Marie Teo, Senior Advisor, Global Government Engagement, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, Singapore

1) What does public service mean to you? Can you share more about your role in the public sector?

At the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), an independent not for profit that works with leaders in 45 countries on strategy, policy, and delivery, I have spent the past few years leading our global engagement strategy on technology and AI policy.  

The acceleration of frontier technologies has introduced both great opportunity and challenges to the way that society, economies, and political systems operate.

Governments, political leaders, and key stakeholders are under pressure to respond and harness this, while also managing the risks in a proportionate and pragmatic way.  

My role contributes to public good by equipping leaders with the tools to navigate these questions. 

Increasingly this involves a form of “tech diplomacy”, bringing together actors that are not always naturally part of the same conversation across government, industry, academia, philanthropy, and civil society, to exchange knowledge, build capacity, and identify gaps that need to be addressed over time.

As power and influence over these technologies becomes concentrated, ensuring a broad range of countries can participate meaningfully in shaping their trajectory is, in my view, one of the defining governance challenges of our time. 

2) Tell us about a project you championed. What impact did it have on the community?

For two years running, I led the organisation’s strategy and delivery at the global AI summit series which began at Bletchley Park in 2023 to convene major actors on AI safety and governance. 

This work was fundamentally about institutional and geopolitical bridge-building at a time of growing fragmentation and declining trust in the AI ecosystem.

Many conversations on AI trend towards the overly technical, highly political, or confined to platforms which cannot always facilitate or create the conditions for open and pragmatic exchange. 

The organisation’s unique vantage point advising leaders meant we were well-positioned to understand the tradeoffs and operational challenges they face, and to bring together the right combination of actors, from frontier labs to ministers, researchers, philanthropists and emerging market governments, around issues like AI safety and sovereignty. 

We established ourselves as one of the standout platforms in a crowded, high-stakes environment. Senior leaders described our engagements as among the few spaces where candid and action-oriented conversations could happen across sectors and countries.

In many cases, it led to bilateral exchanges, financing conversations, and strategic alliances on AI governance and scaling AI impact.  

Ultimately, the impact of this work has persisted beyond the summits themselves. 

Decisions made about the development and trajectory of AI, access and infrastructure are actively shaping how societies will experience one of the most consequential shifts of our generation.

Helping key actors build enough goodwill and trust to engage meaningfully on this is a critical part of ensuring the benefits are shared equitably.  

3) As a young professional, how has your unique background or perspective allowed you to identify a solution that others in your organisation might have overlooked?

The first five years of my career were spent working for homegrown regional technology companies in Southeast Asia.

This was a period when the scale of the region’s digital economic growth opportunity was becoming undeniable, and companies were producing solutions that were transforming economies, societies and reshaping social mobility pathways across the region.  

Having an early and formative front row seat to this has shaped how I approached the next five years of my career – working more closely with governments navigating the opportunities and risks of rapid technological growth.  

First, there can be assumptions that governments, particularly in emerging markets, do not fully grasp the scale of the technological opportunity.

In reality, many in these regions have already experienced tech-enabled leapfrogging and policymakers are acutely aware of both the urgency and potential of these developments.  

Second, my experience working on the industry side gave me an understanding of the incentives that underpin them and how they operate, and therefore the importance of agile, flexible, and proportionate governance.

Innovation and regulation are sometimes framed as opposing forces. In practice, the best outcomes usually come from governance models that create enough trust and clarity for innovation to scale responsibly. 

Third, being from the region, I’m personally invested in the importance of representation in global technology conversations.

Decisions made today are increasingly concentrated amongst a small group of actors but will have an outsized impact on countries everywhere, many of which have the most to both gain and lose from getting this transition right.

I’ve tried to consistently champion these perspectives in spaces where they are not always adequately reflected. 

4) What is your personal strategy for maintaining your creative energy when faced with bureaucracy?

I challenge the notion that bureaucracy is inherently negative.

