PODCAST · technology
Tech Talks
by Harvey Nash
TechTalks are short podcasts with leading figures in the tech and digital industry today. If you’re in the space, want to be in the space or just interested listen to what these experts say and find out what challenges technologists face in large environments, how to launch a product, or what advice start-ups can pass on!
Episodes
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The Truth About the Paper Behind Global Trade
Somewhere in a port right now, a cargo document is being stamped by hand. By the figures Steve Hemmings has seen, between 60% and 80% of global maritime trade is still on paper. That’s not because the technology doesn’t exist, but because people trust the paper. That trust gap is the real story....
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Do You Know Which of Your Customers Are AI Agents?
A few weeks before this conversation, a global hotel group believed its AI agents were under control: registry, governance, real-time token tracking. Then millions of visits hit its website that nobody could identify. They were personal AI agents, acting for real guests, searching and booking...
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Should a 16-Year-Old Have to Run His Own Crisis Helpline?
Is AI safety really about existential risk, or about the here-and-now? David Savage reconnects with Gaia Marcus, now Director of the Ada Lovelace Institute, five years after they first spoke while she was working on the UK’s National Data Strategy. Gaia shares findings from I Love It, But I Hate...
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You Can’t Move Fast and Break the Grid
What happens when an AI-first mindset meets critical national infrastructure? David is joined by Berian James, a machine learning and AI product leader whose career runs from payments at Square to supply chain transformation at Maersk, energy trading, and now tem, where he’s helping rebuild how…
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Every CEO Is Living Through Y2K Again
Overnight, Neil Fox argues, a developer can become a supervisor of AI agents. That is not a tooling upgrade. It is an identity shift, and most organisations have no plan for it. Neil, Chief Transformation Officer at Artizent, has spent a lifetime in software and now works as much with business...
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Your Agents Are Junior Staff. Who’s Checking Their Work?
At one point, Jenny Larsson was letting AI do so much of her writing that she felt herself getting worse at it, until the words no longer sounded like her. So she pulled back. That small retreat sits at the centre of a much bigger problem. Executives talk about AI constantly, she says, yet almost...
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Is Your AI Pilot Too Snazzy to Survive Production?
What happens when any employee can launch an agent that updates a thousand records before IT even knows it exists? Recorded during Dreamforce week in San Francisco, David Savage sits down with Frank Klensch, who leads technical architecture and engineering for Slalom's enterprise applications…
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The Green Premium: Why Climate Tech Has to Wash Its Own Face
David Savage is joined by Matt Bird, CEO and co-founder of Supercritical Solutions, for a candid conversation about what it really takes to build a hardware deep tech business in the UK. Matt explains why he spends 80% of his time fundraising, and why his Series A relationship with Toyota…
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Is Rewarding AI Spend the Dumbest Idea Ever?
Last year, an IT leader told his C-suite the only thing he could guarantee about their new AI tooling was that they'd change their minds within six months. It took three. Now it's budget season again, and boards are demanding AI savings yesterday. Jim Daniel, Senior Vice President of Enterprise…
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What are Salesforce Investing Their Cash In?
For years, Nowi Kallen's team searched for the legal software platform an entire industry would standardise on, and never found it. Then AI shifted the ground, and the bet suddenly made sense. Recorded at Dreamforce, David asks Nowi, Partner at Salesforce Ventures, how he decides which founders…
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Meet the Company on a Mission to Inspire a Million Children to Read
Every time the writer pitched one more personalised detail, the CTO's workload grew exponentially: hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of artwork permutations for one children's book. Now AI has made that product easier to build and the job harder. Mark Daniell (writer and education lead) and...
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AI Won't Fix the Hole in Your Roof
A customer told Taksina Eammano something that morning that should worry anyone running a physical workforce: 17% of their people will retire in the next few years, and decades of know-how will walk out with them. Her bet runs against the doom narrative. While AI disrupts desk jobs, she expects a...
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Why I Spent $30k on a GPU and Lost Four Kilos Testing AI
Three months after ChatGPT launched, Navan co-founder and CTO Ilan Twig bought a $30,000 GPU, spent months testing uncensored models and lost four kilos in the process. His question: if a model gives five different answers to the same prompt, how do you trust it in production? One finding stuck.…
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What Will You Do With the Hours AI Hands Back?
