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Kristina McElheran is a leading economist specializing in technology adoption, digital transformation, and the economics of artificial intelligence in the firm sector. Her research focuses on understanding how U.S. businesses adopt and deploy advanced technologies, and what drives variation in that adoption across industries, firm sizes, and geographies. McElheran is perhaps best known for her foundational work on the 2018 Annual Business Survey (ABS), a large-scale Census Bureau initiative covering roughly 850,000 U.S. firms. Her paper introducing this dataset (169 citations) has become an essential resource for researchers studying technology diffusion. Building on this, her highly influential series "AI Adoption in America: Who, What, and Where" (collectively exceeding 200 citations) documents the early diffusion of five AI-related technologies—including machine learning, natural language processing, and machine vision—revealing that AI adoption remains surprisingly concentrated among large, younger, and more educated firms. Her 2025 work, "The Rise of Industrial AI in America," continues this trajectory, tracking AI's deepening footprint across the economy. McElheran's contributions are particularly valued for connecting rich administrative data to pressing policy questions, making her work indispensable for students and policymakers seeking to understand the uneven landscape of technological change in modern American industry.