A hospital porter is caught hiding a wheelchair in a cupboard because, as he puts it, "it's my wheelchair". The tracking app that found him had never been announced. By the end of the day, everyone had downloaded it. Martin Sadler, Director of Digital and Technology Services at Birmingham City Council, thinks that story explains more about technology adoption than most transformation programmes. It also exposes a habit he wants tech leaders to break: causing outages, fixing them, then expecting applause. We unpack why great IT should be as unremarkable as running water, why counting how often people need your help is a vanity metric, why a first-time fix rate of zero could be a triumph or a disaster, and why the industry keeps hiring leaders from the same narrow pool. If your team measures success by how busy it looks, press play.

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Twenty-odd years getting very good at writing software. Then more than a year without writing a single line of code, and no plans to start again. The first thing he felt wasn’t liberation. It was a loss of craft.

Greg Detre, CTO at Mindstone, argues software is the canary in the coal mine, running about a year ahead of the rest of knowledge work. What is happening to developers is coming for everyone else.

We unpack what happened when his team built a million-line code base in three months without a human reading it, then hit a wall where every bug fix created another. Why managing agents is really a management problem. Why two-thirds of one week’s bugs were already preventable. And why the emotional blockers have to come first.

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For about ten years, Adrienne Adhami said yes to everything, until she realised no single commitment was getting her best. She isn’t alone. At the MyPholyo Playground launch, in a cold historic banqueting hall full of board members, founders and consultants, the verdict was blunt: the one-title career is over.

But AI isn’t reshaping work evenly. The research David cites suggests women and minority groups are more exposed to the disruption, and more likely to be filtered out by the tools doing the sorting. In this short audio documentary, David hears from founder June Angelides MBE, co-host Adrienne, Laura Fox and Vivi Koroma Kala on knowing your value, guarding your time and resisting the AI-polished profile. Press play if your career no longer fits one job title, or if you deploy AI that decides who's does.

To dive deeper into today’s show, follow these links. You can find out more about MyPholyo and the Playground event at The Old Palace, Hatfield House here: https://mypholyo.com/playground/. The International Labour Organisation and Poland’s National Research Institute found that the jobs most exposed to generative AI make up a far larger share of women’s employment than men’s: https://fastcompany.co.za/work-life/2025-05-21-the-impact-of-ai-on-womens-employment-a-growing-concern. Research from the Brookings Institution and the Centre for the Governance of AI found that 86% of the six million US workers least able to adapt if AI removes their job are women: https://www.techrepublic.com/de/article/news-ai-threat-jobs-women/. Stanford’s study of around four million applications found that AI hiring tools screened out Black and Asian applicants at higher rates: https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-hiring-tools-can-yield-racial-bias-and-systemic-rejection.

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Tech Talks is powered by Harvey Nash, the leading global provider of technology and talent solutions. Click ⁠here⁠ to learn more about our services.

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Recorded live at Pax8 Beyond EMEA 2026. David sits down with Libby McIlhany, Chief Product Officer at Pax8, the night before her innovation keynote. They cover the questions the industry has started asking out loud: who’s accountable when an AI agent goes rogue, how European businesses handle data sovereignty without their own compute, and whether token costs could become a long-term headache for small businesses that come to rely on agents.

Libby started out in tech as an engineer in San Francisco during the first dot-com boom, and she draws a direct line from “I need a website, but I don’t know why” to today’s AI rush. She also explains why she thinks fears about the “SaaSpocalypse” are overblown. And she makes a strong case to women in tech who hold back because they think everyone else is further ahead: “Don’t ever think that someone knows more than you.”

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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.

Ask a company's youngest employee whether they use AI, and you might hear about ten free Gmail accounts, each fed contracts until the credits run out. That story, told by Nick Heddy, President and Chief Commerce Officer at Pax8, is where shadow AI stops being a slide and becomes a confidentiality breach. Recorded on the floor of Pax8's partner conference, this conversation takes on the stakes for small businesses: firms that will never hire a CTO, can't lay anyone off, and are about to be handed always-on agents with enterprise-grade governance. We unpack why agents will soon prompt humans rather than the other way round, who owns the evidence when a customer changes a policy, and why he thinks SaaS pricing logic doesn't apply. Then there's the blunt maths: 400 million small businesses, perhaps 10,000 providers able to help. Who fills the gap?

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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.

