James is Senior Vice President at Google-Alphabet reporting to the CEO and responsible for Research, Technology & Society, including overseeing Google Research and Google Labs. He is focused on helping advance Google and Alphabet’s most ambitious foundational and applied innovations in computer science, including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and science, and in areas that have potential for broad impact on people and society, all in support of Google's mission, responsibly. He is Senior Partner emeritus of McKinsey & Company, and is Chair and director emeritus of the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI). At Mckinsey, he advised the chief executives of many of the world’s leading technology companies and he led MGI ’s research on technology, the economy, competitiveness, and other global economy trends.
Appointed by President Obama, he served as Vice Chair of the Global Development Council at the White House, and by Commerce Secretaries to the Digital Economy Board and the National Innovation Board. He currently serves as Vice Chair of the US National AI Advisory Committee which advises the President on AI and the National AI Initiative Office at the White House, and serves on the U.S. Secretary of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board. He serves on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations, Hewlett and MacArthur Foundations.
He is a Visiting Professor at Oxford’s School of Government and a member of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s Committee on Responsible Computing. He has been elected a Distinguished Fellow of Stanford’s AI Institute, a Distinguished Fellow in Ethics in AI at Oxford, a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a life Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. A Rhodes Scholar, James has DPhil, MSc with distinction and MA from Oxford in AI and robotics, mathematics, and computer science, a BSc first class in electrical engineering from the University of Zimbabwe.