Wayne Brown’s tech plan: look to Asia and ditch the AI fluff

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown is about to turn 80 – and is still plainly more interested in the next deal, the next big export market and the next practical problem to fix than in winding down.

In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, Brown delivers a typically uncensored account of how he thinks Auckland should use technology to drive economic growth. He has little patience for glossy AI rhetoric, power-hungry data centres, or Wellington bureaucrats telling him what to do. 

“The government doesn’t know how to grow the economy, so I might as well do it,” Brown told me fresh from a morning visiting startups as part of the Council’s 100 Days of Startups programme, which sees him shine a light on one of the city’s startups each day in the run-up to Startup Week in October.

Brown says the city’s business people told him Auckland was lacking leadership on tech, despite it being home to around 60% of the country’s startups. He established the Auckland Innovation and Technology Alliance a year ago as a public-private partnership to foster collaboration across Auckland’s tech ecosystem.

Better, cheaper, faster

Brown draws on his engineering background and the lessons he collated in his 2007 book The Five Minute MBA to set a simple test for government, council and entrepreneurs alike. What is the problem you are fixing – and can it be solved better, cheaper and faster?

Auckland, he says, needs more firms able to turn local capability into global businesses, particularly in areas that play to New Zealand’s strengths: medtech, agri-tech, and biotech.

And he wants them to look beyond familiar markets in the US, UK and Australia. Brown argues the bigger opportunities lie in India, China, Indonesia, Brazil and Latin America – markets where Auckland’s diaspora communities, city-to-city relationships and sector expertise could give companies an edge.

His assessment of the political scene as the general election approaches is brutal. Brown describes the party-political offering as an “unappetising smorgasbord”, rails against bureaucracy and corporate welfare, and questions New Zealand’s reflexive alignment with America on trade and technology.

He’s particularly sceptical of the current data centre boom that Auckland is playing host to.

“If they want to come here, what will you do for us to have your f**king boxes here? It’s not the other way around.”

He has even less time for artificial intelligence.

Expect strong language, challenging claims and plenty of eyebrow-raising takes. This is no polished mayoral interview. It is Wayne Brown, in full: opinionated, impatient and with his own firm ideas on how to make Auckland the tech centre of the South Pacific.

Listen to the full episode streaming on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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