Tech Talks

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 UK businesses and generators buy and sell energy. Berian makes the case that “move fast and break things...

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 leaders as with engineers. He explains why agile teams of seven to nine are shrinking to pods of three, w...

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 entirely as a productivity play, while customer growth goes undiscussed and entry-level roles quietly...

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 team, after more than a decade in and around Salesforce. With IT budgets under intense scrutiny and bo...

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 Ventures and Shell Ventures took three years to land. He also explains why the UK is a brilliant place to star...

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 IT and Business Operations at Smarsh, argues that pressure is exactly why so many enterprises are deploy...

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 and which spaces are worth backing when AI is rewriting the rules every quarter. We unpack why AI-na...

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 Alex Pond (CTO), co-founders of You Are The Star, turn children into the heroes of personalise...

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 surge back into the trades, because no model is fixing a roof or rewiring a building, and the global d...

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. It knows what a lie is, and will use one to avoid losing. That discovery shaped an AI agent that now re...

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 Engineering, he argues that software is becoming infrastructure you never log into, and that the shift will...

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, co-hosts of Tech Journey Insights and both former teachers, argue the stakes are rising....

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 all in on an autonomous sales agent today, or spend that time fixing the data it will d...

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 with data: consolidating 15 insurance systems into a single data model in 12 months before building on...

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 survivors of human trafficking to become software and AI engineers. Students join a 12-month paid programme...

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", navigating player safety regulations, and confronting the hidden tokenomics of enterprise 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, Mandy shares why tightly scoping permissions and deploying deception strategies are essentia...

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 language barrier disappeared, and makes an unusually candid case for talking more openly about what const...

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 it takes to stay current, and the personal sacrifice behind every entrepreneurial bet. A...

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 explode, and makes the case that AI should be sold as an amplifier, not a replacer. Today's episode is a sharp...

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 Russia, and manufacturing concentrated in China. From childhood scarcity to a £700k pre-seed raise and de...

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, David pushes her on the trade-off directly: if AI is closing doors inside large companies, is "just st...

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 North of England. David and Patrick talk continuous authentication, the ethics of training AI on consente...

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 ignoring employee upskilling, and how to build a cross-functional framework that keeps your busine...

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 generalist? And why are CIOs discarding business fundamentals in a rush to implement AI? As we mention in today...