Alex Farach
Principal Data and Applied Scientist at Microsoft
I am an economist and data storyteller. I spent eight years measuring the American labor market for the federal government, and I now work on the business impact of AI at Microsoft. The discipline has been the same in both, getting the empirical work right and then making the result clear enough to act on.
My research at Microsoft has focused on how AI changes knowledge work, and I ran the field experiment reported in Scaffolding Human-AI Collaboration. I have co-authored Microsoft's Work Trend Index and the New Future of Work reports. I also built the New Future of Work Reader, a public site where Microsoft scientists publish research on AI and work.
Two of my papers take up the economics directly. Evolving the Productivity Equation asks whether AI should count as a new factor of production, and AI as Coordination-Compressing Capital models how AI reorganizes a firm from the inside. Before Microsoft I spent those eight years at the U.S. Department of Labor, moving between the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the unemployment insurance program. That is where I learned how national statistics are built, including the estimation models behind the Occupational Employment Statistics program, which I helped improve.
I build open-source tools for labor market analysis and applied machine learning. cmapr handles career mobility research, onet2r reads O*NET data, huggingfaceR brings Hugging Face models into R, and foundryR connects to Azure AI Foundry. I also publish teaching material for people approaching these methods for the first time, including a periodic table of NLP tasks in R. Outside of work I play jazz guitar.