About Me
Hi! I’m Tomás.
I’m a Research Scholar at the Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI), where I work on the economics of frontier AI — particularly how AI’s effects can be measured and what empirical infrastructure is needed to track them. I’m also a Research Affiliate at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, collaborating with Stanford researchers on the measurement and economics of AI.
My work with Sam on AI-induced job displacement was published as a chapter in the NBER’s Economics of Transformative AI volume, with a companion Brookings report and coverage in the Washington Post. It introduces an occupation-level measure of how well workers are equipped to adapt if AI displaces them. I presented it twice at Stanford. I’ve also worked on the industry dynamics of AI and participated in a large-scale RCT on AI and research reproducibility (accepted at PNAS).
Lately, at GovAI, I’ve been working with Sam on policy memos to inform policymakers on the Hill and in the administration, focused on data tracking of AI’s labor market effects. I’m also building a website cataloguing the empirical economics of AI literature. With Luis Meloni (professor at USP), I’m finishing a paper that uses Brazilian administrative data for what may be the first quasi-experimental analysis of aggregate labor market impacts of LLMs in a developing country. And I’ve been collaborating with Rishi Bommasani (Senior Research Scholar at Stanford HAI) on open-source task-level estimates for AI exposure and time savings, and exploring new measures of the jagged frontier.
I graduated top of my class at the University of São Paulo — frequently ranked the best university in Latin America — and also won the best senior thesis prize. Last August I attended Stanford’s ETAI summer school.
Before joining GovAI, I built AI pipelines at an early-stage media tracking startup and at Latin America’s largest quantitative hedge fund. I was also a trainer of the three-time world champion Brazilian team at the International Economic Olympiad, where I later served on the board.
I work with Python and R mostly.
My CV is available here.
Feel free to contact me at t6aguirre@gmail.com. For GovAI-related matters, you can reach me at tomas.aguirre@governance.ai, and for Stanford-related matters at taguirre@stanford.edu.
News
- April 2026 — Cited in Deborah Bizarria’s Folha de S.Paulo column (Brazil’s largest newspaper), “Quem vai conseguir se adaptar à inteligência artificial.”
- April 2026 — Work discussed in the Financial Times newsletter The AI Shift by Sarah O’Connor and John Burn-Murdoch (“Will AI damage the jobs ladder for non-grads?”), alongside the follow-up Brookings piece “How AI may reshape career pathways to better jobs”.
- March 2026 — Cited in the Brookings / Hamilton Project / PIIE piece “Research on AI and the labor market is still in the first inning”.
- March 2026 — Coverage in Mortgage Professional America on what the adaptive-capacity index implies for loan officers.
- March 2026 — Coverage syndicated to Detroit News and other outlets.
- March 2026 — Work with Sam featured in the Washington Post interactive on jobs most affected by AI automation.
- January 2026 — NBER Working Paper w34705 released: “How Adaptable Are American Workers to AI-Induced Job Displacement?” Companion Brookings report published the same week.
- September 2025 — Highlighted by Luis Garicano in his read-through of the NBER Economics of Transformative AI volume.
- September 2025 — Presented the adaptive-capacity work at Stanford (NBER Economics of Transformative AI conference).
- August 2025 — Attended Stanford’s ETAI summer school, where I presented the adaptive-capacity work in one of the classes.
Last updated: August 14, 2026.