The CTO Lens

Sophie and David are back for episode 18. This week, they've set themselves a challenge: run through the week's news without mentioning AI once (it does not entirely go to plan) and dispel five leadership myths.

The five leadership myths cover whether digital transformation really belongs to IT, whether titles actually command influence, whether lines of code equal productivity, whether remote teams need micromanaging, and whether a...

Sophie and David are back for episode 17.

This week's guest is Craig Smiley, CPTO at Plandek, a platform he describes as "Strava for engineers" - pulling together signals from across an engineering organisation to show teams how they're really doing. Craig explains why 94% of companies can't connect their engineering output to business outcomes, why the answer isn't a single productivity number but compensating metrics that stop tea...

Sophie and David are back for episode 16.

This week's guest is Dr. Claire Ann Banga, CEO of eMoodie, who speaks with Sophie and David on the human side of leadership. Claire explains how her background in child psychology led her to build both a mental health screening platform and, now, multimodal AI models that read vocal biomarkers to flag when someone is struggling, why early intervention delivers a 600-650% return compared to w...

Sophie and David are back for episode 15.

This week's guest is Sergei Irisov, Head of IT and Digital Transformation at ZeroAvia, the company building the first new type of aircraft powertrain in 50 years - a hydrogen-electric system that has to survive a punishing web of certification requirements before it's allowed anywhere near the sky. Sergei explains how his team went from drowning in test data to using AI to find patterns huma...

A special CTO Lens episode this week featuring two special guests with some fascinating insights.

First, Ben Rudolph, co-founder of Peregrine Technologies, on what happened when he spent two weeks coding alongside his own engineering team again, why AI is brilliant at solving problems locally but much worse at reasoning about a system globally, and the real-world use cases that show what AI can actually do with messy, high-stakes da...

The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 13 of Season 3. Sophie is recovering from a Tough Mudder this week - 15 kilometres, 23 obstacles and yes, electrocution. And David is in need of another holiday, just 8 weeks after his last one...

Our main segment this week sees our hosts take part in a terrific discussion with Greg Detre, CTO of Mindstone, for one of the most honest conversations about AI-powered engineering the podcast has...

The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 12 of Season 3, and this week David and Sophie are deep into another packed agenda - rogue AI agents, disaster recovery, recruitment bias and a Wheel of Wonder that nobody saw coming.

For our main segment in this episode, Sophie and David sit down with Gordon Lucas, Group Software Engineering Director at PureGym - the UK's largest gym chain with over 600 sites and now expanding into the US -...

The CTO Lens Podcast is back for Season 3, Episode 11. This week David and Sophie are joined by Richard Tworek, CTO at Riverbed Technology, for a wide-ranging conversation on observability, tool consolidation, and why enterprise AI still needs a human in the loop. Plus the Flip Side makes its return, decided for the first time by the toss of a Nicaraguan coin.

This episode covers the fallout from private Claude conversations turning...

The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 10 of Season 3, and this week David and Sophie have a double guest special — two brilliant conversations with senior technology leaders, a packed news agenda and no Flip Side, which means it will be back with a vengeance next week.

This episode covers the UK's new AI minister Kanishka Narayan — and why everybody in the know seems to think he's exactly the right person for the job...

The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 9 of Season 3, and this week David is fresh from his daughter's wedding, throwing caution to the wind and thinking about a curry. Normal service has resumed.

This episode covers Andy Burnham's first day as Prime Minister and the rumoured scrapping of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology - and whether that's actually as bad as the headline suggests. The San Francisco mayor ha...

The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 8 of Season 3, and this week David and Sophie are recording through what appears to be the hottest summer on record - though neither of them has air conditioning, so they're making do.

This episode covers Satya Nadella's five point plan for enterprise companies to stop giving away their most valuable asset every time they use an AI model - and David asks whether it's a bit rich coming from t...

The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 7 of Season 3, and David and Sophie are recording in what appears to be the hottest summer on record - and as it turns out, that's actually relevant to the news agenda.

This episode covers the impact of extreme heat on critical technology infrastructure - from the Eiffel Tower closing early due to a transformer blowout to NHS trusts declaring critical incidents because their scanners and lab...

The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 6 of Season 3, and David and Sophie are both back in the hot seat - tanned, reunited and ready to dig into a packed agenda.

This episode covers Trump's threat to impose a 100% tariff on any European country that introduces a digital services tax on American tech giants - and asks whether it's time for tech leaders to start buying homegrown. RAM prices are rising in what some are calling Rama...

The CTO Lens Podcast is back, and this week Sophie is taking a well-earned break. David is joined by the returning Mal Minhas for a packed episode of news, a fascinating guest conversation and a debut Flip Side argument that ends - as these things often do - somewhere in the middle.

This episode covers the G7 summit where the world's most powerful AI bosses told world leaders in no uncertain terms to stop leaving governance to the l...

The CTO Lens Podcast does something a little different this week. David is away, and Sophie has taken the opportunity to bring together three brilliant women working at the sharp end of AI for a conversation that is honest, practical and long overdue.

Joining Sophie are Hema Purohit, founder of Lotus Advisory and Consulting and a veteran of Microsoft and Google with three decades in tech; Stephanie Stacey, founder of Miss AI and the...

The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 3 of Season 3, and this week David and Sophie have a packed agenda - news, a brilliant guest and a Flip Side debate that gets a little complicated when Sophie switches sides mid-argument.

This episode covers Meta's customer support chatbot being exploited to steal Instagram accounts - and what every tech leader should take from it about deploying agents without really knowing what they can d...

The CTO Lens Podcast is back with another packed episode. David's fresh from a stag weekend involving combat archery, a giant inflatable and some questionable social media evidence, while Sophie's been spotting baby moorhens. Normal service has resumed.

This episode covers NVIDIA's new AI chip for personal computers - and what that means for every CTO's laptop refresh plan. King's College London becomes the first UK academic team to...

The CTO Lens Podcast is back - and Season 3 is here. David and Sophie return refreshed, ready to dig into a packed news agenda, a brand new segment and some big questions about where tech leadership is headed next.

This episode covers the Pope weighing in on AI and the culture of power driving Silicon Valley, Elon Musk losing his lawsuit against OpenAI in under two hours and still claiming victory, and Anthropic raising eyebrows by ...

The CTO Lens Podcast wraps up Season 2 with Episode 20 - and David and Sophie are going out with a bang. Twenty episodes in, they reflect on what they've covered, what's coming in Season 3, and why the world of tech leadership has never been more interesting - or more complicated.

This episode covers Anthropic's Mythos model making headlines again - this time for falling into the hands of a Discord channel of curious hackers who rea...