About
James is founder and chief executive of Swayable, the AI data platform company based in New York and California. Swayable is backed by investors including Y Combinator, and is used by many of the world’s marketing and advocacy campaign organizations to measure the impact of their content and messaging.
He was previously part of the senior management team at The New York Times, as Executive Director of Strategy for Digital Product and Technology, and Vice President and Chief of Operations of NYT Global. Before that, he was a founding partner at New York-based social-change agency Purpose, and a strategy consultant at McKinsey.
Originally from Australia, James moved to the U.S. to earn a PhD in experimental physics at Cornell in the Davis Lab, where he developed new measurement technology and published discoveries in journals including Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Physical Review, while also studying economics under Kaushik Basu, later the Chief Economist of the World Bank. He was later appointed as an affiliate to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, and more recently to Princeton’s Kahneman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy.
James is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the social impact organization led by UK’s Princess Anne, and was listed by Origin Magazine as "one of the top creatives changing the world”. In addition to his work leading Swayable, he contributes to the global challenge of building a healthy information environment as a council member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Information Integrity, to which he was appointed for the 2025–2027 term.