A candidate clears every stage of a hiring process and reaches final screening. Then the liveness check flags them as AI-generated. The client's first instinct? Assume the software got it wrong. Callum Murray, CEO of Amiqus, explains why it hadn't. He also explains why hiring fraud has moved from conference talking point to something security services now warn employers about: deepfake applicants, remote hires quietly handing their jobs to someone else, and day-one imposters who aren't the person you vetted. The stakes go well beyond HR. Callum runs mission-critical software for regulated organisations, which is exactly why he's content to let others take the bleeding-edge AI risks first. We unpack fraud as a service, why basic controls still send opportunists elsewhere, and the honesty gap at AI breakfast events, where nobody admits what fell over. Still think your hiring process isn't an attack surface?

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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.

The people who built your client relationships may no longer be equipped to have the conversation your customers now want. That is the dilemma Harald Nuij, EMEA CEO at Pax8, hears from service providers rebuilding themselves around AI: the pitch has shifted from technology to business outcomes, and the consultants who can lead it are scarce and expensive. Some firms are going further, deliberately firing customers and absorbing margin erosion to come back stronger.

We unpack why small businesses want to do the work of 50 with 25 rather than cut headcount, why five-person companies could soon turn over a billion, why “customer zero” should now run alongside “customer one”, and his candid admission that an industry governance alliance may never fully keep pace. Press play if your team is being asked to transform faster than it can retrain.

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The music on Tech Talks is created by London artist Lemzi.

Last year, Harvey Nash’s Digital Leadership Report found a third of firms seeing a return on AI. This year it says two-thirds. David thinks that’s rubbish, and Faye Murray, Field Chief Data Officer for EMEA at Dataiku, largely agrees: much of that ‘return’ is personal productivity, while agentic AI at scale is still struggling.

The pattern she sees is pilots that start with the technology rather than the problem, with no baseline, no accountable owner and costs that never surface in the proof of concept. Meanwhile, employees are building agents faster than IT can track them, and bans only push the risk underground. We unpack governed self-service, governance proportionate to risk, why sovereignty means being able to switch providers without rebuilding everything, and the question every agent owner should answer before launch: is the action reversible? Press play before you sign off your next pilot.

On today’s show David and Sam discuss a post from Megan Caywood, take a look at here ideas here.

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Eight years ago, Gene Reich was running an MSP and worried about help desk phishing: callers who weren't who they claimed to be, and sensitive data littered across email and ticketing systems. He and Peter Segerstrom, co-founders of Traceless, now argue the problem has escaped the help desk. In a remote-first world, huge groups of people work with other huge groups, and nobody knows who anyone else is. Add AI-powered social engineering, staff vibe coding their jobs, and a Teams flaw Peter says let attackers impersonate colleagues, and identity becomes everybody's problem.

We unpack why people remain the weakest link in the supply chain, why AI may matter more to small businesses than enterprises, and why Gene believes today's AI is already good enough for 90% of users. Then Peter names the conversation nobody is having: a looming crisis of authenticity. Listen before you approve your next password reset.

David would love you to complete our Digital Leadership Report. To do that, just click ⁠⁠here⁠⁠.

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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.

One morning, Diana Kocheva learns that the classmate she’d sat beside since she was seven has died. There is no time to mourn. There’s work, a podcast to record, and a mother in Zaporizhzhia who needs a generator to get through the winter.

Diana, founder of London Tech Community, came to the UK as a Ukrainian refugee in 2022 and now runs a community of thousands of women in tech, while living, as she puts it, between two worlds. If you lead people, some of them are carrying something similar, and it will never show up on a dashboard.

David and Diana unpack who gets labelled a refugee, the online pile-on that branded her a “red carpet refugee”, why luck is the only real difference, the defence innovation the West is missing, and why tech should talk far more about art.

Press play before your next one-to-one.

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The music on Tech Talks is created by London artist Lemzi.

For his last documentary, David flew a sound engineer and a TV production crew to a dry lake bed in the Nevada desert, just to record his footsteps and a passing car. Four hotel rooms, two cities, one soundscape. Most stories can’t wait for that kind of operation, and most opportunities won’t.

Owen Grover, General Manager USA at Nomono, knows the trade-off well: when an interview subject becomes available at the last minute, waiting to assemble the full team can mean missing the moment altogether. It’s a dilemma every tech leader will recognise, whether the prize is a story, a pilot or a product launch.

Together they unpack when a lean kit beats a full squad, why video has proved additive rather than a threat to audio, and where AI should stop: the audience and the creators should always be human.

Press play before you call in the cavalry.

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The music on Tech Talks is created by London artist Lemzi.