Thomas Leoni

Priv.-Doz. Dr. Thomas Leoni, MA, is a labour economist and Head of the Faculty of Business at the University of Applied Sciences Wiener Neustadt, where he was appointed in March 2021. His research and teaching sit squarely on the question that now dominates every policy conversation in Europe: what happens to work, skills, and human capital when AI can learn almost anything a person can do.

Leoni trained at the University of Bologna, completed his Master's in International Economics and European Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., and earned his PhD at Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien), where he also completed his habilitation in 2021 on the labour market reintegration of people with health-related limitations. Before FHWN, he spent roughly fifteen years as a senior economist at WIFO, the Austrian Institute of Economic Research, and was a research affiliate at the NBER Disability Research Center in the United States. Earlier in his career he worked as a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group.

His empirical work combines labour-market institutions, health and disability economics, and the impact of digitalisation on the structure of work. He has co-authored widely cited papers on sickness and disability policy reform across OECD countries, contributed to WIFO's foundational 2017 study on the employment effects of digitalisation in Austria, and advises Austrian and European policy debates through his research and teaching at WU Wien, FH Burgenland, and Danube University Krems.

At the Human × AI Conference, Leoni takes the stage for an interview titled "When AI Can Learn Anything, What Do You Teach Humans to Stay Irreplaceable?" He argues that the answer is not about competing with machines on their terms, but about designing education and workplaces that amplify what humans do uniquely well — judgment, context, values, and the capacity to learn continuously throughout a career.