INSEAD launches Thrive Lab with $3 million from Google.org and DeepMind — to study how people flourish alongside AI

INSEAD announced on October 30, 2026 that it has received US$3 million in funding from Google.org and Google DeepMind to support a new research lab devoted to a question most AI announcements skip: not what the technology can do, but what happens to the people living alongside it. The Research Lab for Human and Organisational Thriving — INSEAD Thrive Lab — will study how people and organisations can flourish as artificial intelligence reshapes how they learn, work, and relate to one another.

The lab is, by design, a bet on the human half of the AI story. INSEAD frames the central questions plainly: how do people strengthen their human, social, and psychological capital amid relentless technological change, and how must the ecosystems where they learn — educational, community, and professional — evolve to build it? The announcement offers no findings and no new product. What it offers is a funded research agenda, a home inside one of the world’s large business schools, and a public commitment to turn the answers into something organisations, schools, and governments can use.

Learning, working, relating

Thrive Lab will work across three interconnected domains: Learning, Working, and Relating. Learning covers how people build capabilities as AI changes what knowledge and skills are worth having, and how education itself must adapt. Working covers what makes a working life economically viable and psychologically meaningful when AI takes on more of the work itself. Relating covers the human connections — with colleagues, family, and community — that the release argues are part of thriving, not a backdrop to it.

“We want to understand how people can expand their capabilities, build economically viable and psychologically meaningful working lives, and cultivate strong relationships with others in the age of artificial intelligence,” said Winnie Jiang, the lab’s academic director and an associate professor of organisational behaviour at INSEAD. “Through rigorous, multidisciplinary research, INSEAD Thrive Lab aims to have real-world impact and generate actionable insights into what enables people and organisations not just to adapt to a rapidly changing world, but to thrive in it.”

What the $3 million will fund

The funding supports research, and the lab’s first visible work is about building the field itself. Thrive Lab will train emerging scholars working on human meaning and human flourishing through a PhD research award and a postdoctoral fellowship, and bring the wider research community together at an annual global conference. Alongside that, it plans research-to-practice partnerships with organisations, schools, and governments, plus workshops, talks, and dialogues designed to translate research insights into practice.

That structure matters because the lab’s subject is deliberately broad. A lab that only published papers on wellbeing would be easy to ignore; one that also funds early-career researchers, convenes an annual conference, and works directly with employers and schools is building an audience for its findings as it produces them. The announcement does not say how long the US$3 million is expected to last, how many awards or fellowships it will support, or what specific studies will come first — those are the details to watch for in the lab’s next announcements.

Who is running it

Thrive Lab sits inside INSEAD’s Human and Machine Intelligence Institute (HUMII), the school’s cross-disciplinary institute for AI research. HUMII counts the 2025 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Philippe Aghion, and the 2025 Oskar Morgenstern Medallist, Phanish Puranam, among its core academic team. Jiang leads the lab; Lily Fang, HUMII’s academic director and INSEAD’s dean of research and innovation, said the lab’s work “will be core to HUMII and to our society,” and described HUMII’s goal as research on all branches of artificial intelligence “for the ultimate purpose of expanding human capacities and human agency.”

The funders frame the lab in the same terms. “The success of artificial intelligence won’t be measured solely by efficiency or productivity gains, but by whether it empowers people to live more fulfilling lives,” said Sepi Hejazi Moghadam, head of Foundations of Science at Google.org. The lab, she said, will explore “some of the most pressing questions shaping the future of work and help people adapt, stay resilient, and thrive alongside AI.” Neither funder’s role beyond the funding is described in the announcement.

What it is not — yet

Read carefully, this is an agenda, not a result. There are no study findings, no datasets, and no tools announced with the lab, and no claim that AI’s human effects are already understood. The lab’s value will be judged by whether its research produces the “actionable insights” Jiang promises — and by whether employers, schools, and governments actually change anything because of them. That is a slower test than a benchmark score, and a fairer one for a lab asking how people flourish.

The announcement was made during the INSEAD AI Forum Asia, held at INSEAD’s Asia Campus in Singapore, a forum for researchers, business leaders, policymakers, and the public on the beneficial and responsible use of AI. The Asia edition follows Europe and America editions in the global forum series; the next edition takes place in the UAE on January 27–28, 2027. INSEAD, which has campuses in France, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and San Francisco, says its alumni network exceeds 73,000 members across 176 nationalities. More about the lab is at thrive-research.ai.

Sources: the INSEAD announcement via PR Newswire, also carried by Business Wire. The editorial illustrations are AI-generated.