Manyika has been involved with think tanks, national and international commissions, academic institutions, and non-profit and philanthropic foundations [15] including the Council on Foreign Relations, [16] the MacArthur Foundation, [17] the Hewlett Foundation, [18] the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, [19] Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute, [20] the Oxford Internet Institute, [21] and the Aspen Institute. [22] He is a fellow at DeepMind. [23] He is also a visiting professor at Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government.

Early life and education

Born and raised in Zimbabwe, [22] James Manyika attended Prince Edward School [24] and received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering at the University of Zimbabwe. He attended Oxford University [22] as a Rhodes Scholar, [25] earning a Master of Science in mathematics and computer science, a Master of Arts, and a Doctor of Philosophy in AI and Robotics. [9]

Career

Trained as a roboticist, while at Oxford Manyika studied computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, [9] and topics such as Bayesian networks [26] and decentralized data fusion. He and Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte [27] published the book Decentralized Data Fusion: An Information Theoretic Approach in 1994. [4] Early in his career, Manyika was awarded a research fellowship at Oxford's Balliol College and served on the engineering faculty at Oxford. [22] During that time he was also a faculty exchange fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a visiting scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Labs in California. [9]

He joined McKinsey & Company in the United States by 1997, [28] then became senior partner [10] and a member of McKinsey’s board. [29] He was chairman and director of the McKinsey Global Institute for 13 years and published extensively on technology, competitiveness, productivity and the economy. [30] [31] [32]

In 2022, he became Google’s first Senior Vice President of Technology and Society, reporting to CEO Sundar Pichai, where he helps shape Google's views on issues such as AI, the future of work, the digital economy, computing infrastructure and sustainability, focusing on how all of these benefit and affect societies, their economies and the planet as a whole. [33] In April 2023, his role was expanded to Senior Vice President and President for Research, Labs, Technology & Society and now includes overseeing Google Research, which works on fundamental advances in computer science across areas such as AI and ML, algorithms and theory, privacy and security, quantum computing, health, climate and sustainability and responsible AI, as well as Google Labs. [34] Also in 2023, Manyika, Jeff Dean, Demis Hassabis, Marian Croak, and Sundar Pichai published a letter on Google's approach to AI entitled "Why we focus on AI (and to what end)". [35] In 2025, Wired detailed Google's effort to catch-up on the "chatbot revolution" and Manyika's role, along with Hassabis and Dean, in both those efforts and the launch the Gemini program. [36]

As for his roles on government advisory boards, in 2011, he was named to the US National Innovation Advisory Board at the Department of Commerce. [22] [12] During the Obama administration, from December [10] 2012 [22] until 2017, [10] Manyika served as vice-chair of the United States Global Development Council at the White House. [12] In 2017, he resigned from the Commerce Department's Digital Economy Board of Advisors after Donald Trump made controversial comments about deadly violence against counter-protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia. [37] In 2022, Manyika was appointed as the vice-chair of the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee established by Congress to advise the US President and the White House on a "range of issues related to artificial intelligence" and served until the end of this 3 year term in April 2025. [38] Also in 2022, he was appointed by the US Secretary of State to the Foreign Affairs Policy Board and served until December 2024. [39]

Manyika joins the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2012 NSF Joins OSTP in Launching Federal Big Data Effort in Washington, D.C. (7119382009).jpg
Manyika joins the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2012

In October 2023, he was appointed by the UN Secretary General to the UN High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence and to serve as co-chair of the body together with Carme Artigas, the Digital and AI Minister of Spain. [40] The Advisory Body published its final report and recommendations in September 2024 titled “Governing AI for Humanity”. [41]

In August 2019, [42] California Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Manyika and Mary Kay Henry as co-chairs [30] of the state's Future of Work Commission. [42] In March 2021, he and the Future of Work Commission co-authored a report urging California to better address pay inequality and working conditions by 2030. [30] He also co-chaired, with Admiral William H. McRaven, the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on U.S. Innovation Strategy and National Security, which issued their final report, Innovation and National Security: Keeping Our Edge in 2019. [43] In 2019, Manyika became a member of the Trilateral Commission, and in 2020 was a member of its Task Force on Global Capitalism in Transition. [44]

In 2015, he co-wrote the book No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends. [45] [46] Manyika was a guest speaker in September 2017 at an Estonian summit involving European Union heads of state. [47] His decision-making process and predictions about the future of work were described in Ben Sasse's 2018 book Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal. [48] Manyika contributed one chapter to the 2018 book Architects of Intelligence: The truth about AI from the people building it, [49] by Martin Ford. In 2022, Manyika guest-edited a volume of Daedalus , the journal of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, that was devoted to AI & Society. That volume included his essay "Getting AI Right: Introductory Notes on AI & Society", as well as essays by leading AI researchers, technologists, and social scientists. [50] He has co-authored papers with Nobel laureate Michael Spence, including in 2023 in Foreign Affairs “The Coming AI Economic Revolution: Can AI Reverse the Productivity Slowdown.” [51] He contributed to the quantum error correction work, led by Hartmut Neven, which was recognized as the Physics World "2024 Breakthrough of the year." [52] [53]

