Scholarship Overview
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Overview
The Microsoft AI Economy Institute (AIEI) launched in 2025 to support independent, policy-relevant research on how artificial intelligence transforms productivity, labor markets, education systems, and economic opportunity worldwide. The institute emphasizes scholarship that translates directly into policy, decision-making, and investment guidance.
Cohort 4 is the fourth global research call, open to researchers affiliated with accredited universities or research institutions worldwide. This cohort examines organizational choices that determine whether AI creates value, who captures that value, and how that value distributes across workers, firms, entrepreneurs, and society.
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Research Focus: AI and Jobs
This call centers on understanding organizational choices that shape where AI complements human work, substitutes for it, or creates entirely new economic activity. These outcomes emerge from decisions about workflow design, team structure, governance, incentives, accountability, and expertise development—not from fixed technical properties of AI models.
Priority Research Themes
- The Everyone-a-Manager Shift: How AI diffuses managerial functions (goal-setting, work decomposition, system direction, output evaluation) throughout organizations, reshaping worker agency, authority, credit, responsibility, and hierarchy.
- Designing for Augmentation and Innovation: Conditions under which AI raises the marginal value of human judgment, increases labor demand, and creates new capabilities through human-AI complementarity.
- Designing Organizations and Workflows People Embrace: Complementary investments and implementation choices that enable worker embrace rather than mere compliance; diffusion of AI practices across teams, occupations, organizations, and geographies; impacts of open-weight models on access, control, confidentiality, and risk.
- Building Expertise and the First Rung: Long-term consequences when AI performs junior and routine work that historically trained future experts and managers; alternatives to lost learning pathways; skills needed for long-term success.
- Designing for AI-Mediated Discovery, Markets, and Value Creation: How AI-mediated information discovery changes purchasing decisions, pricing, product differentiation, and market concentration; metrics for AI visibility and their impact on business outcomes.
Program Structure and Timeline
The Senior Fellows Program follows a structured, cohort-based model spanning approximately 12 months across three phases:
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Phase 1: Proposal and Selection
- Submission portal opens: October 19, 2026
- Proposal deadline: November 30, 2026 (6:00 PM Pacific)
- Award notification: December 2026
Phase 2: Cohort Engagement and Draft Development (January–March 2027)
- Bi-weekly virtual workshops with fellow researchers and subject-matter experts
- Multi-day in-person workshop with Microsoft subject matter experts and AIEI leadership (March 2027)
- Book chapter submission: March 2027
Phase 3: Revision, Publication, and Research Completion (April–September 2027)
- Revise chapter based on peer and editorial feedback
- Contribute to publication and public launch of edited volume (July 2027)
- Complete research projects
- Manuscript submission to high-quality academic journal: September 2027
Funding and Support
Each selected proposal receives:
- Research gift: $75,000 (single award per proposal, regardless of one or two PIs)
- Travel allowance for in-person workshop: $7,500 for researchers based in the United States, Canada, or Mexico; $20,000 for all other locations (including Africa/SADC region)
Researchers are recognized as AIEI Senior Fellows and may be invited to present findings at industry and policy forums.
Eligibility
- Open to researchers affiliated with accredited universities or research institutions worldwide
- Each proposal may include up to two Principal Investigators (PIs)
- All PIs must hold a PhD or equivalent terminal degree (e.g., MD, JD, DrPH) at time of application
- Only one award issued per proposal (shared between two PIs if applicable)
- Interdisciplinary teams encouraged
Note for African/SADC applicants: There is no geographic restriction. Researchers at South African, Zimbabwean, or other African universities with accredited status and terminal degrees are fully eligible. The $20,000 travel allowance supports international attendance at the in-person workshop.
Application Components
Applications consist of two parts:
1. Applicant Biosketch (11-point font)
- Personal statement (≤300 words)
- One-page professional summary
- Up to three contributions to science
- Current research support and citation metrics (H-index, total citations, I-index)
2. Project Overview
- Research question, methods, and contribution
- Policy relevance and applicability
- Up to three target journals
Review Criteria
Proposals evaluated on four equally weighted criteria (25% each):
- Scientific strength: Rigor, appropriateness, and quality of methods; replicability and generalizability
- Feasibility: Likelihood of completion within timeline and scope
- Pragmatic applicability: Potential to generate actionable insights for AI-driven economic transformation
- PI productivity: Evidence of ability to execute and publish proposed research
Priority Considerations
All else equal, preference given to proposals that:
- Are cross-, multi-, or interdisciplinary
- Apply novel methods, including AI-enabled approaches
- Use existing datasets or leverage established relationships to collect data efficiently
- Compare or contrast country and/or regional perspectives
- Deliver actionable insights to help people and institutions
Methodological Scope
Qualitative, quantitative, theoretical, and mixed methods approaches are all acceptable, provided proposals align with stated research priorities.
Independence and Publication
All research supported by AIEI is conducted independently. Findings, interpretations, and conclusions are those of the authors and do not represent Microsoft views. Senior Fellows contribute chapters to an edited trade book on the AI economy and submit manuscripts to high-quality, open-access academic journals.
Official scholarship page: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/group/aiei/aiei-open-call-4/
You apply directly with the provider. We never charge for applications or ask for payment details. How we verify scholarships
