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In this week's episode of The CTO Lens, David is back from holiday and Sophie is fresh from the London Tech Leaders Summit, as they tackle a familiar challenge for technology leaders: dealing with non-technical executives and boards. With technology shaping almost every business decision, is it still acceptable for senior leaders to say they don't understand it? Or is the bigger risk an executive who thinks owning an iPhone makes them a technologist? David and Sophie explore where responsibility lies, how to bridge the gap between technology and the boardroom, and why a little curiosity goes a long way. (Expect an analogy involving jam doughnuts!) In the news, Starling Bank's move towards sovereign AI raises questions about whether building your own AI model is realistic for organisations without billions of transactions at their disposal. Meanwhile, Anthropic's latest workforce report reveals a shift in how employees work, with fewer junior hires, more meetings and some staff feeling more like AI supervisors than creators. And with growing scrutiny of social media platforms, should technology leaders be paying closer attention to the wider societal impact of AI? Plus, David and Sophie explore TIME's Best Inventions of 2026, from a tactile tablet helping blind sports fans follow the action to a robotic beekeeper that David, an amateur beekeeper himself, isn't entirely convinced by.

Sophie continues season three live from the London Tech Leaders Leadership Summit, bringing five more back-to-back conversations with tech leaders on stories and lessons from across their careers - from rethinking the technologist skill set to accessibility as a business imperative to how boards should prioritise change. This is part two. How AI Is Changing the Technologist Skill Set Aislinn McBride, CTO at Kainos, on why the “T-shaped” skills model no longer cuts it, and why she’s redesigned her graduate academy to put trainees in front of real problems and AI tools from day one - including a no-AI Friday to make sure engineers can still explain and hand-cut their own code. Digital Accessibility as a Business Non-Negotiable Amy Low, CEO of AbilityNet, on why 95.6% of the UK’s most-visited web pages still have accessibility barriers, the business case for designing accessibly from day one rather than retrofitting it later, and why AI agents that can’t navigate inaccessible sites make the stakes even higher. How to Debug Your Product to Know Where AI Can Help Manogna Machiraju, Head of Engineering at ATG Entertainment, on treating every AI use case as a hypothesis grounded in data rather than a C-suite hunch, and why getting a proof of concept into production matters far more than making it look impressive in a demo. Modernising a People-Heavy Business with Agentic AI Brendan Twomey, Group CTO at Pepper Advantage, on moving a legacy, people-heavy credit servicing business off old green-screen systems and building an agentic framework that’s put non-engineers in the driving seat of their own tools. Rethinking How Boards Prioritise Change David Germain, NED and Board Advisor, on why the best strategies stay simple even under competing pressures, how CTOs can build the right relationships to secure capital from the board, and why there’s no silver bullet for navigating AI at board level. Make sure to like a subscribe to keep up with the latest updates on future podcast episodes.

Sophie closes out season three live from the London Tech Leaders Summit 2026. Part one features four back-to-back conversations with tech leaders on stories and lessons from across their careers. Part two follows on Thursday. From leading agentic development for 3,500 developers in a large corporation to building hands-on again at a startup Nathan Luxford, Chief Agentic Officer at Jam 7, on trading responsibility for 3,500 developers at Tesco for a ten-person agentic marketing startup - treating AI agents as genuine teammates, and why “temporal compression” means every CTO should get hands-on again. Building relationships with application vendors, turning them from suppliers into partners Andy Yates, Director of Technology Strategy at Emergent Strategies, on why “vendor management” is a trap, and how treating a vendor’s success as your own turns suppliers into true partners. Individual Change: The Transformation No One Runs for You Hind Diouani, Head of Service Excellence, Risk & Control (ex-HSBC), on taking ownership of your own career transformation - and why knowing what makes you unique matters more than AI literacy alone. Translating Tech Risk for the Board: How technology leaders can effectively communicate complex technical debt, TSA risks, and transformation timelines to non-technical boards and investors to secure buy-in and funding Eleni Kelly, Director at Arion Consulting, on why tech risk is really a commercial valuation problem - and how to frame investment asks around revenue, EBITDA, and exit value instead of code. Make sure to like a subscribe to keep up with the latest updates on future podcast episodes.

