Benedict Macon-Cooney, Chief AI & Innovation Officer at the Tony Blair Institute | Reimagining the State in the Age of AI

Amazing.

It gives us some context of the exciting mandate that you have.

If you could also give us, for anyone who doesn't know, or just further concepts for anyone who does, an overview of the organization and its mission, please.

Yeah, so the Institute, in essence, does one big thing, which is it equips prime ministers and presidents with the tools to be able to deliver more effectively.

Now, that's sort of based on Tony's experience in governing.

And in short, when he thought he'd become prime minister, you say something gets done and it doesn't get done.

And realizing that...

There's a huge gap in the market then, because often politicians, when they ascend to positions of authority, it's sometimes their first position of authority in actual execution and delivery.

And, you know, if you look across the private sector, there are management books, there are a huge amount of information, there are organizations to help young CEOs, young presidents, organizations, etc., But there isn't the comparative thing in politics.

And so that was sort of the kind of the big idea in setting this up, you know, post leaving office for Tony.

Now, we still do that.

And we still do three big elements to help deliver that, which is the first is the policy work, which is those big ideas for how you transform government today, you know, particularly with AI threading through that in healthcare, education, how you even do fiscal reform, etc.

The second is...

So my division, which is some products that we are developing for the prime ministers and presidents, we then work with technology companies that are also providing solutions.

Whether that is something like Khan Academy, which is providing AI tutors, or some of the frontier labs and infrastructure side, which is being built out at scale right now in AI, helping governments begin to deliver that and build in the right way.

And then it all comes together, I think, In essence, by then the last point being we're in 45 countries around the world.

We're always embedded within the president or prime minister or head of state, head of government's office to then help them with both the ideas and the execution.

And then we work throughout then the government, whether that's in a health ministry or an infrastructure ministry, energy ministry, depending on what the presidential priorities are.

So you can sort of thread that all together.

We sort of build the ideas.

We help them work with other companies and build some solutions ourselves.

And then we work on the delivery and implementation of reform agendas within governments themselves.