James Manyika is a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, chairman and director of McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) and a member of McKinsey’s board. Based in Silicon Valley for over 20 years, James has worked with the chief executives and founders of many of the world’s leading tech companies on a variety of issues including strategy and innovation. James has led research on technology, the digital economy, productivity and competitiveness. Earlier in his career, James published a book on AI and robotics, more recently on global economic trends as well as numerous articles and reports.

James was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve as vice chair of the Global Development Council at the White House, and by US Commerce Secretaries to the Commerce Department’s Digital Economy Board and the National Innovation Board. He serves on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Hewlett, MacArthur, and Markle Foundations. He routinely collaborates with technologists, economists and philanthropists on initiatives related to inclusive growth, technology and other moonshots for societal impact. 

With a keen interest in research in science and technology, he serves on board of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and on advisory boards at Oxford’s Internet institute, Stanford’s Human Centered AI Institute and the 100-year study on AI, MIT’s AI Policy Forum, LSE, as well as Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He has been appointed a visiting professor at Oxford, a member of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s Committee on Responsible Computing. 

A Rhodes Scholar, James received his DPhil, MSc, and MA. from Oxford in AI and robotics, mathematics, and computer science, his BSc in electrical engineering from the University of Zimbabwe as an Anglo-American Scholar. He has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a distinguished fellow of Stanford’s AI Institute, a visiting fellow of All Souls College, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a fellow of DeepMind. 

James was a visiting scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Labs and a faculty exchange fellow at MIT. At Oxford, he was a fellow of Balliol, and a member of the Programming Research Group and the Robotics Research Lab.