When Tom White joined Salesforce, his pre-sales engineers (the people meant to be ahead of every tech shift) told him they were totally overwhelmed. His response was to clear their diaries every other Friday for learning, because you can't master agentic AI from the sidelines. As VP Solution...
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Would You Let a Teacher Work Two Days a Week in Your Team?
What if your next hire spent three days a week in a classroom and two in your team? It's the idea Beverly Clarke MBE admits she's putting out "in a really wild way". She means it as a fix for the widening gap between what schools teach and what industry says it needs. She and Rebecca Franks,...
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The Truth About AI Launches: "Is This Real?"
The question Salesforce hears most on the conference floor isn't about features. It's three words from the technical crowd: "Is this real?" Vendors announce strategic direction; the product sometimes lands weeks later. Meanwhile, buyers have budgets to set and a six-month roadmap to defend. Go…
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Is Your AI Strategy Just a Science Project With a Budget?
Most AI programmes begin with the exciting part. Prashant Hinge, Chief Information and Transformation Officer at MSIG USA, argues that is exactly why so many aren't delivering value. He describes how the specialty insurer took a different route, the first transformation of his career to start…
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From Trafficking Survivor to AI Engineer: Rethinking Who Belongs in Tech
Too often, the story of human trafficking ends at the rescue. The survivor leaders Laura Hackney worked with wanted something different: a job, stability, a career. So who gets to build the technology the rest of us use? Laura is co-founder and CEO of AnnieCannons, a US nonprofit that trains...
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Can You Afford Two Transformations at Once? Productivity Leakage and the 20% AI Reality Check
If AI promises 20x gains, then why are most enterprises seeing only 20%? In this episode of Tech Talks, David Savage sits down with Andrew Daniels, Group CIO of Betfred. Together, they unpack the reality of managing AI alongside ongoing digital transformations, tackling "productivity leakage",...
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What Elastic’s CISO Wants You to Fix Before Deploying Autonomous AI
How do you secure autonomous AI agents when zero-trust fundamentals are still lacking? Mandy Andress, CISO at Elastic, joins David Savage to break down the reality of securing AI-driven enterprise data. From Elastic’s "Customer Zero" framework to grounding AI in context to prevent hallucinations,...
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Language Still a Barrier? Not for Much Longer.
DeepL's Gonçalo Gaiolas is building the Babel Fish for real: voice translation that captures tone, emotion, even your own vocal fingerprint, live and at near-zero latency. He explains why DeepL isn't racing the frontier labs, shares a story about a silent colleague who finally spoke up once a...
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What Do You Need to Sacrifice to Succeed?
Stuart Fenton, CEO of Ingentive, joins David to discuss why the AI cost conversation is broken. Everyone asks "how much will the tokens cost, Stuart says that's the wrong question; the right one is how much you'll save. He unpacks the real economics of AI transformation, the relentless discipline...
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Can Governance Actually Keep AI's Toddler Phase in Check?
General Mills' Sanchit Srivastava (Senior Manager Data Analytics) joins the podcast to talk about why unstructured data isn't the hard part of implementation, governance is. He compares AI to a toddler ("it'll get there, but a lot happens on the way"), unpacks why token costs are about to…
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The Borehole That Built a Rocket
Moletsane Mophethe grew up walking to boreholes for drinking water in Lesotho. Now he's founded Metal Morph, recovering critical minerals like aluminium and iron straight from wastewater instead of landfill, cutting reliance on a global supply chain split between mines in Africa, Australia and...
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AI Broke the Career Ladder. Did It Build a Replacement?
AI is thinning out the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder. There are fewer entry-level roles, fewer easy starts inside big organizations. OpenAI's Global Head of Founder Experience, Laura Modiano, doesn't dispute that. But she thinks the conversation stops one step too early... On this episode,...
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Is the UK Crippling Talent with a Funding Crisis?
Patrick Smith, the founder and CEO of Zally, returns to Tech Talks with an update on building the world's first foundational model for human behaviour. Zally is a business that's grown from a Manchester ambition into a San Francisco-headquartered company with a research lab still rooted in the...
