Carl-Benedikt Frey is the Dieter Schwarz Associate Professor of AI & Work at the Oxford Internet Institute and a Fellow of Mansfield College, University of Oxford. He also directs the Future of Work Programme at the Oxford Martin School, where he serves as Oxford Martin Citi Fellow.

After studying economics, history, and management at Lund University, Frey completed his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in 2011 and went on to found Oxford’s programme on the Future of Work. He is an Economics Associate of Nuffield College and Senior Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at Oxford, and remains an Associate Fellow in Economic History at Lund University.

In 2013, he co-authored 'The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?' with Michael A. Osborne, estimating that 47 percent of jobs are exposed to automation. The study's methodology has been used by President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisors, the Bank of England, the World Bank, and the BBC's widely used automation-risk tool. In 2024, Frey and Osborne revisited their findings in light of generative AI, arguing that face-to-face communication and genuinely original creativity remain distinctly human advantages.

Frey is the author of How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations (2025), which traces a thousand years of technological change and argues that progress depends on a delicate balance between decentralised innovation and bureaucracy for scaling. The book has been shortlisted for the 2025 Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award and the 2026 Lionel Gelber Prize, and won the 2026 PROSE Award in Economics from the Association of American Publishers. He is also the author of The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation (2019), selected as a Financial Times Best Book of the Year and winner of the Richard A. Lester Prize.

Frey has served on the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on the New Economic Agenda, the Bretton Woods Committee, and the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), an OECD-hosted initiative to guide the responsible development of AI. He has also advised international organisations, governments, and businesses, including the G20, the OECD, the European Commission, the United Nations, and several Fortune 500 companies. His work and commentary on technology, AI, and the future of work have appeared in The Economist (By Invitation), Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, Scientific American, and the Wall Street Journal, and have been featured in over a hundred media outlets worldwide, including CNN, BBC, and PBS NewsHour.