Isabella Loaiza
Postdoctoral Associate
MIT Sloan School of Management
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Isabella Loaiza’s Talk
The EPOCH of AI: Human-Machine Complementarities at Work
In this session, I'll introduce the EPOCH framework (Empathy, Presence, Opinion, Creativity, and Hope), a framework that has been designed to capture human capabilities that artificial intelligence can, and should, complement rather than replace. Using network-based methods that mapped task interdependencies across all U.S. occupations, our team developed three metrics: (i) an overall score (the "EPOCH score") that measures human-intensive skills, (ii) a potential-for-augmentation score, and (iii) a risk-of-substitution score.
The EPOCH framework explicitly distinguishes AI’s roles in augmenting work versus automating it, addressing a key gap in the literature. Our results show a clear shift toward more human-intensive work. New tasks that emerged in 2024 carried significantly higher EPOCH scores than pre-existing tasks, and high-EPOCH tasks were performed more frequently. At the occupational level, EPOCH-intensive jobs experienced stronger employment growth from 2015 to 2023 and higher hiring rates in 2025, and have more favorable projections through 2034. In contrast, occupations with higher substitution risks show consistently negative outcomes across past employment, current hiring, and future projections. Finally, augmentation scores are negatively associated with recent employment and hiring trends, but show no significant link to long-run employment projections.
About Isabella Loaiza
Isabella Loaiza is a Computational Social Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Her research focuses on understanding the human capabilities that complement AI technologies, as well as the opportunities for worker augmentation and reskilling.
Insights from her work have informed corporate and policy discussions on the future of work. She has advised the Spanish Presidential Office on its labor force report, HispanIA 2025, and shared her perspectives with the Chilean Congress’s Committee on AI and Labor. Her work has been featured in ABC News, NPR's Planet Money, Telemundo and El Pais among others. She earned her Ph.D. in 2023 from the MIT Media Lab.