Tech Talks

Hosted by Harvey Nash

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Episodes

945

Latest episode

Oct 2026

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EN-GB

About the show

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 and talent solutions. Find out more about our solutions at https://www.harveynash.co.uk/

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60 recent

October 16, 202633 min

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. 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 down with Steve Hemmings, Client CTO at Insight, to unpack three things: why maritime fell behind, what shipping could learn from how airlines move your luggage, and his “cart to market” model for spotting who is pulling your transformation forward and who is dragging it back. If you’ve ever bought another tool because nobody used the last one, press play. If you’re heading to Web Summit and looking for a different way to meet attendees, we’re hosting a breakfast run club on Tuesday November 10th at 7am. Come and meet some new, friendly faces: ⁠https://luma.com/mpv6bmso⁠ Tech Talks is powered by Harvey Nash, the leading global provider of technology and talent solutions. Click ⁠here⁠ to learn more about our services. The music on Tech Talks is created by London artist ⁠Lemzi⁠ .

October 14, 202628 min

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 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 interfaces is no substitute for social maturity. They discuss the hidden costs of putting AI into real workflows. Ada’s research on social workers using AI transcription found strong enthusiasm, but also inconsistent use, hallucinated records and unresolved questions about liability. They also cover why individually sensible decisions to cut entry-level hiring could create a sector-wide talent crisis. On regulation, Gaia explains the “Swiss cheese” model of layered defences and why middle powers can still set conditions for access to their markets. She also describes how surprised the public is that chatbots aren’t regulated already. She closes with advice for 20-year-olds: critical thinking, broad skills, and an experiment that shows how much human knowledge AI models simply can’t see. David would love you to complete our Digital Leadership Report. To do that, just click ⁠⁠here⁠⁠ . WhatsApp us your comments and questions on +447392087344 Tech Talks is powered by Harvey Nash, the leading global provider of technology and talent solutions. Click ⁠⁠here⁠⁠ to learn more about our services. The music on Tech Talks is created by London artist ⁠⁠Lemzi⁠⁠ .

October 13, 202628 min

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 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 engine for growth rather than a cost to be controlled, and how pricing fixed contracts three years out depends on deep regulatory and domain knowledge, not just clever models. David presses him on a question every buyer of AI should be asking: if your provider runs on agents, how can you trust today’s price in two and a half years? They also tackle the jobs question head-on. With graduate roles down by a third since ChatGPT launched, Berian argues that AI-native graduates may actually have a head start, and that today’s shift in engineering is the next leap in abstraction, much like the move from assembly to compilers. David would love you to complete our Digital Leadership Report. To do that, just click ⁠here⁠ . WhatsApp us your comments and questions on +447392087344 Tech Talks is powered by Harvey Nash, the leading global provider of technology and talent solutions. Click ⁠here⁠ to learn more about our services. The music on Tech Talks is created by London artist ⁠Lemzi⁠ .

October 12, 2026Episode 104332 min

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 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 a time-saver misses its real value: running thousands of experiments at once. We also get into the token budgets CFOs have no idea how to plan, and the question Neil wishes more leaders asked: what does all this do to us as a society? Press play if your job title is about to mean something different. If you’re heading to Web Summit and looking for a different way to meet attendees, we’re hosting a breakfast run club on Tuesday November 10th at 7am. Come and meet some new, friendly faces: https://luma.com/mpv6bmso Tech Talks is powered by Harvey Nash, the leading global provider of technology and talent solutions. Click here to learn more about our services. The music on Tech Talks is created by London artist Lemzi .

October 9, 2026Episode 104235 min

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 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? Jenny, former global CIO for specialty lines at Intact Insurance and now an adviser to executive teams placing their AI bets, unpacks her human-AI delegation ladder, research suggesting 70% of AI success is process, people and change, and why your visibility inside AI answers is the new search problem. Press play before you hand over another decision you can no longer check. On today’s show we also talk about “I love it, but I hate it”; a piece of research from Nuffield Health and the Ada Lovelace Institute into the impact of digital on young people. Read the report here . Follow us on Instagram! Tech Talks is powered by Harvey Nash, the leading global provider of technology and talent solutions. Click here to learn more about our services. The music on Tech Talks is created by London artist Lemzi .

October 8, 202621 min

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 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 value aren't the ones with the flashiest pilots. They're the ones that treat autonomy as something an agent earns. David would love you to complete our Digital Leadership Report. To do that, just click ⁠here⁠ . WhatsApp us your comments and questions on +447392087344 Tech Talks is powered by Harvey Nash, the leading global provider of technology and talent solutions. Click ⁠here⁠ to learn more about our services. The music on Tech Talks is created by London artist ⁠Lemzi⁠ .

October 7, 202630 min

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 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 describes a world where "net zero" has become a dirty word, and where the green premium is a non-starter with finance directors. In that world, the only sustainable path is technology that wins on pure economics. Matt also shares how Supercritical hires for fit before technical skill, and why the company invests in interns and school outreach for a generation struggling to get on the ladder. Finally, he explains why tritium, the scarce fuel that powers most fusion reactors, is the fusion story more people should be talking about. David would love you to complete our Digital Leadership Report. To do that, just click ⁠here⁠ . WhatsApp us your comments and questions on +447392087344 Tech Talks is powered by Harvey Nash, the leading global provider of technology and talent solutions. Click ⁠here⁠ to learn more about our services. The music on Tech Talks is created by London artist ⁠Lemzi⁠ .

October 6, 2026Episode 103926 min

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 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 unpack why the model is no longer the limiting factor, how a switch to usage-based pricing changed who gets access, why vendors quietly switching on AI is the governance gap nobody budgets for, and why he's relieved he no longer owns security. If your AI spend is climbing faster than your confidence in what it returns, press play. WhatsApp us your comments and questions on +447392087344 Tech Talks is powered by Harvey Nash, the leading global provider of technology and talent solutions. Click here to learn more about our services. The music on Tech Talks is created by London artist Lemzi .

October 5, 2026Episode 103825 min

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 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 "a few years out" is no excuse to wait on space technology, why Europe's founders are building everywhere but still lack the compute, and what ambient agents will mean for your working day. If you want the next five years through the eyes of someone paid to bet on them, press play. WhatsApp us your comments and questions on +447392087344 Tech Talks is powered by Harvey Nash, the leading global provider of technology and talent solutions. Click here to learn more about our services. The music on Tech Talks is created by London artist Lemzi .

October 2, 2026Episode 103739 min

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 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 stripped out the routine and left a relentless stream of high-stakes calls on risk, compliance and accuracy, with children on the platform and rights holders scrutinising every frame. We unpack why they build artwork from 3D models rather than generating it, why a printed book still beats an app, and why Mark stopped blaming the phone. WhatsApp us your comments and questions on +447392087344 Tech Talks is powered by Harvey Nash, the leading global provider of technology and talent solutions. Click ⁠here⁠ to learn more about our services. The music on Tech Talks is created by London artist ⁠Lemzi⁠ .