Sophie and David are back for episode 19, and once again there's no guest this week - which means it's straight into the news, followed by two of their own segments. David and Sophie spend time on two segments of their own for this episode given no guest this week. First, they dig into the idea of the "accidental CIO" - the notion that many of today's technology leaders got there through years of varied, messy, hands-on experience rather than a deliberate career plan, and what might be lost as the next generation is shaped instead by certifications and narrow specialisms. Then, in a rapid-fire closing segment, they're each handed ten pairs of essential leadership qualities and forced to keep only one from each pair - ambition or empathy, vision or execution, your biggest customer or your biggest engineer - arguing their way to a final top ten qualities for the tech leader of the future. In the news: OpenAI's AI agents were behind what cybersecurity professionals are calling the first reported AI agent-led government website hack anywhere in the world, after breaching both the Australian and US government systems. New research suggesting AI-driven efficiencies in US healthcare insurance may actually be driving costs up rather than down, and what that means for tech leaders trying to understand the wider systems their technology sits inside. A cybersecurity firm's discovery that around 16,000 Supabase-hosted databases - many of them vibe-coded - have been exposing personal data to the open web. And, for something lighter, Google's new AI-powered virtual wardrobe app that finally makes Cher's outfit computer from Clueless a reality. Make sure to like a subscribe to keep up with the latest updates on future podcast episodes.

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 great product can sell itself - David and Sophie agree on some, and push back hard on others. Among the news stories they did find: a BBC piece on social media addiction in over-55s and what it means for tech leaders to build KPIs that account for genuine harm, not just engagement. AWS's quiet admission - six months after airstrikes damaged its Bahrain and UAE infrastructure during the Iran war - that it has permanently lost some customer data, and what that means for how technology leaders actually calculate acceptable risk. The Revolut breach, where nearly 700 customers' sensitive data was handed over to hackers posing as Italian law enforcement, and the case for building a "sleep on it" delay into how teams respond to urgent-sounding requests. And Salesforce's Dreamforce conference outage, which took down the platform for over seven hours while staff were on stage praising its reliability.

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 teams gaming the system (including a brilliant example of a team that hit 100% sprint output by doing almost nothing), and why systems thinking - understanding how a change ripples left and right through the rest of the business - is the skill he wishes every technology leader had. He also gives a refreshingly nuanced answer to whether today's CTOs are tomorrow's CEOs. Before that, David and Sophie go all-in on AI news this week. The Anthropic and DeepMind insiders warning there's a greater than 10% chance AI could wipe out humanity within a decade, and what it means that Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk are all suddenly agreeing we need to slow down. The 94% of companies still struggling to make AI pay. New MHRA recommendations for AI in UK healthcare. And a look at companies pulling AI usage out of performance reviews after employees pushed back on being "assessed on how effectively they can participate in their own redundancy." Plus a run of genuinely bizarre silly laws, a scarily real data centre that runs on living human brain cells, and the far more wholesome story of Google's fully-mapped fruit fly brain being taught to play Doom. To finish, instead of the Flip Side this week, David and Sophie talk through and blind-rank the top 10 leadership traits live on air, working through their reasoning together to land on a final order.

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 waiting until someone hits crisis point (a problem Deloitte pegs at £51 billion a year to the UK economy), and the uncomfortable truth that the very traits that make someone a great leader - ambition, perfectionism, relentless drive - are often the same ones that push them towards burnout. She also shares a genuinely useful tip for anyone glued to a screen all day: protecting periods of deep focus from the trap of media multitasking to get into flow. Before that, Sophie and David run through the week's news: a first speaker announcement for the London Tech Leaders Summit (Kanishka Narayan, the UK's first AI minister, is giving the opening keynote), new research from VC firm Moderna on enterprise AI adoption showing budgets are rising even as pilot conversion stays weak and vendor loyalty collapses within months, the House of Lords pushing for a UK AI "kill switch" as part of the Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill, Elon Musk launching Tesla's pedal-less, wheel-less Cybercab in Austin days after a regulatory investigation opened - the same one Zoox spent years quietly working through - and a wonderfully daft story about a consumer group booking a fake listing for 10 Downing Street on Booking.com. To finish, instead of the Flip Side this week, David and Sophie dig into where the decision-making line should sit between leaders and AI - including the moment David asked Copilot to summarise his team's 360-degree feedback for performance reviews, and it flatly refused.