Manyika and Erik Brynjolfsson at AEA 2025 in San Francisco ASA 2025 - James Manyika w Brynjolfsson 01.jpg
Manyika and Erik Brynjolfsson at AEA 2025 in San Francisco

He was named one of the 100 Most Influential Africans of 2020 by New African magazine. [54] In February 2021, he co-authored a McKinsey report titled The Race in the Workplace: The Black Experience. [5] In December 2022, he was again listed by New African as one of the 100 Most Influential Africans of the year. [55] In 2023, he was listed in the inaugural TIME 100 AI: “The 100 Most Influential People in Artificial Intelligence.” [56]

Boards and academia

In 2023, Manyika was appointed to the board of Airbnb. [57]

Manyika has been involved with a number of think tanks. [15] He is an elected member, on the board of directors, and a member of the executive committee of the Council on Foreign Relations, [58] [59] a trustee of the Aspen Institute, and former trustee of the World Affairs Council of California. [22] [12] He was previously a non-resident Senior Fellow of Brookings Institution. [60]

He is involved with a number of academic institutions. In 2021, he was appointed a visiting professor at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. [61] He is on the advisory boards of Harvard's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, [62] which includes the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard [63] and is on the advisory councils of MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing, [64] University of Oxford's Institute for Ethics in AI, [65] the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University. [20] Concerning digitization, he co-chairs Stanford University’s Digital Economy Lab, [66] and is on the advisory board of the Program on Innovation and Diffusion at the London School of Economics. [67] He was previously on the advisory boards of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) [46] and the Oxford Internet Institute, having joined the latter in September 2011, [21] and the University of Toronto’s Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. [68] He has been a member of the AI Index team at Stanford [69] and was an officer of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, a project at Stanford University where experts discuss the future societal impacts of AI [70] and was on the advisory board of the University of California, Berkeley School of Information. [22] He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Globalization and Development. [71]

Manyika has served on the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine's Committee on Responsible Computing Research and its Application. [72] He is a member of the Science, Engineering and Technology Committee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [73] He has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, [74] a life fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, an inaugural distinguished fellow of Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI, a distinguished fellow in ethics and AI at Oxford, a research fellow of DeepMind [23] and a visiting fellow of All Souls College and a fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. [16]

Foundations and non-profits

Manyika serves on the board of the MacArthur Foundation's Lever For Change project, which connects philanthropists to people and projects to fund solutions to societal challenges. [75] Manyika has previously been a board member of the MacArthur Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, [18] and the Markle Foundation. [76] He has been a trustee [77] of the XPrize Foundation [78] and an unpaid senior advisor at the philanthropic Schmidt Sciences, founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt, where he co-chairs the AI2050 Initiative which supports academic fellows working to realize "the opportunity for society from AI as well as addressing the risks and challenges that could result from the technology." [15] Through the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, he established the J.M.D. Manyika Fellowship, named after his father, to support scholars and artists from countries in Southern Africa. [79] He was previously on the board of the Khan Academy, which offers free education online, and remains on its Global Advisory Council. [80]

