Anglicare Sydney CEO on AI, housing and critical issues facing governments

Joe Kornik: 

Welcome to the VISION by Protiviti interview. I'm Joe Kornik, Editor-in-Chief of VISION by Protiviti, a global content resource examining big themes that will impact the C-suite and executive boardrooms worldwide. Today, we’re exploring the future of government, and I'm thrilled to welcome Simon Miller, CEO of Anglicare Sydney, a nonprofit organisation that offers services for seniors, families, and individuals in need from food and housing to mental health and family care. I'm happy to turnover the interviewing today to my Protiviti colleague, Leslie Howatt, managing director and the firm’s Technology Consulting solution Australia lead. Leslie, thanks so much for joining me today.

Leslie Howatt: 

Thanks, Joe. Great to be here and I'm delighted to have Simon, you here with me today. Thank you so much for joining us.

Simon Miller: 

My pleasure to be here, Leslie. Thank you.

Leslie Howatt:

You have such a unique background as a CEO of an NGO, former management consultant for 15 years and more than a decade in the New South Wales government. How do you think those experiences come together to help shape the work you currently do as a CEO of a not-for-profit providing age care, retirement living, social housing, and community services to over a hundred thousand people across Greater Sydney and the Illawarra?

Simon Miller:

It’s interesting because I’ve had the privilege of working across really all three different sectors. I’ve worked across the public sector. I’ve worked across the private sector and now, in the for-purpose sector. And I think what that does is it gives me the capacity to view problems from different perspectives, to understand how different stakeholders think about things. One of the things with being a CEO of a not-for-profit is there is so much that we have to do in working with other sectors and so, actually, being able to speak their language, understand the challenges that they are working on to be able to bring a whole range of different skill sets around public policy and advocacy, around commercial analysis, around technology and be able to meet those together I think is a really useful perspective that I'm able to bring and contribute to the sector, hopefully, to the development of the sector and some of the things that we’re trying to do as an organisation and indeed as a society here in Australia.

Leslie Howatt:

So, given that, what do you see are the biggest challenges facing governments both in Australia or beyond right now?

Simon Miller:

Yes. Look, I think there are five really big themes that governments are grappling with. I think the first one is clearly cost of living, the sticky inflation. Governments and central banks are trying to deal with managing economic growth along with the price pressures and they’re struggling with that. They haven’t really had to do since the 1970s. Well, this is different from the 1970s as well so this is almost a unique challenge around cost of living. What’s that leading to, it’s leading to what I call the rise of disillusionment. There’s disillusionment amongst the population. You see this showing up in populism and extremism. You see it coming up with the challenges from social media. I think the third thing is energy transition. There’s never been a global crisis quite like that of climate change and the energy transition is feeding into all of these. It sorts of feeding into a hopelessness which leads to populism, it’s feeding into the cost-of-living pressures through the rise of renewables, but it’s a really, really serious issue that government is trying to grapple with. They know they have to do it but there’s a lot of pushback from the populists because it’s expensive. And then I think housing, the availability of housing, the cost of housing. You’re seeing rents at unaffordable levels across at the least most of the Western world. You’re seeing dislocations in the housing market in places like China and so there’s a really significant challenge around the housing right at the moment and that’s not just in Western democracies. It’s right across the globe. I think the last one is AI and technology and governments working out, “What do we do with artificial intelligence? How do we manage them? How do we use it?”

Leslie Howatt:

So, let’s pick up on that last point. In your consulting days, you built and led an artificial intelligence and advanced analytics business across Asia-Pacific, growing it from scratch to hundreds of data scientists and engineers. How do you think government can use AI to deal with living policy challenges?

Simon Miller:

Look, I'm genuinely quite excited about AI and what it can be used for in public policy. So, I think there’s just an enormous number of use cases and so let me give you an example. I heard recently about people starting to use large language models to do real time coaching in call centres. So, you can have the AI model listening essentially to the call and provide prompts. So, it’s not just, “We’re going to record this call for later. We can actually give you real-time feedback on how you’re doing and real-time access to information.” So, it’s going to improve experience. I think there’s opportunities for automated approvals, automated regulatory approvals. For instance, planning approvals, interpretations of laws and policies, I think is a really interesting area. I was talking to a large Asia-Pacific bank just a week ago and they were saying they’re now running an AI across all of their policies and all of their terms and conditions and it means that customer queries to bankers, 90% of them can now be answered live without people needing to go back and try to ask experts. AI can actually do that and, again, speed things up, makes it more efficient. Governments can do that same thing with laws and policies.

Airlines and logistics companies have been using AI to help with optimisation and scheduling disruption management, and governments are now starting to think about how do we use that in say public transport networks or road networks and so that creates improvements and experience of lives of citizens. We are using at my organisation AI to actually automate recruitment in terms of resume screenings, in terms of asynchronous video interviews. Well, government hires thousands of people and so the capacity to be able to find the right people, find them fast, takes a lot of the pressure and friction out of the recruitment process, again, it’s going to improve public policy.

I think the used cases are absolutely endless. The only thing that’s going to limit it, really, is the imagination, government can be quite risk-averse and needs to be risk-averse because it’s actually dealing with balancing quite difficult public conversations and trying to manage the interaction with the population. So, risk aversion and imagination, and on the other hand, their willingness to invest. I think the public investment we require will be substantial but the payoffs, particularly as government revenues fall and we have a demographic pressure of an aging population, I think the payoffs for the government will be enormous from the application of AI, right across almost any area you can imagine in public policy.

