INSIDER MAGAZINE: Google Australia & New Zealand managing director Melanie Silva on the power of knowledge

Amid her jam-packed schedule as Google’s Australia and New Zealand managing director, Melanie Silva loves getting a hit of dopamine — that chemical in the brain that makes you feel good. For Silva, they often come from knowing a problem has been solved, but they don’t need to be directly connected to her own work. One of the more interesting partnerships Google has is with the CSIRO as part of the technology giant’s $1 billion Digital Future Initiative, a five-year project investing in local research and infrastructure. “I get my dopamine hits from sitting in that meeting and talking about the pipeline of problems that we’re going to solve,” she says. Silva explains one such project: work on the Great Barrier Reef to help eradicate noxious crown-of-thorns starfish, which are covered in venomous toxins harmful to humans and marine creatures. Up to one metre large, they feed on coral and in outbreaks of more than 15, they can strip a reef of 90 per cent of its living coral tissue. Google’s machine learning technology replaces the old process whereby a scientist was towed behind a boat to physically count each starfish. Where scientists — some of whom had worked on the project for two decades — would spot one, the AI detected 20. Silva recalls hearing about how the scientist’s work had been changed. “The guy’s literally in tears (from) the impact of what this is going to do for his life’s work,” she says. “That’s where I get the dopamine hit from ... those day-to-day applications as opposed to look at this big game-changing thing. You’ve got to look at the problems and fall in love with the problems that can be solved by this profound technology.” An ebullient Silva is speaking to Insider fresh from taking to the stage at a Google Marketing event where she interviewed James Clear, author of the book Atomic Habits, of which she is “a big fan girl”. The self-help book — which has legions of fans worldwide, shooting to the top of best-seller lists in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and on Amazon — promises “an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones”. Silva’s work schedule reads like a series of good management habits: she prioritises one-on-one coaching, opens up an “office hour” every so often for staff to chat with her directly and every six weeks has a designated “thinking day” — prompted by a realisation early in her tenure that leaders can become complete slaves to their calendar. “What I quickly realised was that I had no time to think big. I had no time to spend on those really big, chunky things that were playing on the back of my mind and it was just like the days were going back-to-back most of the time,” she recalls. One year in, she learnt of “getting into flow” — deep, distraction-free thinking time. Despite her busy schedule — and initially feeling intimidated by finding the time to do so — it works. “It is a game-changer,” Silva says. “I prepare for them. I have three topics that I want to think about, I carve up the day, I have data that I take with me beforehand, or I talk to people beforehand to prepare, but then I just think really deeply about things that are coming up or around the corner. “These are some of the times where you might say ‘there’s been a lot of external shocks to the system, is this program still fit for purpose?’ and just look at all the data and code some questions. I think my team sometimes, maybe dislike it because I come back from my thinking day (and put) lots of things in their inbox. “But it has been a game-changer in terms of freeing up time to just really think deeply about stuff and be strategic, because otherwise you’re just on the dance floor the whole time.” Silva says the impact of thinking days on her mental wellbeing has been profound: her body anticipates the day, she’s aware of what she wants to think about and in the days leading up to the allotted time, she “can’t wait” to just throw the ideas around. She sees little difference between the time being blocked out in her diary and attending an off-site. “You can’t book meetings on it, it’s not a luxury — this is actually contributing to the future of our business and our operations and our people in Google Australia and New Zealand and it’s the most important thing.” Google’s omnipresence makes it one of the most intriguing companies in Australia, often never far from the headlines. Though it’s for many years been more than a search engine — think Maps, Gmail, Chrome, Nest, YouTube and Pixel phones — the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence looms as one of the biggest shifts in the global tech space in decades. Microsoft’s Bing — for years a distant second or third — has added the power of ChatGPT to its search, boosting interest in what many thought was an internet relic. In May, Google still maintained a 90 per cent share of global search traffic — and undoubtedly enjoys brand name recognition (recall Greens leader Adam Bandt last year chastising a Financial Review journalist to just “google it, mate”) — compared to Bing’s mere 3 per cent, according to analytics platform SimilarWeb. There’s little doubt AI will continue to dramatically shift the landscape for big tech. Silva says companies large and small are increasingly asking how AI can help their business. But she points out AI has been used in Google products for years (that alert on your phone suggesting to leave a little early to avoid traffic? That’s AI) and now it’s just more visible and accessible. Generative AI — that can produce text or images or other media on command — is leading the way but presents challenges. “I think it’s an exciting time. It’s definitely an exciting time to be a CEO,” Silva says. “It’s definitely an exciting time to be on the board of companies that use any sort of technology to be sitting down and asking the questions: How can this technology improve our customer experience? How can it improve our business operations? How can it improve our bottom line? What are the problems that we have today that this technology can solve? That’s where innovation is going to come from. “It’s really hard to predict where things are going to go and innovative companies, many of them Australian, build on top of that platform and create these new areas of economic opportunity. “This technology is really profound. This is game-changing kind of technology. And so it’s about how do you bring the boldness, how do you make sure that you share the innovations that are going to help create the economic opportunity, but also how do you balance that with being responsible — a principled approach, really clear guardrails about how we are going to use it and trying to raise the bar in terms of how industry and society sees the use of it as well.” AI is too important to not be regulated, Silva says, and Google’s role is to work with regulators and governments to explain how it is placing guardrails and ensuring accountability. “When I talk to some of my clients, they’re thinking through how do I put guardrails around what our employees can and can’t share? Or just how do we train people in knowing what goes out into the public domain?” she says. “I don’t want to purport to know all the answers, but I guess what we would like to see is a set of guardrails that everyone can work towards, and we’re happy to input and contribute into those, knowing what we know from our journey so far.” Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said earlier this year that the threat of harm from errant AI deployment kept him awake at night — including through disinformation. He also admitted Google was not yet fully aware of how its AI produced some responses, but said that was similar to how the workings of human minds were also not fully understood. For her part, Silva says school curricula also need to evolve to meet these new technology advances. A mother of three — a teenager, a tween and a toddler — she says watching how young people use this and other new technologies is fascinating. “I would love to know that we are, as an Australian community, coming together to think about what do our kids need to know about this sort of technology,” she says. “What are our schools putting into the curriculum about this sort of technology and how they’re using it? “When I watch the way my kids search versus the way I search, it’s very, very different. It’s a really rapidly moving space. There is a huge amount of opportunity, if we get it right. But regulation is just part of what that ecosystem is going to involve going forward, absolutely.” Pressed on potential bad use cases, Silva responds that everything in the world is corruptible — “a car is designed to be on the road and driven safely, but a bad actor in a car can go and cause horrific damage” — and pivots to the opportunities ahead. Australia can be a world leader in the regulation and development of AI and opportunities for tech talent to build further need to be created. “Some of these will be frivolous and popular and others will be life-saving. We’re already seeing patients where breast cancer images are scanned and they’re detecting breast cancer and lung cancer at rates better than the human eye can,” she says. “Now that’s a technology that you don’t want to not have available in Australia. “What AI is great at is sorting through troves of data and helping make better, faster decisions ... but the conversations that I’m having with clients, and business leaders across Australia is (about) the applications of AI and the cost-saving benefits. What can I do smarter, faster, better, but how can I gain productivity benefits off the back of it?” Silva urges companies of all sizes to think about how their competitors will use the technology, how and where they will create opportunities and to think about some of the problems companies can solve within their organisation by using AI. “There’s also countless ways to spot new business opportunities that you might not be looking at,” she says. “I guess my advice is to fall in love with the problem that you’re going to solve, not with the solution. So rather than going out and saying, ‘I’ve got some AI, how can I use this data’, (ask) what are some of the problems that we’ve got in the business? Is there a way that we could apply AI to it — which is slightly nuanced way of looking at it.” The AI shift is perhaps the most momentous to date in Silva’s tenure at Google. With 16 years at the company already, starting in 2007 as a finance industry marketing manager, in October she marks five years as Google’s ANZ head. Though starting her career in financial services, with stints in the late 90s and early Noughties at AMP, ING and Citibank, her start in technology came at AMP when she overheard colleagues talking about building AMP’s first website. She recalls peering around her cubicle and asking, “can I help?” Questions are a hallmark of Silva’s career and leadership style. While advising new leaders to find their own unique style, she advocates turning statements into questions, particularly if leading a new team and the person and the business are slightly unknown. “The difference between making a statement and asking a question is incredible,” she explains, “and the difference between listening and talking is incredible. “So I would actually very much advise new leaders to carve out some time where they are going to be really intentional ... you’ve got two listening holes, one talking hole and that’s about the ratio that you should be operating — twice as much listening as talking. I’d always recommend that leaders think about how they’re gathering input and how they’re gathering signals from their team. Questions are very, very powerful.” Silva typically works four days each week in the office and one at home — she does the school drop-off on a Monday and finds it easier to keep driving into the office than to head back home. The majority of her week is taken up with the commercial sides of Google’s ANZ operations but regularly works with other teams including marketing and legal. She also juggles time demands such as after-hours speaking engagements, overseas work with her Google peers across the Asia-Pacific region but says she deals with the same issues as other working parents. “I‘m a working mum and I muddle my way through these things like most working parents do, so there’s the working week, sprinkled with netball training, drop-offs and pick-ups and all that jazz as well,” she says. “The kind of norm at Google is, you’re going to be judged on the work you produce, not the time of day that you do it. And so that level of flexibility and focusing on the output has just been a constant for me. I worked four days a week when I came back from having my first two children. I took a year of maternity (leave) with all three of them. And that time is just so precious. You don’t get that back again. You’ll never spend that time back with your kids again.” Silva doesn’t ascribe workplace flexibility to the pandemic, and says if bosses in all industries want to attract and retain the best talent, they have to recognise their people have lives outside of work. That recognition drives the appeal of companies and makes it easy for top talent to choose that workplace rather than one that prescribes arriving at 9am and clocking out at 5pm, she believes. “I’ve really always tried to resist this kind of notion that Gen X and millennials and Gen Y and Gen Z all have different needs. Different people at different phases of their life have different needs,” she says. That’s perhaps an apt analogy for Google itself, which started in Australia in 2002 with just one sales employee working from her lounge room. Today, with a workforce nudging 2000 across all manner of functions, programs and types of technologies, Google’s needs have changed. Silva speaks excitedly about its future in Australia, particularly the Digital Future Initiative. “They’re real world problems and investments and solutions that are just really locally based,” she says. “So that’s super exciting and that’s just going to continue to go from strength to strength over the next year. I think we’ve just, at Google I/O (the company’s annual developer conference), launched an incredible range of products that will be coming to Australia at different varying points throughout the course of the next year. So that’s also something super interesting to be excited about. “And I’m also very excited about my toddler turning three, that’s a huge milestone. Life starts to get a little bit more chillaxed at three.”