RADICAL REALIST

I met Matt Brittin in a moment of calm before the storm.  We sat down for breakfast the week before he was announced as the new director general of the BBC (he starts 18 May). Since leaving Google last year, he has been a self-described “gap year student”, doing all the things that rejuvenate the body and soul before before the next big challenge. In many ways Brittin is the perfect fit for a role that requires deep nuanced thinking and a strong understanding of technology and media. His very first paid job was delivering newspapers around his neighbourhood. His last job saw him focusing on Google’s opportunity to harness technology for good across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.  

One of the first things you notice about Brittin is that he carries himself like an Olympic athlete, and still has that mindset. He remains an avid rower, having represented Team GB at the Seoul Olympics and winning a bronze medal at the World Rowing Championships in 1989. Before the BBC, before Google, there were early mornings by the river and even earlier ones delivering newspapers. As we sit down, I ask him about that first discipline. What did those cold starts and long rows teach him about leadership?  

“It’s a very physically demanding sport,” he says. “You compete intensely to win your seat in the boat, and then you collaborate with the people you’ve competed with.” It is a neat metaphor for modern leadership. In rowing, there is no room for deadweight. Unlike sports where a single star can carry a team, success depends on total synchronisation. Each person must pull their weight, even when every instinct is telling them to ease off.  

That sense of collective strain has stayed with him. It surfaces again when we talk about his 18 years at Google, which he joined in 2007. Back then, only a small fraction of the world was online, most of them through the shriek of dial-up connections. Today six billion people, nearly two third of the world’s population, are online.   

Google’s dominance, he is quick to point out, was far from inevitable. The company had to reinvent itself repeatedly, not least in the transition from desktop to mobile. Brittin was closely involved in helping media organisations navigate that shift, working with newsrooms to adapt content for a new, faster, smaller screen.  

In many ways, he was well placed to understand both sides. Before joining Google, he held commercial roles at Trinity Mirror (now Reach) at a time  when the news was read on tomorrow’s chip paper and newspapers were dealing with the advent of online news.   

“The world was changing very quickly,” he says. “You had to keep adapting.”  

That pace forced a rethink of leadership. He told me about a conversation he had with Google co-founder Larry Page who told him that his job as a leader was to find the best people for the most important work and then get out of their way.

“What that meant was finding different skills for different areas,” Brittin explains. “For me, running Google in Africa or the Middle East meant finding people of different interests, cultures, genders, and backgrounds to lead on innovative work.” Technology, he says, is quickly changing the way the world works, and an old alpha male model of authoritarian leadership won’t work.    

Although Brittin’s commitment to fairness and equality is clear in his leadership style, I wonder how he considered the role big tech companies, like Google, play in making decisions that  determine our ecological and social future. New technologies risk turbocharging pre-existing levels of inequality as fewer and fewer people control how this technology is used. I ask him how he reconciles the growing concetration of wealth and power into the hands of an undemocratically elected few with our ambition for an equal and meritocratic society.   

“You need clear regulation,” he says. “Governments have to understand what’s happening, and companies need to be open about both the risks and the opportunities.” There is, he suggests, a growing case that those who create vast wealth from technology should contribute more directly to society, whether through taxation or philanthropy.  

“The wealth creators should be distributing that wealth,” he says. “There are different ways of doing that, but the argument is there.”  

At the same time, the industry is locked in competition, pushing the boundaries of what is possible at extraordinary speed. That creates a tension between innovation and responsibility. I ask him if I could turn him into the international AI czar responsible for the future safety of AI, what would he do to ensure the technology is used as a force of good.   

Brittin tells me about a time ten years ago when he worked alongside the European Parliament around content safety on YouTube. The answer was clear he said, there were already laws in place that held platforms responsible for their content, but the laws hadn’t kept pace with the technology. In the case of YouTube, he helped develop sophisticated policies so that 90% of the content that violated online guidelines was removed before a single human view.   

His response made sense for me with something like YouTube, a technology that has been around for over two  decades and is now used by over two billion people a month. But my concern is more for technologies with incredible destructive power that not even its developers fully understand. In many ways trying to control AI with today’s regulation feels like fighting a war with yesterday’s technology.   

Brittin tells me that part of answering that question begins with asking ourselves what makes AI different from other technologies we’ve grappled with in the past. He cites a book that I will add to my reading list, AI Needs You, by Verity Harding that looks at how governments approached three other revolutionary technologies in the past: the space race, in vitro, and the internet. Without spoiling too much of the book, Brittin argues that democratically determined values can force the tech industry to embrace limitations while simultaneously ensuring the technology is used for the greater good.   

“The breakthroughs are happening faster, and sometimes even the people building the systems don’t fully understand them,” admits Brittin. “But the upside is enormous. We can’t not pursue it.”  

That balance between optimism and caution runs through much of our conversation. He returns to it often, like someone testing an idea from different angles. It is there again when we turn to the future of work. I tell him about a conversation I had recently with a correspondent at The Economist who compared those concerned about AI’s erasure of jobs to Luddites. Every technology has brought more jobs than the one it replaced; the problem is that it’s almost impossible to imagine what those new jobs might be.   

Brittin underscored this point with an example: “At the beginning of the 20th century, most people worked in agriculture. By the end of it we had hedge fund managers and hairdressers.” The real question, he suggests, is speed. Change is happening faster than before, and early signs in the graduate job market are not encouraging.  

If AI poses a challenge to employment, it poses an existential one to parts of the media industry. As a board member of The Guardian, Brittin has seen firsthand the pressures facing journalism.  

Local newspapers, in particular, have been hollowed out. In the US, 40% of local newspapers have disappeared in the last decade. Their traditional business models, heavily reliant on classified advertising, were dismantled by the very technologies that enabled new forms of media.  

But here Brittin maintains his same level of optimism.  New models are emerging, often more focused, supported by subscriptions rather than advertising. He points to The Mill in Manchester, an online newspaper delivered by email to paid subscribers. At the same time, audience habits have shifted dramatically. Platforms like YouTube now rival traditional broadcasters in reach. For Brittin, that means meeting audiences where they are.  

Still, technology alone cannot solve deeper social fractures. With viewers facing so much misinformation so often, I ask whether AI could help be part of the solution to the problem it created. By way of example, a Reform voter and a Green voter have overlapping concerns. They could both care about flooding in their communities and crime on their streets. I ask him if AI can be reimagined to bring people out of their echo chambers so that they begin to see the world differently.   

 “That’s a very sophisticated hypothesis,” he muses. Part of the problem is that online communities have replaced many of the physical communities that have held people together. The end result is rising levels of economic despair and loneliness.   

He tells me he’s not sure AI can substitute for the human connections that come from meeting in person over shared passions or interests. What does work, he suggests, are shared experiences. Music, sport, culture, moments where people come together despite their differences.  

“We’re going to need that human element more than ever,” he says.  

As breakfast plates are cleared, I ask one final question. After a career that has taken him from local news and consultancy, to one of the world’s most powerful technology companies, he is about to step into one of Britain’s most scrutinised roles. At a time when the country often feels uncertain about itself, what would he say to lift the mood?  

“I’m an optimist,” he says simply. There is, he argues, much to build on. A culture of fairness, of collaboration, of creativity. Even in hard times, he insists, the UK remains a global cultural powerhouse.  

“People around the world value what the UK has to offer,” he says. “The education, the information, the news.  

It is a characteristically measured answer. Not a grand rallying cry, but a quiet statement of belief. Much like rowing, it suggests, progress will come not from a single surge of effort, but from many people pulling together, in rhythm, over time.