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Forget the Regulation: Why the EU AI Act is an Operational Maturity Test
Is the EU AI Act keeping you up at night? Box's Global Head of Public Policy, Leah Perry, argues that organizations are looking at AI governance all wrong. It’s not a legal hurdle; it’s an operational maturity test. In this episode, we unpack why regulated industries are ahead, the real threat of...
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Managing the Hyper-Confident Machine: The Reality of AI Code
AI agents write code faster than we can review it, shifting software developers from builders to managers of virtual colleagues. Chris Plowman, Director of Enterprise Architecture, Data and AI at Slalom, joins David to unpack this existential shift. Why are we returning to the age of the...
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Is Your Period Data Already Being Sold?
Amber Vodegel built Pregnancy+ to 150 million users before selling to Philips. Now, she's back with 28x, a women’s health tracker tackling a massive risk: the monetization and exploitation of intimate health data. In this episode, Amber shares why she's ditching cloud servers and central…
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The "Silent Sabotage" of AI Adoption (And the Industry Lies We Tell Our Teams)
AI adoption isn't a tech problem; it's a profound organisational shift. Wesley ter Haar, co-founder of Monks, joins David Savage to expose the uncomfortable realities of AI: the "silent sabotage" from teams on the fence, the paternalistic industry lies about job losses, and why most enterprises…
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Why Your AI Strategy Belongs in Business Ops (And the ROI We're Too Scared to Measure)
Everyone is pitching enterprise AI, but why is the CFO missing from the room? ShipStation Global’s Arjun Srinivasan joins David Savage to challenge the fluff. He explains why AI leadership belongs in Business Operations, not IT. From red-teaming AI at his dinner table to coaching pre-teens to…
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Six Hundred Million Decisions a Day. Zero Trust in the Room.
Six hundred million automated decisions are made daily at Optimum, but what happens when the human agents go rogue? Today's episode features a conversation with Sundar Krishnan, who reveals why customer service agents override AI recommendations, the long-term cost of short-term customer…
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Is Your AI Strategy Actually Working Backwards?
Most companies chasing AI ROI are solving the maze from the outside in. Stephen Henn, Managing Director of AI Innovation at DLA Piper, joins David Savage to explain why "AI-ifying" a broken human process just gives you an automated, expensive mess. From the token economics of scaling AI to the...
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The Price of Inaction: Why Novant Health's Chief AI Officer Rejects the 'Shiny Object' Graveyard
We often hear about the latest, shiniest AI models, but what is the real cost of doing nothing? Vijay Sankararaman, Chief AI Officer at Novant Health, joins David Savage to explain why he rejects the "pilot graveyard" of tech for tech's sake. Discover how AI is being deployed inside a secure,...
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The Death of the Enterprise: Why the Best AI Model Won't Save You
If everyone has access to the same AI model, what's actually left to compete on? AES Chief Digital Strategy and AI Officer Erin Boyd argues it's not the model, it's the data, and knowing exactly where to reinsert human friction. She explains why she told a room of executives their companies would...
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Is More AI Actually Making You Slower?
Fractional CTO and AI engineering lead Jess Madhavan joins David to unpack why so many leadership teams feel like they're falling behind on AI, and why the real risk often isn't too little AI adoption, but too much of it without governance. Jess and David dig into the shrinking junior talent...
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Is Tech Leaving Women Behind Twice as Fast?
Women are twice as likely to lose their jobs to AI as men. Heather Black, founder of Supermums, has spent ten years building the pathway for women into tech, and she's not interested in the stats alone. In this conversation, she and David get into: ➡️ Why AI is quietly widening the gender gap in...
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Why AI Forgets Your Brand: The Nightmare Keeping CMOs Awake.
Google had rules, but AI search is a black box. Francisco Vigo, CEO of geoSurge, joins David Savage to unpack why large language models default to the brands they already know, and what that means if yours isn't one of them. Francsico explains the bias built into how ChatGPT and Claude decide…
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A Founder's Guide to Personal Branding That Doesn't Feel Fake
How do you scale a platform built on getting people off their screens? Cliq co-founder Nicola Gunby joins our host David Savage to unpack a closely-held funding round, early moves into Australia and Europe, and the tension of keeping community intimate while growing fast. Nicola shares why her…
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Is the Tokenpocalypse Coming for Your AI Budget?
