The AI Index is an annual report that tries to measure the state of artificial intelligence with data rather than anecdote. According to Stanford’s own coverage of the launch, the first AI Index was released in 2017 by a group connected to the One Hundred Year Study on AI (AI100), with the goal of providing “a comprehensive baseline on the state of artificial intelligence and measuring technological progress in the same way the gross domestic product and the S&P 500 index track the U.S. economy and the broader stock market.”
The index was conceived by Stanford computer scientist Yoav Shoham, who said the goal was “to provide a fact-based measuring stick against which we can chart progress and fuel a deeper conversation about the future of the field.” The founding steering committee included Ray Perrault of SRI International, Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT, and Jack Clark, then of OpenAI. The report is now produced by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) and runs to hundreds of pages each year.
Each edition tracks metrics across research output, technical performance on benchmarks, private investment, hardware and compute trends, public opinion, education, and policy. Because it aggregates from many primary sources into a single yearly snapshot, it has become one of the most cited references for high-level claims about how fast AI is moving and where the money and talent are concentrated.
Why business readers should care: the AI Index is a vendor-neutral, citable source for the numbers executives reach for, on investment, adoption, and capability, and it makes clear which of those numbers are well-grounded and which are still uncertain.