Season 3: Episode 6 - Human in the Lead - Rethinking AI, Teams and the Consulting Model

Season 3: Episode 6 - Human in the Lead - Rethinking AI, Teams and the Consulting Model

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 Ramageddon, and AI is getting the blame. Ford has quietly hired back the human engineers it replaced with AI after the robots failed to match their skills - and David has some advice for any engineer worried about their job. Anthropic's Mythos gets another update, with more than 100 US government agencies now granted access. OpenAI's Sam Altman launches Patch the Planet to fix the open source vulnerabilities that Anthropic's models were built to expose. And Europe gets its own answer to MANGOES - it's called BRIOCHE, and Sophie is very much on board with that. Sophie also sits down with Amul Batra, co-founder of Northcoders and MD of Counter, for a genuinely fascinating conversation about why the standard consulting model does its clients a disservice - and what a better one looks like. Amul also makes a compelling case for why junior developers aren't disappearing, they're just changing - and introduces a phrase that might be the most important reframe in AI adoption right now: not human in the loop, but human in the lead. And in the Flip Side, David and Sophie ask the question every tech leader should be sitting with right now - in five years, what will companies realise they completely got wrong about building tech teams? Sophie argues for wholesale organisational redesign. David argues for not throwing the mainframe out with the bathwater. They meet somewhere in the middle, as is tradition.

Season 3: Episode 5 - How to Build Sustainability in IT: Embracing Opportunities and Driving Value

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 labs. The US government bans Anthropic from releasing its newest and most powerful models, citing national security concerns - and David wonders if it's just very effective marketing. Apple launches Siri AI and quietly reminds everyone why you should never count them out. Google halves the price of its AI subscription. And Keir Starmer resigns as Prime Minister, which raises the not entirely trivial question of what a new government means for UK tech. David and Mal are also joined by Allard Pheifer, Global Sustainability Lead at CHG Meridian, for a conversation that will make you rethink everything you assumed about sustainability in IT. Allard reframes it entirely - not as a compliance burden but as a value creation opportunity - and shares how he built an AI powered tool that lets account managers build a full business case for a customer in under sixty seconds. And in the Flip Side, David and Mal debate whether the biggest mistake technology leaders make is hiring for technical excellence - and whether character should come before code. They disagree, then agree, then meet somewhere in the middle. As is tradition.

Season 3: Episode 4 - Women in AI: The Biggest Myths, a Deportation & Why the Human Has to Come Back

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 UK AI User Groups, and former lead on the NHS England relationship at Microsoft; and Alina Timofeeva, a tech advisor driving AI and digital transformation based in Saudi Arabia. Together they cover the biggest myths people confidently repeat about AI, why Europe's organisations are losing out by chasing shiny tools instead of building foundations, where real leverage is starting to emerge, and the skills that will actually matter in the next five years. There is also a conversation about power, capital and ownership - and whether women should be joining AI companies, owning AI infrastructure, or something else entirely. It is a wide ranging, refreshingly candid discussion - with a story about an AI-induced deportation that you will not hear anywhere else.

Season 3: Episode 3 - Is the Job Market for Senior Technology Leaders Broken?

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 do. Europe's AI startups face an existential reckoning as token costs rise. OpenAI expands beyond developers to target knowledge workers. ChatGPT confirms ads are coming. An Anthropic co-founder reveals 80% of Claude's code was written by Claude itself - and 100% is possible within two years. A company backed by Sam Altman raises half a billion to bring nuclear fusion to the grid by 2028. And the silliest news of the week - a burglar uses a Waymo as a getaway car to steal yoga clothes in San Francisco, and the police still haven't caught them. David and Sophie also sit down with Simon Hudson, fractional CTO and long-time London Tech Leaders community member, for a frank conversation about the senior tech leadership job market - ageism, inflated CTO titles, why networks matter more than ever, and what experience really means when AI claims to have all the answers. And in The Flip Side, David and Sophie debate whether the rising cost of intelligence should be passed on to consumers or absorbed as the cost of doing business. Sophie argues for. David folds his arms and says no. Sophie then crosses the floor mid-debate - and David declares victory.

Season 3: Episode 2 - "The Best Engineering Leaders of the Next Decade Won't Come from Engineering"

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 access Google's quantum chip Willow, and David and Sophie ask whether quantum computing is finally becoming real or still a solution searching for a problem. GitHub Copilot switches to token-based pricing and some developers are seeing costs jump from $50 to $3,000 a month overnight. There's also a deep dive into token maxing - including Amazon's ill-fated internal AI leaderboard that had to be shut down - humanoid robots arriving on BMW's factory floor with a three-minute battery break, and the growing NEET crisis as automation starts to reshape the jobs market for young people. Plus a quick IPO update on SpaceX's surprise government contract and Anthropic's $65 billion raise ahead of a potential public float. Sophie sits down with Tris Bates, Head of Mobile Engineering at New Day and driving force behind NS London - Europe's largest Apple developer community - for a fascinating conversation about what AI tools are actually doing to mobile engineering in practice, why everyone wants an app, and why seeing through walls using WiFi might not be as far off as you think. And in this week's Flip Side, David and Sophie debate whether the best engineering leaders of the next decade won't come from engineering at all. David argues for the motion. Sophie dismantles him. David awards her a 60-40 victory and hints he might deserve a pay rise.