Susan Athey to advise Keystone Strategy

Stanford economist Susan Athey has joined technology and economics consulting firm Keystone Strategy as chief scientific advisor.

She will advise the company alongside her academic appointment as economics of technology professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Athey will provide economic and econometric advice to Keystone’s CoreAI division, which provides operational and commercial AI services, algorithms, and systems to large businesses.

At Stanford, Athey is a founding faculty director of the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford GSB, and was a founding associate director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Previously she held appointments at the economics departments of Harvard University, MIT and Stanford. Athey is an elected members of the National Academy of Sciences, and is a recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association.

Outside academia, Athey most recently served as chief economist of the antitrust division at the U.S. Department of Justice, and completed a two-year stint in the role in June. She was previously chief economist of Microsoft for six years, and has previously worked with Keystone Strategy.

Commenting on the appointment, Athey said: “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.”