Social Impact Tech: Google’s Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink, Director of Product Impact, Google.org.

Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink has spent her career finding new ways to apply technological advances to causes benefiting the planet and vulnerable communities, culminating in her position as Director for Product Impact at Google.org, after a nine year tenure at the company. In this role, she leads initiatives for Google’s philanthropic arm that leverage emerging technologies and Google’s expertise to address global challenges. She previously worked at The Bridgespan Group, providing strategic guidance to nonprofits and foundations, and with the U.S. Agency for International Development and International Relief and Development, where her work focused on innovative approaches in post-conflict transitions.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

I grew up moving around the US as the oldest of three kids. My dad served as a doctor in the military so we had the chance to experience different parts of the country with their own cultures. It gave me an appreciation for the many aspects of diversity within the US and taught me to adapt to new places and people. I’ve always been driven by curiosity and think my interest in exploring new things was shaped by this experience.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

The people who have most shaped my career are those who have ceded some of their own power and access to lift me up and who often believed in me before I learned to believe in myself. In my very first job, Frank Pavich was a senior, experienced leader who had worked in dozens of countries and led major programs. He regularly asked for my ideas, invited me to join fast-moving projects, and brought me into discussions directly. Ultimately, I found myself working on project plans and proposals for one of the largest grant projects ever undertaken by the US Government — in only my second year out of engineering school. As someone new to the workforce, it was only in retrospect that I understood how rare this could be, and I hope to be this kind of leader for others.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead. I associate this quote with the time I spent at the US Agency for International Development’s Office of Transition Initiatives, where I was part of a relatively small office that supported community-level action in countries going through a political transition. It was fascinating work, and I had the privilege of interacting with and directly supporting individuals and small grassroots groups who were working to create a new future for their community. By empowering those who best understood and could influence the outcomes they wanted to see, we were able to drive action. I try to carry what I learned from this time with me in my work today — particularly as we think about technology and how it can have the most impact. We know that going to those proximate the challenges and involving them in the development of new solutions is what’s required for change.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

I love to learn and take in new information. I have a knack for remembering things, including much that might seem useless at the time! But ultimately, this helps me connect the dots across information to get to understanding and ultimately to distill themes and possible directions. When I have to quickly get up to speed on a new topic like global education or keep abreast of the rapid pace of technical development in the AI field, I’m often fueled by curiosity. I also try to approach sticky situations with this lens rather than jumping to conclusions.

My engineering background means I like to break bigger problems down to their smaller parts and analyze them, especially when faced with a lot of ambiguity. With the complex social and environmental challenges we’re working with our grantees to tackle, it’s useful to be able to get a picture of the system and consider where the biggest levers are for change. That also helps me to navigate the complexity of doing this work at a large company like Google.

Ultimately, I hope to show up in a way that shows respect and care for the people I work with, the opportunity my team and I have, and the real challenges we’re facing. I try to bring empathy and humility into discussions and operate from the same side of the table to the best of my ability.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our society. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?

The team I lead has two main problems that we’re looking to solve. First, we’re focused on helping nonprofits, governments, and social impact organizations leverage emerging technologies to accelerate and scale their work so they can help more people. Second, so many of the growing social issues escalated by climate change have the greatest impact on the most vulnerable communities. Often, this has to do with the lack of equitable resources available to all communities. This inequity is one of the many reasons why we invest in the development of new technology — to bridge societal gaps.

How do you think your technology can address this?

I’m a big believer in the ability of technology to help solve problems, but also believe that tech only is as good as the people and organizations leveraging it. And we’ve been lucky enough to support some incredibly impactful projects over the years — for example, helping Indian cotton farmers fight pests via an AI powered mobile app and others to pilot machine models and facilitate direct cash transfers during natural disasters. Another recent project we’re very proud of is ClimateTRACE- the world’s first independent, comprehensive, near-real-time greenhouse gas monitoring platform, which is helping identify where emissions are coming from and pinpoint where decarbonization efforts should be focused.

Across Google and in my team, we’re particularly interested in the potential that AI offers to unlock new impact. We know from the organizations we’ve supported that, when they use AI, they’re able to reach their goals in a third of the time and at half the cost (on average). That’s a testament to the impact that AI is already enabling for organizations and the communities they work with — and we know there’s more potential ahead as AI technology advances and AI becomes more accessible to apply. We’re supporting those solutions that are working to reach even greater scale — ensuring they can enable more people or cover more of the planet — while simultaneously looking for the next wave of ideas to support through programs like AI for the Global Goals.