Publications

Books

Personal life

Manyika is married to the writer Sarah Ladipo Manyika. [24]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Favole, Jared A. (December 25, 2012). "Obama to Tap Pimco Chief to Lead Development Council". The Wall Street Journal .
  2. ↑ James Manyika - Blavatnik School of Government Blavatnik School of Government http://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk  › people › james-manyika
  3. ↑ "James Manyika". Google Scholar. Retrieved 25 March 2022.
  4. 1 2 3 J. Manyika, H Durrant-Whyte (1 December 1994). Data Fusion and Sensor Management: An Information-Theoretic Approach. Prentice Hall. ISBN   978-0133031324.
  5. 1 2 Jones, Ayana. "Report examines challenges of Black professionals in corporate America". The Philadelphia Tribune. Retrieved 13 April 2021.
  6. ↑ Fingas, Jon (January 24, 2022). "Google's new senior VP will explore technology's impact on society". Engadget. Retrieved 19 March 2022.
  7. ↑ Birch, Kate (2 February 2022). "Meet Google's first head of tech and society, James Manyika". Business Chief. Retrieved 19 March 2022.
  8. ↑ De Vynck, Gerrit (August 9, 2023). "Google's AI ambassador walks a fine line between hype and doom". The Washington Post. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 "James Manyika | McKinsey & Company". www.mckinsey.com. Retrieved 10 March 2021.
  10. 1 2 3 4 "Obama Picks El-Erian to Head Global Development Council". CNBC. 26 December 2012. Retrieved 19 March 2022.
  11. ↑ Abramsky, Sasha (9 March 2021). "Meet Julie Su, California's Fighter for Workers". The Nation .
  12. 1 2 3 4 "James Manyika (Vice-Chair)". The White House. Retrieved 10 March 2021.
  13. ↑ "Foreign Affairs Policy Board". State.gov. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  14. ↑ "National AI Advisory Committee". AI.gov. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  15. 1 2 3 "James Manyika". Schmidt Futures.
  16. 1 2 "Council on Foreign Relations James Manyika Bio". Council on Foreign Relations. Retrieved 16 June 2022.
  17. ↑ "James Manyika Joins MacArthur Board". MacArthur Foundation. Retrieved 16 June 2022.
  18. 1 2 "James Manyika". Hewlett Foundation.
  19. ↑ "Board of Directors". Broad Institute. 10 June 2016. Retrieved 6 May 2025.
  20. 1 2 "James Manyika". Stanford HAI. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
  21. 1 2 "OII | Dr James Manyika". www.oii.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
  22. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Zimbabwean gets top Obama job". Newsday / Jewish Times. 24 December 2012.
  23. 1 2 "Ethics & Society Team". Deepmind. 4 January 2024.
  24. 1 2 Manyika, James (2001). "RE-ENCOUNTERS Rhodes, Rhodesia, Schools and Scholarships" . Interventions. 3 (2): 266–295. doi:10.1080/13698010120059654. S2CID   143534129.
  25. ↑ "Outstanding Zimbabwean Awarded Rhodes Scholarship". U.S. Embassy in Zimbabwe . 14 December 2014.
  26. ↑ "Data Fusion and Sensor Management: A Decentralized Information-Theoretic Approach (Ellis Horwood Series in Electrical and Electronic Engineering)". ISBNS.net.
  27. ↑ Rao, B.S.Y.; Manyika, J.M.; Durrant-Whyte, H.F. (1991). "Decentralized algorithms and architecture for tracking and identification". Proceedings IROS '91:IEEE/RSJ International Workshop on Intelligent Robots and Systems '91. pp. 1095–1100. doi:10.1109/IROS.1991.174639. ISBN   0-7803-0067-X. S2CID   34665826.
  28. ↑ Butler, Patrick; Ted W. Hall, Alistair M. Hanna, Lenny Mendonca, Byron Auguste, James Manyika, and Anupam Sahay (1 October 2001). "A revolution in interaction". McKinsey & Company .{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  29. ↑ "James Manyika | McKinsey & Company".
  30. 1 2 3 Ronayne, Kathleen (2 March 2021). "Report affirms job losses of low-income California workers". AP News .
  31. ↑ Luna, Taryn; John Myers (21 December 2020). "Gov. Gavin Newsom's chief of staff leaves as new top advisor joins his team". The Los Angeles Times .
  32. ↑ "McKinsey partner James Manyika joins Google as head of tech and society". Consulting.us. 7 February 2022. Retrieved 16 June 2022.
  33. ↑ Roach, Sarah (24 January 2022). "Google hires first head of Tech and Society". Protocol. Retrieved 16 June 2022.
  34. ↑ Pichai, Sundar (20 April 2023). "Google DeepMind: Bringing together two world-class AI teams". blog.google. Google. Retrieved 7 June 2023.
  35. ↑ "Why we focus on AI (and to what end)". AI.Google. Retrieved 6 May 2025.
  36. ↑ Dave, Paresh. "Inside Google's Two-Year Frenzy to Catch Up With OpenAI". Wired. ISSN   1059-1028 . Retrieved 2025-05-13.
  37. ↑ Scola, Nancy (18 August 2017). "Wave of resignations hits Commerce Department's board of 'digital economy' advisers". Politico .
  38. ↑ "U.S. Department of Commerce Appoints 27 Members to National AI Advisory Committee". Department of Commerce. 14 April 2022. Retrieved 16 June 2022.
  39. ↑ Cooper, Naomi (20 June 2022). "State Secretary Antony Blinken Announces Members of Foreign Affairs Policy Board". ExecutiveGov. Retrieved 22 August 2022.
