Gayan Benedict has forged an illustrious career in IT and technology. He is at the cutting-edge of global research, policy and implementation of the economic and potentially life-changing technology that is blockchain. Gayan has recently completed a Fulbright Scholarship, is an Industry Fellow at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, is the Chair of Standard Australia’s Committee on Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies, and is the CTO of Salesforce, Australia and New Zealand.
We were fortunate to welcome Gayan back to St John’s College for the annual Academic & Professional Dinner as the keynote speaker.
Can you describe your first memories of John’s?
As for many, arriving at John’s coincided with arriving at university which for me was huge and intimidating. I came from Redcliffe and previously the Northern Territory, and hadn’t been in a big university like that before, so John’s was a safe haven. During O’Week it was great coming back at the end of the day, seeing the same people. It was the perfect way to connect and feel like you’re in a good place in the middle of all the chaos and nerves of the first days of university.
I met brilliant people with diverse backgrounds. I was exposed to and became good friends with a much broader diversity of people than if I’d just stayed home and commuted to uni. It’s a rich experience when you go back after lectures, and you live with different folk.
In what ways did John’s foster a sense of community and belonging among students?
There was a lot of cultural, sporting and social outlets and so all those things gave you ways of interacting with different people; sometimes they overlapped, sometimes they didn’t, but it allowed you to go pretty deep. You didn’t have to be good at any of those things. There were many opportunities to organise or support them. I wasn’t a great volleyball player, but I helped convene. I found that enjoyable and it was a way I could contribute.
Have you gone from what you were doing at the Reserve Bank into specialising in blockchain?
I was the CIO and previously the CTO of the RBA, and in those roles you have your fingers in a lot of pies and have a large remit with a big team. I was always interested technology having a policy influence at the bank and blockchain was one of those unique technology spaces which was relevant to what the bank did. National payment policy, systemic financial system stability, and our national banking operations are fundamentally influenced by the RBA and technology is increasingly at the heart of these portfolios. Blockchain is an emerging and remarkable technology, and I thought maybe it’s something where I can contribute to the broader policy objective of the Reserve Bank rather than just keep the systems running. I grabbed that as an opportunity to make a difference and at the same time obtain my PhD. My PhD at UTS allowed me to stay on as an Honorary Research Fellow once I graduated which allowed me to keep my research interests up and at the beginning of last year, I joined MIT as a Research Fellow. I’ve always enjoyed the intersection between research and industry. The cutting edge: taking good things from research and applying them to industry and taking lessons from industry and making sure research explores the gaps.
That sounds like a huge paradigm shift in the way everything is going to work.
What inspired you to pursue a Fulbright?
A colleague of mine at the Reserve Bank was involved in the Fulbright Association, and I mentioned my postdoctoral research at UTS, and he said that would meet the criteria for a postdoctoral Fulbright. It gave me freedom to explore all the research and gave me the opportunity to take the research to another level and I was lucky enough to get it. It was a fantastic experience.
Was risk a driver for you because AI is so much at the forefront of everything now?
It wasn’t at the time, as part of my industry research role at UTS I started looking at the convergence three to four years ago. My Fulbright application was submitted two years ago which was before ChatGPT, so when we got published at a conference in Copenhagen in December 2022, the initial feedback was it was unrealistic to explore the emergence of AI in the way that we did. Twelve months later it was on everyone’s lips. At the time it seemed like an esoteric thing, but it seemed very plausible to me that made it extremely interesting.
How do you envisage the role of blockchain evolving in addressing global challenges, economic inclusion, sustainable development. What impact will it have?
The key differentiator for blockchain over previous versions of internet technology is the ability for people to collaborate without having to rely on a central company or intermediary. It allows distributed consensus. If people want to agree on how to spend money or on objectives they want to achieve, blockchain provides a standard to do that very simply and without reliance on a central company, system, or government agency to get stuff done. It allows people to collaborate without relying on a central organisation or platform. The second impactful implication is when the internet was first released, it was about companies publishing information which evolved to users themselves putting their own content on the net with social media. Suddenly there was the ability for people to contribute to the internet rather than simply consume what companies were publishing. Being content providers ourselves is what we describe as Web2 and blockchain allows people to maintain ownership of their content. It enables people to assert ownership of content they create and take ownership from one system to another.
Never have we had the ability for individual ownership on the internet. There’s always a big platform like Amazon or Facebook and they get all the data. It’s exciting that it is now possible for people to remain owners of the content and move it around with them. I have a friend who is innovating well in this space and has developed fantastic technology that will allow people to create game characters which they can take from one electronic game to another and move it around with them. We are not that far away from people being able to do all sorts of things on the internet that we haven’t been able to do before.
A good example is if you’re an artist and you create a song and put it on the internet, with blockchain you can potentially get revenue every time it’s played or used, and you don’t have to go through a central music publishing house. That’s where you can assert ownership and manage the value of what you create without having a huge reliance on all these other organisations that take a large chunk of what you’re entitled to.
Absolutely. My initial exposure to blockchain at the Reserve Bank was through its very first application which was cryptocurrency. There was obviously a lot of hype around it, the hype subsided – there was a huge bubble that burst. Out of that initial bubble, technology emerged that has become standardised and accepted in the mainstream. We now have what we call digital assets and digital finance which is a legitimate regulated asset class. Several financial institutions are moving to blockchain-based technology, which was initially introduced with bitcoin and hyped-up cryptocurrencies.
While the crypto-currency bubble crashed, the underlying technology prevailed. Think of the original internet boom just before the Year 2000, where there was a lot of hype, then the crash. But you look back now and companies like Amazon, Google and the company I’m at now, Salesforce, came out of the ashes of that period. They have really changed the entire world economy, not just their industries. We are now seeing this with blockchain, where there is hype that subsides but substance that prevails, which, in retrospect, I am sure will be very transformative.
Looking back at the start of your journey, what advice would you give to current and future students living somewhere like John’s and what insights or lessons would you share with them?
Lean into the College opportunities. Sure, you might not be the best sports person or musician but there’s still so many ways to enjoy those things. Give yourself exposure to those things because sometimes appreciation itself is a huge benefit.
UQ’s prestige, status, and quality has gone from strength to strength. St John’s is located in UQ and UQ is very well regarded globally. You can’t talk about John’s without talking about the university it sits within, so make the most of the great opportunities you have while at such a venerable institution.