About this podcast
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
The newest 50 of 962 episodes
- Is Your IT Team Fixing Problems It Created? · 34 min · Season 1 Episode 1064A hospital porter is caught hiding a wheelchair in a cupboard because, as he puts it, "it's my wheelchair". The tracking app that found him had never been announced. By the end…
- Can You Take Responsibility for Work You Can’t Check? · 30 min · Season 1 Episode 1063Twenty-odd years getting very good at writing software. Then more than a year without writing a single line of code, and no plans to start again. The first thing he felt wasn’t…
- Has Your Career Already Gone Nonlinear? · 15 min · Season 1 Episode 1062For about ten years, Adrienne Adhami said yes to everything, until she realised no single commitment was getting her best. She isn’t alone. At the MyPholyo Playground launch, in…
- Everyone Wants AI, Nobody Knows Why · 26 minRecorded live at Pax8 Beyond EMEA 2026. David sits down with Libby McIlhany, Chief Product Officer at Pax8, the night before her innovation keynote. They cover the questions the…
- Every Human Needs an Agent. Every Agent Needs a Human. · 29 minAsk a company's youngest employee whether they use AI, and you might hear about ten free Gmail accounts, each fed contracts until the credits run out. That story, told by Nick…
- Is the Person You Hired Actually the One Doing the Work? · 27 minA candidate clears every stage of a hiring process and reaches final screening. Then the liveness check flags them as AI-generated. The client's first instinct? Assume the…
- Drink Your Own Champagne, But Don’t Drink Alone · 27 min · Season 1 Episode 1058The people who built your client relationships may no longer be equipped to have the conversation your customers now want. That is the dilemma Harald Nuij, EMEA CEO at Pax8…
- If Your AI Agent Goes Wrong, Whose Name Is On It? · 35 min · Season 1 Episode 1057Last year, Harvey Nash’s Digital Leadership Report found a third of firms seeing a return on AI. This year it says two-thirds. David thinks that’s rubbish, and Faye Murray, Field…
- The Truth About 'Good Enough' AI · 22 minEight years ago, Gene Reich was running an MSP and worried about help desk phishing: callers who weren't who they claimed to be, and sensitive data littered across email and…
- No Time to Mourn: Building a Tech Career Through a War · 31 min · Season 1 Episode 1055One morning, Diana Kocheva learns that the classmate she’d sat beside since she was seven has died. There is no time to mourn. There’s work, a podcast to record, and a mother in…
- Are You Assembling the Avengers While the Moment Passes? · 28 min · Season 1 Episode 1054For his last documentary, David flew a sound engineer and a TV production crew to a dry lake bed in the Nevada desert, just to record his footsteps and a passing car. Four hotel…
- Why I Was Grateful When COVID Killed My Business · 21 min · Season 1 Episode 1053In 2020, every bar and restaurant shut, and the social media marketing business Tom Shaw had built for them went with them. With no clients left to answer to, he decided to learn…
- Why My Investment App Knew I Was on the Phone · 30 min · Season 1 Episode 1052Justin Pagano was on a phone call when he opened his investment app, and a banner appeared: we’re not calling you, and we’d never ask for this. No block, no extra step, just a…
- Data in Sport: Can Numbers ever Overrule Gut Feeling? · 17 minDavid grabs Will Morgan, Principal Data Scientist at the Rajasthan Royals, on the floor at Data Decoded in Manchester, the day before they share a stage. Will went from 12 years…
- The Ad Is Cringe. 300 Million Views Don’t Care. · 42 min · Season 1 Episode 1050You watch an ad and wince. It’s clumsy, it’s cringe, and you can’t imagine it converting anyone. Then it racks up 300 million views and converts brilliantly. For Ada Mockute…
- Is Your Data Lying to Your Board? · 20 minWhat happens when a prediction lands on a board slide and everyone treats it as a fact? Recorded live at Data Decoded, David sits down with transformation leader and founder Lucy…
- My Job Didn’t Exist When I Started Coding · 33 min · Season 1 Episode 1048Eight 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…
- The Truth About the Paper Behind Global Trade · 33 minSomewhere 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…
- Should a 16-Year-Old Have to Run His Own Crisis Helpline? · 28 minIs 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…
- You Can’t Move Fast and Break the Grid · 29 minWhat 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…
