Tech Talks

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 databases entirely for an on-device architecture, the reality of 'return on mission' funding, and why AI-driven...

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 are set to fail the transition. It’s a raw, honest look at what it actually takes to r...

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 build safely, Arjun shares how to move from framework to code and tackle the one metric everyone avoids: r...

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 "credits," and why enterprise AI is guaranteed to hallucinate without a critical, context-driven...

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 compliance risk of shadow "vibe coding," Stephen shares what it actually takes to wor...

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, agentic walled garden to break constraints, eliminate administrative inertia, and return the...

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 "wither" if they don't reimagine how they work, and why burning down institu...

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 pipeline, what actually helps early-career engineers stand out now, and why she credits her career...

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 tech hiring ➡️ The “digital belly flop”: what happens when a £2m AI project skips change management...

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 what to recommend, why marketers are more anxious about this shift than any before it, and the energy...

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 team shows up to the events they build for, why founder storytelling beats a polished pitch, and what's m...

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. They dig into why AI-native platforms are starting to redefine cloud computing, and why we're...

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 almost nobody outside the industry is talking about what happens when banks try to lend deposits that...

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 chaos, but Jack Tam (SVP of Product and Engineering) says it's the opposite. Today, we're talk...

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 warehouse floor, why 51% of the vote on any AI pilot comes down to whether frontline workers act...

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 face, why 25% of retail loss comes from honest mistakes rather than theft, and why the best techn...

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, and why the C-suite itself (CHRO, CIO, maybe a "Chief Work Officer") may not survive in its current fo...

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 strict ROI are rewriting the playbook for tech leaders. Learn how to navigate spend sprawl and deploy AI tha...

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. We also dig into the AI cost reckoning: why boards have moved past “are we using AI” to demanding real r...

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 own ideas, and why he's refusing sponsorships as he restarts his journey in America. WhatsApp us your com...

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, why workflow redesign matters more than adoption numbers, and why hiring is shifting toward critical th...

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 world flooded with AI content, has authenticity become Gozney's real product? WhatsApp us your comment...

For years, we've measured developer productivity in isolation. Now "token maxing" is pouring kerosene on the fire, creating "agent anarchy" as individuals build local solutions that fragment enterprise systems. SnapLogic CTO Jeremiah Stone explains why optimising for individual AI output is the wrong metric, and why systemic thinking (not token spend) actually drives ROI. W...

Setting up a legal entity abroad used to take 18 months and a small fortune in lawyers. Now enterprise companies are quietly reversing course, closing entities while keeping their best global talent. Charlotte Johnson, RVP at Pebl, joins the podcast to talk about "entity rationalisation," and how an AI model trained on 186 countries' worth of employment law is changing workforce plan...

Today's episode features Checkatrade CEO Jambu Palaniappan, talking about why AI ownership, not AI adoption, is the real boardroom question. He explains why five or six US tech companies still control most of the ecosystem, why open-source alternatives can't come fast enough, and why every business betting on someone else's model is quietly taking on someone else's risk. This episo...