AI, Work, and the Tools to Study It

Research, dashboards, and open-source software spanning labor economics, applied data science, and machine learning.

I'm Alex Farach, an economist and data scientist. I spent eight years as a federal economist at the U.S. Department of Labor and now research AI and productivity at Microsoft. The papers, dashboards, and tools here are my own independent work, and all of it is free to use. More about me.

Papers

Scaffolding Human-AI Collaboration: A Field Experiment on Behavioral Protocols and Cognitive Reframing arXiv, April 2026 · Field experiment with 388 employees at a Fortune 500 retailer
AI as Coordination-Compressing Capital arXiv, February 2026 · Interactive report
A Measurement-Clock Audit of O*NET Vintage in AI-Exposure Scores Working paper, 2026 · Code and results on GitHub

All papers and software

Dashboards

OES Data Explorer

Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational employment data across industries and geographies. Industry-occupation matrices, state-level location quotients, and data export.

Open dashboard

AI Exposure Analysis

Task-level AI exposure scoring using the Anthropic Economic Index. Weighted employment metrics with national and state-level breakdowns.

View analysis

AI Diffusion Framework

Structural conditions for AI adoption across occupations and sectors. Task applicability scoring, cross-sector mobility, and wage-weighted exposure.

Explore framework

The Commonplace

A curated research knowledge base on AI and the economics of work. Papers assessed for methodology, claims extracted and categorized, weekly synthesis digest.

Explore research

Teaching & Tools

Periodic Table of NLP Tasks in R

A map of 81 natural language processing tasks, each tile opening a plain-language lesson with code that runs during the build. 62 lessons published across three complete stages, from sourcing text through parsing it to training and evaluating models.

Open the table

R packages

Four open-source packages for this kind of work. huggingfaceR for Hugging Face models, onet2r for O*NET occupational data, cmapr for career mobility, and foundryR for Azure AI Foundry.

Browse the packages

Data Sources

BLS OES Employment statistics Anthropic Index AI task exposure O*NET Occupation data BLS QCEW Quarterly wages MS AI Applicability AI usefulness scores