Stanford SALT Lab launches TaskNet to track how AI reshapes work tasks
Diyi_Yang · x · 2026-10-28
Stanford SALT Lab's 'Future of Work with AI Agents' Project
Diyi Yang highlights TaskNet by Jennifer Wang's team: studying AI's impact on jobs shouldn't rely solely on static taxonomies like ONET, since workers' actual responsibilities change before job descriptions do. TaskNet offers a scalable way to track how work evolves alongside AI.
Key components
- 2025 nationwide audit on automation vs augmentation with Erik Brynjolfsson's team
- Aug 2026: collaboration with Anthropic on 250,000 real conversations, studying task criticality, human agency, and friction
- CollabSkill (COLM 2026): decouples human vs agent contributions in team workflows
- JobBench: an agent benchmark grounded in what real professionals want delegated to AI, built on WORKBank
- WORKBank database publicly released on GitHub and Hugging Face
- Featured in the 2026 AI Index Report Economics Chapter
The project addresses the 70 million U.S. workers facing the biggest workplace transition from AI agents, whose voices are often missing from research.
Related event: Mercor and Stanford Release TaskNet, Adding 79 AI-Era Tasks to O*NET(4 posts)→
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