- Every CEO Is Living Through Y2K Again · 33 min · Season 1 Episode 1043Overnight, 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…
- Your Agents Are Junior Staff. Who’s Checking Their Work? · 35 min · Season 1 Episode 1042At 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…
- Is Your AI Pilot Too Snazzy to Survive Production? · 22 minWhat 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…
- The Green Premium: Why Climate Tech Has to Wash Its Own Face · 31 minDavid 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…
- Is Rewarding AI Spend the Dumbest Idea Ever? · 26 min · Season 1 Episode 1039Last 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…
- What are Salesforce Investing Their Cash In? · 25 min · Season 1 Episode 1038For 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…
- Meet the Company on a Mission to Inspire a Million Children to Read · 40 min · Season 1 Episode 1037Every 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…
- AI Won't Fix the Hole in Your Roof · 27 min · Season 1 Episode 1036A 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…
- Why I Spent $30k on a GPU and Lost Four Kilos Testing AI · 43 min · Season 1 Episode 1035Three 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…
- What Will You Do With the Hours AI Hands Back? · 35 min · Season 1 Episode 1034When 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…
- Would You Let a Teacher Work Two Days a Week in Your Team? · 34 min · Season 1 Episode 1033What 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…
- The Truth About AI Launches: "Is This Real?" · 15 min · Season 1 Episode 1032The 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…
- Is Your AI Strategy Just a Science Project With a Budget? · 28 min · Season 1 Episode 1031Most 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…
- From Trafficking Survivor to AI Engineer: Rethinking Who Belongs in Tech · 29 min · Season 1 Episode 1030Too 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…
- Can You Afford Two Transformations at Once? Productivity Leakage and the 20% AI Reality Check · 34 min · Season 1 Episode 1029If 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…
- What Elastic’s CISO Wants You to Fix Before Deploying Autonomous AI · 29 min · Season 1 Episode 1028How 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…
- Language Still a Barrier? Not for Much Longer. · 26 min · Season 1 Episode 1027DeepL'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…
- What Do You Need to Sacrifice to Succeed? · 27 min · Season 1 Episode 1026Stuart 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…
- Can Governance Actually Keep AI's Toddler Phase in Check? · 30 min · Season 1 Episode 1025General 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…
- The Borehole That Built a Rocket · 23 min · Season 1 Episode 1024Moletsane 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…
- AI Broke the Career Ladder. Did It Build a Replacement? · 41 min · Season 1 Episode 1023AI 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…
- Is the UK Crippling Talent with a Funding Crisis? · 25 min · Season 1 Episode 1022Patrick 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…
- Forget the Regulation: Why the EU AI Act is an Operational Maturity Test · 35 min · Season 1 Episode 1021Is 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…
- Managing the Hyper-Confident Machine: The Reality of AI Code · 29 min · Season 1 Episode 1020AI agents write code faster than we can review it, shifting software developers from builders to managers of virtual colleagues. Chris Plowman, Director of Enterprise…
- Is Your Period Data Already Being Sold? · 36 min · Season 1 Episode 1019Amber 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…
- The "Silent Sabotage" of AI Adoption (And the Industry Lies We Tell Our Teams) · 26 min · Season 1 Episode 1018AI 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…
- Why Your AI Strategy Belongs in Business Ops (And the ROI We're Too Scared to Measure) · 29 min · Season 1 Episode 1017Everyone 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…
- Six Hundred Million Decisions a Day. Zero Trust in the Room. · 22 min · Season 1 Episode 1016Six 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…
- Is Your AI Strategy Actually Working Backwards? · 25 min · Season 1 Episode 1015Most 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…
- The Price of Inaction: Why Novant Health's Chief AI Officer Rejects the 'Shiny Object' Graveyard · 26 min · Season 1 Episode 1014We 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…
