The CTO Lens

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.

Season 3: Episode 1 - The Product Manager Ratio That's Dividing Tech + The Pope Denounces AI

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 quietly acquiring and shutting down Stainless - infrastructure used by almost every major AI company. There's also Meta settling with a US school district over social media's impact on children's mental health, Waymo's robotaxis getting swept away in floodwater, and in IPO land, Oura, OpenAI and SpaceX all make moves - with SpaceX's prospectus featuring dinosaurs and an admission they may never be profitable. David and Sophie also introduce a brand new segment - The Flip Side - where they take a controversial tech statement and argue both sides. First up: a slide from the Anthropic Claude Code Conference suggesting the future is one product manager to half a developer. Leaner teams or just buggier software?

Season 2: Episode 20 - What Nobody Is Telling Fractional Workers About AI (Season Finale)

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 really shouldn't have had access. Apple bids farewell to Tim Cook and welcomes John Turnus as the new CEO, bringing with him a refreshingly humble philosophy on leadership. There's also a juicy Apple bug fix that will interest anyone who's ever deleted a message they'd rather forget. David and Sophie also dig into the Google Cloud Next conference - new AI chips, a Workspace Intelligence suite and Gemini's enterprise agent platform - and ask whether Google has simply been asleep at the wheel or playing a very long game. On the Elon front, Tesla is upping its capex to $25 billion, millions of owners are facing unexpected hardware upgrades, and a Waymo car drove through a police cordon in North London - though there's a twist. David also makes the case for insourcing tech talent and asks whether the UK could build its own Silicon Valley if it really wanted to. The big conversation this episode is one that's been bubbling all season - what happens to consultants and fractional workers when AI makes them 10x faster? Should they charge more, less, or invent an entirely new model? David may or may not have accidentally invented one live on air. The mid-episode game returns for its season finale - who will clinch the title? And in the listener mailbag, the team tackle whether anyone can ever truly curate AI, and when - if ever - AI processing will run out of power. To give us feedback on the CTO Lens Podcast, you can complete this form: https://tinyurl.com/ctolenspod [https://tinyurl.com/ctolenspod] We'd really value any comments you had to improve the podcast in any way.

Season 2: Episode 19 - Liz Kendall, Falling Robots and Data Teams Are More Important Than You Think!

The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 19, and this week David and Sophie are firing on all cylinders with a packed news agenda and a guest who really knows his way around a data pipeline. This episode covers Roblox's controversial facial analysis age checks - and whether that's really the best we can do for child safety online. The UK's AI minister Liz Kendall gets the David and Sophie treatment after it emerged she doesn't actually use AI in her job. Sweden's decision to ditch screens and go back to pens and paper in classrooms raises some uncomfortable questions about where tech actually belongs. Allbirds' spectacular pivot from eco-friendly footwear to AI compute infrastructure gets a thorough reality check. And Tinder and Zoom want to scan your eyeball to prove you're human - with Sam Altman's fingerprints all over it. David and Sophie also sit down with Shamim Mirzai, Head of Data Engineering and AI at Atheneum, for a grounded and genuinely fascinating conversation about how software, platform and data teams are evolving - who owns what, where the friction lives, and why your data engineering team might just be the most strategically important people in your organisation right now. Shamim brings decades of experience across banking, shipping, hospitality and tech - including a memorable stint at Mumsnet - and some refreshingly practical thinking on what it actually takes to make AI initiatives work at scale. And in this week's listener mailbag, David and Sophie tackle the questions keeping tech leaders up at night - do we still need project managers, who's accountable when AI writes bad code, and should engineers be paid more for doing 5x the work with AI? As ever, they don't always have the answers, but they're asking the right questions. Link for London Tech Leaders Upcoming Events: https://luma.com/londontechleaders [https://luma.com/londontechleaders] Link for London Tech Leaders Engineering Summit: https://registration.crowdcomms.com/londontech2026 [https://registration.crowdcomms.com/londontech2026]