Tech Talks

Stuart 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 question; the right one is how much you'll save. 

He unpacks the real economics of AI transformation, the relentless discipline it takes to stay current, and the personal sacrifice behind every entrepreneurial bet. A blunt reframe of cost, risk, and what build...

General 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 compares AI to a toddler ("it'll get there, but a lot happens on the way"), unpacks why token costs are about to explode, and makes the case that AI should be sold as an amplifier, not a replacer.

Today's episode is a sharp, practical look at where enterpris...

Moletsane 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 wastewater instead of landfill, cutting reliance on a global supply chain split between mines in Africa, Australia and Russia, and manufacturing concentrated in China.

From childhood scarcity to a £700k pre-seed raise and deals covering 56% of UK water, this ...

AI 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 Experience, Laura Modiano, doesn't dispute that. But she thinks the conversation stops one step too early...

On this episode, David pushes her on the trade-off directly: if AI is closing doors inside large companies, is "just start your own business" a genuine ans...

Patrick 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 grown from a Manchester ambition into a San Francisco-headquartered company with a research lab still rooted in the North of England. David and Patrick talk continuous authentication, the ethics of training AI on consented human behaviour, why the UK keeps ...

Is 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 hurdle; it’s an operational maturity test.

In this episode, we unpack why regulated industries are ahead, the real threat of ignoring employee upskilling, and how to build a cross-functional framework that keeps your business agile.

We are also discus...

AI agents write code faster than we can review it, shifting software developers from builders to managers of virtual colleagues.

Chris Plowman, Director of Enterprise Architecture, Data and AI at Slalom, joins David to unpack this existential shift. Why are we returning to the age of the generalist? And why are CIOs discarding business fundamentals in a rush to implement AI?

As we mention in today's show, we'd love you to complete o...

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 hiring platforms make data p...

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 rebuild an organization at the speed of Silicon ...

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: real, quantifiable business RO...

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 semantic layer. Todays show underscores why it is...

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 work backward from real impact and get to deterministic, f...

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 clinic to its most sacred interaction: the docto...

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 institutional baggage isn't about cutting jobs. This is AI leadershi...

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 less to skill than to who she chose to help ...

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

➡️ The NLP Logical Levels fra...

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 bottleneck nobody's pricing into the AI ...

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 missing from the conversation about ...

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 at a critical fork in the road between closed a...