Particularly in government and international policy settings, it reflects the balance of competing risks, incentives and stakeholders.

Recognising this has helped me reframe the purpose that bureaucracy serves.

My creative energy returns when I shift towards understanding the constraints and working to find solutions to surmount or navigate them and finding pragmatic pathways forward. 

I also remind myself that meaningful, durable change is rarely linear. I return frequently to Dr Martin Luther King Jr.’s observation that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice”.

Public sector progress can feel slow or incremental, but policy change and institution building is a long-term effort.   

5) If you had just one area to invest in to accelerate transformation in the public sector (regulation, technology, talent, etc.), which one would you choose and why?

The hardest public sector problems are rarely purely technical or purely political, they sit across domains, sectors, and increasingly across borders. 

Governments need more people who understand how different systems think and operate, particularly in an environment where companies are shaping the trajectory of technology at breakneck pace. 

Conversely, companies misunderstand state constraints and are disconnected from implementation realities that governments face. 

As such, I would invest in greater cross-sector exposure and mobility between government, technology, academia and civil society. 

If technology is set to continue evolving quickly, but institutions are able to learn, adapt and collaborate, cultivating more people who can translate, build trust, and connect across these domains, will enable meaningful public impact.  

6) What is your greatest ambition as you grow in your public service career?

My ambition is less about reaching a place or position, and more about striving for mastery in what I choose to do.

My career has shape-shifted in ways I could never have anticipated, across technology, policy, and international engagement.

But the consistent north star is trying to find the intersection between my skills and strengths, and what is most needed in the world at a particular moment in time, and honing that. 

I hope to keep building expertise, judgment and the perspective needed to contribute meaningfully and remain useful as I grow in my career.  

7) What is a “universal value” that connects everyone in your department – from interns to directors – and how do you use that to drive collaboration?

The universal value that connects people across my current organization is a shared belief in progress and the idea that governments and institutions can meaningfully improve outcomes for people.  

Mission-driven organisations naturally attract people who care enormously about the work they do. This is what makes them powerful and equally what makes collaboration occasionally challenging.

Strong views, principled disagreements and rigorous debate are par for the course when people are personally invested in the outcome. 

Overall, I think good collaboration does not always mean complete alignment.

It means fostering an environment where discussion can happen healthily, people are transparent about their views, and respect is maintained when consensus cannot be reached.

In practice, I’ve found some of the strongest teams are not ones without tension but those that navigate it with intellectual honesty and respect. 

8) What is the best piece of advice you’ve got for the next generation of public servants?

Working in public service or for public good requires you to stay hopeful and resilient without becoming detached. 

We are currently operating in a period of enormous global change. Governments and mission-driven organisations are under intense pressure to adapt and respond quickly.

That can make public-interest work feel difficult, uncertain and emotionally exhausting. 

I think there is sometimes a tendency to respond to this by encouraging people to become less personally invested in their work. My experience has been the opposite.

The people who create meaningful impact are often those who care deeply but who also learn how to sustain themselves over the long term. 

For the next generation of public servants, my advice would be to protect a sense of purpose, while also building the resilience, perspective and support systems needed to continue doing difficult work over time. 

9) What is a myth you wish to debunk about young public servants?

I would challenge the notion that young people working in service of the public good are driven by idealism or naivete.

My experience has been that many are exceptionally pragmatic because they have seen firsthand the consequences when systems fail to meet the demands and needs of people.

The combination of realism and optimism is what I think sustains many people working in public interest roles. 

10) Write a letter to your future self in 2035. Please keep it within 200 words.

I hope that in 2035, you have fully applied yourself to the opportunities and responsibilities you were given, and that you approached your work with seriousness, integrity, and a great deal of care and judgment.  

I hope you’ve remained intellectually curious and continued to seek out perspectives different from your own especially about the work (technology, politics, history, and human progress) because you recognise that there is always more to know and understand.  

If you’ve managed to stay useful and principled through all of the change that has inevitably come, that is something to be proud of.