Is your company already living in the AI 'tokenpocalypse'? Anaconda CEO David DeSanto joins our host David Savage to unpack the hidden costs of scaling AI; from a developer burning $300,000 a month on tokens with nothing to show for it, to the compliance risks of data quietly crossing borders.…
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Lorum Explain Why Every Bank Still Runs on 1990s Plumbing
George Davis went from building a cash-flow forecasting startup in London at 18, to crypto cross-border payments, to founding Lorum; a correspondent bank for banks, chasing an OCC license in the US. His argument? The correspondent banking system isn't broken, the incentives inside it are, and...
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Minimum Guardrails, Maximum Trust: Inside Intuit's Bet on Loose Rules
Most companies handle AI risk the same way. Lock it down, restrict access, wait and see. Intuit tried something else. Let people play with the new tools first, under the lightest guardrails they can get away with, and then send in the platform teams to harvest what actually worked. It sounds like...
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Is Your AI Strategy Solving the Wrong Cost Problem?
Most AI conversations are about cloud spend and token bills. Tom Bianculli, CTO of Zebra Technologies, is building the opposite: "tokenless AI" that runs directly on frontline handheld devices instead of burning tokens in the cloud. Tom joins David Savage to unpack what that looks like on the...
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Is Your Store Lying to You?
Every retail store runs on a "plan of record". The perfect, on-paper version of how things should work. But the floor is messier. Everseen CEO Joe White joins David Savage to unpack that gap. We find out how vision AI governs itself across GDPR and global privacy rules without ever storing a…
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Is There Still Room for a Chief People Officer?
AI is dissolving the walls around job architecture, but not deleting it, says Skillsoft Chief People Officer Ciara Harrington. She joins David Savage to explain why the sharpest AI innovation comes from senior leaders, not digital natives, why functional depth matters less than critical thinking,...
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The Death of Tokenmaxxing: Why Enterprise AI is Shifting to Open Weight Models
Are West Coast tech giants losing their grip on enterprise AI? Harpreet Arora from Vercel joins David Savage to break down the massive shift from closed frontier models to open weight alternatives. Discover how data sovereignty, latency, and a sudden shift from speculative "token maxing" to…
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Is Your AI Guardrail Solving One Problem and Creating Another?
Two-thirds of office workers now use AI tools IT never approved. PagerDuty's Chief AI Officer, João Freitas, explains why: guardrails are being built for an ecosystem that changes monthly, and the abstraction layers meant to fix 'Shadow AI' raise a harder question underneath.. data sovereignty.…
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Going Viral, Losing Yourself
When Laurence Benson got stranded in Bali with no income, he turned to TikTok. He has built a massive following, but soon realised that accepting brand deals destroyed his authenticity. In this episode, we unpack the hidden human costs of creator burnout, the danger of using Al to replace your…
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Is AI Quietly Making Your Best People Slower?
We're told AI saves time, so why is complex work taking longer? Foxit's Evan Reiss joins David Savage to unpack an emerging “productivity gap,” where AI speeds up simple tasks but buries knowledge workers in hours of verification. They dig into the hidden long-term token costs of agentic models,...
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Is Chasing AI Efficiency Costing Marketers Their Trust?
Meta keeps pushing brands toward AI-generated visuals. Gozney's answer was to pour real paint over their pizza ovens instead. Head of Growth Kirsty Tansey joins David Savage to unpack why Gozney refuses to optimise for the next purchase, and chase the next cook instead. Today's episode asks: in a...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
TechTalks are short podcasts with leading figures in the tech and digital industry today. If you’re in the space, want to be in the space or just interested listen to what these experts say and find out what challenges technologists face in large environments, how to launch a product, or what advice start-ups can pass on!
HOSTED BY
Harvey Nash
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Tech Talks have?
Tech Talks currently has 940 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Tech Talks about?
TechTalks are short podcasts with leading figures in the tech and digital industry today. If you’re in the space, want to be in the space or just interested listen to what these experts say and find out what challenges technologists face in large environments, how to launch a product, or what...
How often does Tech Talks release new episodes?
Tech Talks releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 940 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.
Where can I listen to Tech Talks?
You can listen to Tech Talks on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Tech Talks?
Tech Talks is created and hosted by Harvey Nash.
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