INSEAD has launched the Thrive Lab, formally the Research Lab for Human and Organisational Thriving, at its AI Forum Asia in Singapore. The $3M behind the lab comes from Google.org, Google’s charitable arm, and Google DeepMind, the company’s AI research lab.
INSEAD is a graduate business school with campuses in France, Singapore, Abu Dhabi and San Francisco. The Singapore forum belongs to a global series that has already run in Europe and the Americas, with the next edition due in the United Arab Emirates in January 2027.
The lab will study the impact of AI on human connection, meaning and wellbeing, in work and in life. Its research runs across learning, working and relating, and looks at how people can strengthen what INSEAD calls their human, social and psychological capital, meaning their skills, relationships and inner resources, as technology changes quickly around them.
Part of the work looks at how the places where people learn, from schools and communities to professional life, need to change. Sepi Hejazi Moghadam, head of foundations of science at Google.org, said the lab would take on pressing questions about the future of work and how people can adapt, stay resilient and thrive alongside AI.
Winnie Jiang Leads The Lab
Winnie Jiang, an associate professor of organisational behaviour at INSEAD, is the lab’s academic director. Her research looks at how people find and keep meaning in their work through disruption, career changes and new technology, including how AI can be built into jobs in ways that protect a person’s agency, dignity and purpose.
Jiang said the lab aims for actionable insights that help people and organisations “not just to adapt to a rapidly changing world, but to thrive in it”.
Under Jiang, the lab plans a PhD research award and a postdoctoral fellowship to train early-career researchers, along with an annual global conference. The lab also intends to set up research-to-practice partnerships with organisations, schools and governments, and to run workshops and talks that put its findings to use.
Inside INSEAD’s AI Institute
The Thrive Lab sits inside INSEAD’s Human and Machine Intelligence Institute (HUMII), set up in 2025 to advance what the school calls human-centred AI in business and society. Lily Fang, INSEAD’s dean of research and innovation and HUMII’s academic director, said the lab’s work would be core to the institute and to society.
In January, HUMII received a €15M gift from an unnamed INSEAD alumnus, which INSEAD described as the largest gift the institute had received. Its core academic team includes Philippe Aghion, who shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, and Phanish Puranam, the 2025 winner of the University of Vienna’s Oskar Morgenstern Medal.
Google’s Wider Funding
The grant adds to Google’s spending on research about what AI means for people and the economy. In April, Google.org put a further $15M into its Digital Futures Fund, which supports research on AI’s economic and social effects, including work, labour markets and workforce policy.
The Thrive Lab brings that funding together with INSEAD’s own AI research under HUMII. The lab’s work centres on whether people can keep finding meaning, connection and wellbeing in their jobs and lives as AI becomes part of both.