Ultimately, we know that technology solutions can only go so far — to drive change and have an impact, we need to make sure there’s action associated with them. That’s why developing solutions with nonprofits and organizations in communities is so important to us.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?

I’ve always been interested in technology and how it can be used to do things that we didn’t think were previously possible. In engineering school, I grappled with the benefits and challenges that technology can have in society and saw its potential to affect change for vulnerable groups and to help create a sustainable future.

My early career gave me a deep appreciation for the expertise that practitioners have about the issues they’re working on and populations they seek to positively impact. I also saw that, at a time of massive technological change all around us, the social impact organizations I worked with weren’t effectively deploying technology to advance their missions.

My role at Google.org allows me to help bridge this gap by empowering organizations with the resources they need to apply emerging technology in their vital work. Technology has incredible potential to address big problems, but in order to achieve this potential, it needs to be democratized and accessible to organizations already making strides in these areas.

How do you think this might change the world?

I think this approach is gaining steam, and has been a part of the Google.org mission since day one. We seek out organizations with big ideas to solve big problems, and help them scale through funding, mentorship, and technical support from Google volunteers. Our job isn’t to dictate what’s best for the communities we’re serving. Nobody knows what a community needs like its own members. For us, partnership looks like providing the financial, organizational, and technological support that allows solutions to continue autonomously well into the future.

Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

Of course — AI is potentially as big a technology shift as we’ve seen. It presents a lot of opportunities to automate repetitive or time-consuming tasks and free up time for you to focus on more creative or high-value work. In the nonprofit world, for example, it can automate mundane work that takes away from the innovative and creative efforts from people that brought us there in the first place. The important thing is that we take the energy we’ve put into developing that groundbreaking technology and match it with efforts to ensure those breakthroughs are being used for good and benefiting communities in need.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”?

First, you have to start with solving a real problem that could really benefit from a technical solution. We don’t have time to work on tech for tech’s sake. Those who are closest to the problem will be best suited to identify and define the challenge and shape the potential solution. We’ve found that partnerships between technical and non-technical experts can yield some really great results. For example, the work that Medicins San Frontieres is doing to better diagnose antibiotics in low-resource settings was born from a conversation between one of their microbiologists who had just returned from the field and was struggling to support lab technicians there and a computer scientist friend. MSF went on to build Antibiogo, a mobile app that helps laboratory technicians measure and interpret antibiotic susceptibility tests.

It can’t be said enough how important it is to collaborate closely with the communities you hope that technology will serve. Most recently, we’ve seen successes in the development and implementation of FloodHub, Google’s flood forecasting tool that helps combat catastrophic flood damage by equipping communities in harm’s way with accurate and detailed alerts. Flood forecasting was a challenge on its own, but we also had to figure out how to reach at risk communities, which are often those without smartphones or internet access. That meant partnering with aid organizations to build trusted networks that worked in tandem with our technology. After years of trial and error research supported by Google.org, a team of researchers from Yale’s Economic Growth Center and local nonprofit Yuganter, recently released some insights that speak to the value of human intermediaries in ensuring the benefits of AI technology.

AI is everywhere right now — but it’s not always the answer. While it can be tempting to try to incorporate the latest and greatest of technological innovation to problem solve, the simpler solution is sometimes the better one. There’s no need to adopt expensive AI tools to accomplish what a well-designed decision support tool or website can do for an organization.

Ultimately, implementation is innovation. We know that AI systems aren’t going to change anything on their own unless they’re deployed in a system that’s set to take action on the outputs.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

From what I see, it seems like most young people are! I actually think we’ve seen a shift from people feeling like they need to choose a career that’s oriented to social impact or one that’s focused on financial gain. When I was looking for a job out of school as an engineer, I vividly remember leaving an interview and thinking, “I just don’t think I can get excited about optimizing frozen burrito production every day.” — and I went to work for an international NGO instead. More people are moving between sectors in their career, finding ways to have impact in their work regardless of their role, and identifying opportunities in their communities to create change. More businesses are stepping up and making significant environmental and social commitments. In so many ways, it’s different from when I started my career and felt I had to choose — and definitely creates more opportunity for everyone to engage.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

You can check out our ongoing projects at Google.org, and follow us on Twitter. You can also follow me on LinkedIn.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.