Sanjiv Ranjan
MEng, ChPP

I've spent most of my career where technology meets reality, the bit where ideas either become part of how people work, or quietly die after the initial excitement.

I started out as a software engineer in the mid-90s, building real-time systems for airports. I could see the internet was going to change everything, so I took a bet on a startup and spent the next few years building payment systems, music streaming and video platforms before most people had broadband.

Later I moved into delivery and programme leadership, and spent 15 years at the BBC helping large, complicated things actually ship. That meant portfolios across iPlayer, Sounds, News and Sport, scaling ways of working across more than 100 teams, and dealing with the part of transformation people usually underestimate, getting change to land in the real world.

AI is not new to me. Back in 2008 I was working on NLP and text analysis products for publishers including the Mirror, the Independent and BBC magazines. What has changed is the speed, accessibility and ambition of the tools.

That is why this moment interests me so much.

I think we are in another real shift, on the scale of the early internet. A lot of the noise around AI is still noise, but underneath that there is something genuinely important happening in how work gets done. My angle on it is shaped by both sides of my career: I understand the technology well enough to get hands-on, and I understand organisations well enough to know that tools on their own change very little.

The hard part is rarely the model. The hard part is the workflow, the governance, the trust, and the behaviour change around it.

That has shown up repeatedly in my work, including helping take BBC Style Assist, the BBC's first production generative AI tool, from an R&D experiment into a live newsroom. Getting the model to work mattered. Designing the human review, editorial safeguards and adoption around it mattered more.

These days I write, build and think about AI adoption through that lens: practical, process-first, and grounded in how organisations actually work.

What I bring

• I've lived through multiple technology shifts and know what real adoption looks like
• I'm hands-on with AI, not commenting from the sidelines
• I understand delivery, governance and organisational change at scale
• I care less about the demo and more about whether something will actually stick