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Tech Talks

Welcome to Tech Talks (A Podcast about Technology Leaders and Leadership). We explore the stories behind the most recognisable names in industry and the startups you’re yet to hear from. The innovation, cultural transformation and investment stories driving technology with host David Savage. If you’re interested in the latest ideas on AI, data, cyber-security this is the show for you. Follow and join the conversation. Tech Talks is powered by Harvey Nash, the leading global provider of technology

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All Episodes

00:32:33

My Job Didn’t Exist When I Started Coding

Tech Talks ·

2026/10/19

Eight years ago, Janine Luk was teaching herself to code at night and at weekends while working in marketing. The job she does now didn’t exist. Today, plenty of young people hesitate to start, convinced AI will replace software engineers before they get a foot in the door, and most leaders can’t tell them which skills will still matter. Janine, a Senior Software Engineer at Datatonic, has a blunter answer: treat technical skill as the baseline, because everyone applying for your job already has it

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00:33:13

The Truth About the Paper Behind Global Trade

Tech Talks ·

2026/10/16

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. The industry carrying the global economy is putting serious money into AI that stalls at prototype, because the foundations underneath it (governance, data and change management) were never built. David sits

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00:28:17

Should a 16-Year-Old Have to Run His Own Crisis...

Tech Talks ·

2026/10/14

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 It, the Ada and Nuffield Foundation research with 50 young people aged 14–24. The digital-native generation is bucking the usual trend: they are more wary of AI, not less. She also explains why fluency with

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00:28:46

You Can’t Move Fast and Break the Grid

Tech Talks ·

2026/10/13

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” simply doesn’t apply when the energy grid is at stake. He explains why risk management, done well, is an

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00:32:38

Every CEO Is Living Through Y2K Again

Tech Talks ·

2026/10/12

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, why the bottleneck has moved from writing code to deciding what is worth building, and why treating AI as

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00:35:03

Your Agents Are Junior Staff. Who’s Checking Their Work?

Tech Talks ·

2026/10/09

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 disappear. If fewer juniors climb the ranks, who becomes the expert capable of judging an agent’s work

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00:21:51

Is Your AI Pilot Too Snazzy to Survive Production?

Tech Talks ·

2026/10/08

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 bottom-up AI experimentation spreading through organisations, Frank argues that the companies getting real

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00:30:41

The Green Premium: Why Climate Tech Has to Wash Its...

Tech Talks ·

2026/10/07

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 start a company but a hard place to scale one.They also tackle the boardroom reality of climate tech. Matt

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00:26:00

Is Rewarding AI Spend the Dumbest Idea Ever?

Tech Talks ·

2026/10/06

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 deploying AI without governing it, and why so much of the output is slop rather than value. At Dreamforce, we

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00:25:10

What are Salesforce Investing Their Cash In?

Tech Talks ·

2026/10/05

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-native founders skew younger, why the best of them hire for where the business will be in 12 months, why

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00:39:39

Meet the Company on a Mission to Inspire a Million...

Tech Talks ·

2026/10/02

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 personalised sports stories, in print and in a digital library. Alex argues that AI hasn't removed work; it has

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00:26:38

AI Won't Fix the Hole in Your Roof

Tech Talks ·

2026/10/01

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 data-centre boom needs people on site. Recorded at Dreamforce, David Savage and Salesforce's EVP

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00:42:42

Why I Spent $30k on a GPU and Lost Four Kilos Testing AI

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/30

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 resolves more than 62% of customer chats with zero critical hallucinations. We unpack why he's moving

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00:35:21

What Will You Do With the Hours AI Hands Back?

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/29

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 trigger a decade of process redesign. We unpack whether AI is genuinely handing hours back or quietly

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00:33:43

Would You Let a Teacher Work Two Days a Week in Your...

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/28

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. AI is thinning out the junior roles that used to absorb new talent, and many teachers still can't see

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00:15:05

The Truth About AI Launches: "Is This Real?"

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/25

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 depend on?Recorded at Dreamforce in San Francisco, away from the polished keynote messaging, David Savage

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00:27:59

Is Your AI Strategy Just a Science Project With a...

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/24

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 top of it. We hear why he warned leadership the work could slow the business for the first 18 months,

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00:29:01

From Trafficking Survivor to AI Engineer: Rethinking...

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/23

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 with health benefits and work on production code while they learn. Many don't arrive wanting to be

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00:33:43

Can You Afford Two Transformations at Once?...

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/22

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.David would love you to complete our Digital Leadership Report. To do that, just click here.WhatsApp us

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00:28:30

What Elastic’s CISO Wants You to Fix Before Deploying...

Tech Talks ·

2026/09/21

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 essential for modern resilience.As we mention in today's show, we'd love you to complete( our Digital

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