Leslie Howatt:

Let’s talk a little bit about your current role as the CEO of Anglicare. What are some of the big issues that you’re dealing with in that sector and how can government more effectively work with the social sector to deliver better outcomes?

Simon Miller:

There’s really four things that I’m particularly concerned about that we are working on. I think there’s the question of aging and ageism. Our population is significantly aging across most of the Western world, indeed across most of the world, we have an aging population and there’s a need for government to help foster more healthy approach to aging. There is some research out of Yale that suggest that the way you think about aging actually impacts really significantly how healthy you are as you get older. You can have more years of being well as a result of thinking more positively about aging. And so I think there’s a role for not-for-profits and governments to really think about, how do we age well as a society? So, let’s not just make aging a clinical thing, something that is about a loss of capacity but how do we celebrate, how do we embrace aging, how do we actually help well-being to be a feature of how we all grow older and that’s one of the things that we’re trying to grapple with in terms of building communities for older people that are healthy and thriving and flourishing that are not just about medical care but are about community, that are about hospitality, that are about social connection.

The second thing that we really focus on is the housing crisis. Anglicare is a significant housing provider and it’s an area that we focus our growth in because we see this as really being the great kind of social challenge of our time. Because without good housing, you lose social cohesion and I think that that’s an enormous challenge to our society. So, that’s an area that requires government investment, government regulation, government support. It’s something that simply doesn’t happen because if it was something the private would just do on its own, we wouldn’t need to worry about it but it’s clearly a huge problem.

The third case is food and security. This is a big challenge, cost of living and food insecurity, huge challenge across the Western world. Certainly in Australia, where I am, food insecurity is an enormous challenge for us and how do we work on distribution, how do we work on subsidising that, how do we work on building capacity requirement.

I think the last one that we’re significantly working on is around mental health, just the increase in the number of mental health challenges in community, particularly for both young people and for older people. The group in society that has the highest rate of suicide is men over 85. It’s not the largest number but it’s the highest rate and so mental health challenges for both teenagers and for seniors are an area that we are partnering with government to really invest in counselling, in psychology, in support. They are big challenges that we need to face into as an organisation, having partnership with government.

Leslie Howatt:

That’s quite amazing. That’s a stat that I had never heard before but having an aged father, I can kind of understand how that might come about. So, for my last couple of questions, I want you to look out five years or so, maybe to 2030, what do you envision for the future of housing, specifically social housing and community services to support Australia’s aging population?

Simon Miller:

One of the biggest challenges with housing is around supply. We just need more housing. But of course, it’s not just a case of building more because land is expensive. Regulatory approvals are expensive. Construction is expensive, and so people, developers, even Anglicare, we need to make a return on the money that we invest in building housing. So, one of the things that I see in the next decade, five to 10 years, is government stripping away some of those regulatory costs, make it really easy for people to build if they build following a certain design standard. I see technology playing a significant role into the things like prefabrication, things like automation, offsite manufacturing, the reduction of the cost of [Unintelligible] architecture, of project management, of engineering. I think AI, in particular, can play a role in those spaces. Then, of course, the lifecycle cost of housing around energy, heating, cooling management and there’s an estimation that actually, at least in high-rise buildings, those lifecycle costs can be half the net person cost of the building. So, they’re really, really significant particularly for people on low incomes.

So, I see really a quite exciting world where government regulation, where technology, and where really smart design in the next five years can dramatically lower some of those costs and enable developers to make good returns but at significantly lower costs and so you get a win-win. You get developers still making the money that they need to be able to put their money at risk but you see people on lower incomes, on minimum wages, on income support actually able to afford it because we’ve changed the way that we deliver housing. So, that’s something I see us being quite exciting over the next five years and I’m hopeful that organisations like mine can actually play a role in saying, “You know, we’re going to take a risk. We’re going to do some things a little bit differently than we’ve traditionally done because we can and because we can,” sort of show the way and so I’d like us to be the innovative organisation. But these things are going to really transform the way we do the housing, I think.

Leslie Howatt:

Amazing. Finally, then, the same question but about the future of government in the delivery of services. Based on everything we’ve talked about today, how optimistic are you that we’ll get this right and what do you see for 2030?

Simon Miller:

Look, I think I’m ultimately an optimist and I think the reason I’m an optimist in terms of public policy and getting this right is, what I see when I look at millennials and Gen Z and then the generations coming after them is that they are much more publicly minded and I think these things like climate change that have led them to taking a different, more positive, more community-minded approach. So, I think that by 2030, the millennials and Gen Z are going to be a really significant part of the voting population. So, they’re going to demand it from government and governments tend to respond to voters, one way or another, and so I’m actually really optimistic that their attitude will actually translate into government action.

Leslie Howatt:

Thanks, Simon. We really appreciate you taking the time to spend with us today and for your amazing insights. That was so helpful and I learned a lot and, hopefully, others do too.

Simon Miller:

Fantastic. Thank you.

Leslie Howatt:

Now, back to you, Joe.

Joe Kornik:

Thanks, Leslie. Thank you for joining the VISION by Protiviti interview today. On behalf of Leslie and Simon, I’m Joe Kornik. I’ll see you next time.