Given at NABE TEC EU 2026 (National Association for Business Economics, Technology Economics Conference), Amsterdam.
Abstract
How a cross-functional economics team at Amazon uses AI coding agents operationally - across analysis, data pipelines, operations, writing, and troubleshooting. The talk covers what economists delegate (implementation, iteration, exploration) and what they never delegate (methodology selection, causal identification, economic interpretation, stakeholder judgment, research taste). It introduces exam-first iteration as a feedback loop for maintaining control as delegation scales: encode intent, let the agent iterate against it, and use failure as an informative signal.