  40. ↑ "High-level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence". UN.org. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  41. ↑ Mukherjee, Supantha (September 19, 2024). "UN advisory body makes seven recommendations for governing AI". Reuters. Retrieved 6 May 2025.
  42. 1 2 Roosevelt, Margot (2 March 2021). "Californians need higher wages and better jobs, Newsom commission says". The Los Angeles Times .
  43. ↑ "Innovation and National Security: Keeping Our Edge". Council on Foreign Relations. Retrieved 19 March 2022.
  44. ↑ "Task Force on Global Capitalism in Transition". Trilateral Commission. Retrieved 22 August 2022.
  45. 1 2 No Ordinary Disruption. PublicAffairs. 2 June 2015. ISBN   9781610397629.
  46. 1 2 3 "James Manyika". MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
  47. ↑ Teffer, Peter (29 September 2017). "Estonia sees digital summit as success in itself". EUobserver .
  48. ↑ Sasse, Benjamin E. (2019). Them: why we hate each other--and how to heal (First St. Martin's Griffin ed.). New York, NY. p. 55. ISBN   978-1250195029 . Retrieved 13 April 2021.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  49. ↑ Ford, Martin (November 2018). Architects of Intelligence. Packt. ISBN   9781789954531 . Retrieved 16 June 2022.
  50. ↑ "AI & Society". Daedalus. Spring 2022. Retrieved 16 June 2022.
  51. ↑ Manyika, James; Spence, Michael (October 24, 2023). "The Coming AI Economic Revolution". No. Nov/Dec 2023. Foreign Affairs. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  52. ↑ Johnston, Hamish (2024-12-19). "Two advances in quantum error correction share the Physics World 2024 Breakthrough of the Year". Physics World. Retrieved 2025-05-13.
  53. ↑ Acharya, Rajeev; Abanin, Dmitry A.; Aghababaie-Beni, Laleh; Aleiner, Igor; Andersen, Trond I.; Ansmann, Markus; Arute, Frank; Arya, Kunal; Asfaw, Abraham; Astrakhantsev, Nikita; Atalaya, Juan; Babbush, Ryan; Bacon, Dave; Ballard, Brian; Bardin, Joseph C. (2025-12-09). "Quantum error correction below the surface code threshold". Nature. 638 (8052): 920–926. arXiv: 2408.13687 . Bibcode:2025Natur.638..920G. doi:10.1038/s41586-024-08449-y. ISSN   1476-4687. PMC   11864966 . PMID   39653125.
  54. ↑ "100 Most Influential Africans". New African . London, England. 2020.
  55. ↑ "James Manyika – Giving Google's AI a human face", New African, December 2022/January 2023, p. 42.
  56. ↑ "TIME 100 AI". Time . Time. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  57. ↑ "James Manyika to join Airbnb's Board of Directors". Airbnb Investor. Airbnb. 11 September 2023. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  58. ↑ "Council on Foreign Relations Board of Directors". Council on Foreign Relations. Retrieved 9 September 2022.
  59. ↑ "Board of Directors | Council on Foreign Relations". www.cfr.org. Retrieved 2025-05-13.
  60. ↑ "Global Development Council". White House Archives. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  61. ↑ "VISITING SCHOLARS AND PRACTITIONERS". Blavatnik School of Government. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  62. ↑ "Hutchins Center for African and African American Research". Hutchens Center. Retrieved 16 June 2022.
  63. ↑ "Broad Institute". Broad Institute. 27 March 2019. Retrieved 16 June 2022.
  64. ↑ "External Advisory Council". MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  65. ↑ "Members of the Advisory Council | Ethics in AI". www.oxford-aiethics.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 2025-05-06.
  66. ↑ "PEOPLE Meet the curious minds behind the Digital Economy Lab". Stanford Digital Economy Lab. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  67. ↑ "Advisory Committee". Program on Innovation and Diffusion at the London School of Economics. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  68. ↑ "SRI Advisory Board". University of Toronto. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  69. ↑ "Meet our team who are leading the way". Stanford AI Index. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
  70. ↑ "History | One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100)". ai100.stanford.edu. Archived from the original on 14 June 2021. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
  71. ↑ "Journal of Globalization and Development". De Gruyter. Retrieved 6 October 2022.
  72. ↑ "Committee on Responsible Computing Research: Ethics and Governance of Computing Research and its Applications". The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Retrieved 19 March 2022.
  73. ↑ "Science, Engineering, and Technology". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 20 December 2023.
  74. ↑ "US-based Zimbabwean, James Manyika, Elected Into Prestigious American Institute". Pindula. Zimbabwe. 20 April 2019.
  75. ↑ "James Manyika". Lever For Change Website.
  76. ↑ "Dr. James Manyika". Markle | Advancing America's Future. 15 May 2013.
  77. ↑ "Board Members".
  78. ↑ "XPRIZE Foundation Bio - Dr. James Manyika". XPRIZE.
  79. ↑ "J. M. D. Manyika Fellowship". hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
  80. ↑ "About Our Leadership Team". Khan Academy. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.