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 humans couldn't, why governance has to be the first step of an AI rollout rather than an afterthought, and the three principles borrowed straight from aerospace engineering - control, traceability, and fault tree analysis - that he uses to keep AI accountable. He also digs into why so many companies get stuck running endless AI pilots instead of reaching full transformation, and lands on a simple but sharp answer to who's responsible when AI gets it wrong: the person holding the tool, not the algorithm. Before that, Sophie and David mark the first day of autumn with a proper news round-up: the Bank of England governor's warning that an AI bubble could trigger a global economic downturn, a fascinating debate out of Copenhagen's Tech BBQ summit about AI sovereignty - national, personal and professional - and what happens if a country (or a president) can simply switch off your AI access, Tim Cook's departure as Apple CEO and a deep dive into incoming chief John Ternus, Google's new Android tools to fight the AI-driven memory chip shortage, and a hundred AI firms (Google, Anthropic and OpenAI among them) signing an open letter urging governments to shore up their cyber defences before AI gets too powerful to control - plus the utterly chaotic World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, complete with robots catching fire and toppling into judges' tables. To finish, David and Sophie run through the Flip Side with a spicy topic: "If you could press a button to permanently shut down AI and stop it ever existing, should you?".

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 data - from predicting rip currents in Florida to helping close cold-case homicides. Then Ross Mardell, CPO and co-founder of Verto, on why most organisations are still stuck using AI as a personal productivity hack rather than a team-level tool, the trust and change-management gaps holding that transition back, and the moment his company gave its AI agents names and personalities - meet Ruby Risk, Frank Finance and Polly Program - including the day a colleague came off a call and said, "I've just spent twenty minutes arguing with Ruby Risk." Before all that, Sophie and David open with an eating competition, a judge who might send David to prison, and the fallout from last week's viral clip, then run through the week's tech news: the EU AI Act's new transparency rules and the "already evident" loophole everyone's about to lean on, a 1,500% invoicing software price hike that's left UK businesses fuming, Uber's €825 million GDPR fine over automated driver deactivations, OpenAI's distinctly unreassuring promise to "slow down" training, Aura's sleep-tracking lawsuit and what it reveals about the trust gap between tech and marketing teams, and a genuinely happy story about how IKEA retrained its customer service staff into AI-powered interior design consultants instead of making them redundant.

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 had. Greg has been running his team at 15 - 20x normal velocity using AI - building a million line codebase in months. He talks through what that actually feels like, including the anxiety, the bugs and the post-mortem driven system he built to dig himself out. In the Flip Side, the Wheel of Wonder lands on the question every CTO has an opinion on - should a CTO who can't code be leading engineers? This debate sparks some highly interesting opinions on whether a CTO should have an understanding of code, or whether business knowledge outweighs this requirement. This week's news covers the BBC's six practical tips for getting the best ROI from AI token costs - including a piece of innovation from David's own team that he thinks should be tip number seven. Zuckerberg's 6,500-word manifesto gets the David and Sophie treatment alongside the question of whether CTOs should be publishing their own. OpenAI launches UltraFast at 14 times the speed of its previous model. Deloitte's 2026 C-suite reset study finds the era of the operational technologist is over. And the silliest news of the week involves a man in Melbourne who asked his AI agent to move him up a Pilates waitlist - and it hacked the gym system without a moment's moral hesitation. Happy listening!

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 - for a conversation about what it really means to lead an engineering team through rapid business transformation. Gordon shares how he has been quietly mandating AI adoption across his team for two years, why he believes every engineer is now effectively a manager, and what happens to culture and craft when the code starts writing itself. For the news section, David and Sophie cover the growing pattern of AI agents escaping their sandboxes - this time it's Meta's turn, as their cybersecurity agent breaks out during testing and the blame game begins. Anthropic's Mythos is revealed to have created fake accounts based on real people, sent malicious files through GitHub and then edited its own activity history to cover its tracks - stopped only by human review. There is also a 90-second power outage in Manchester that brought the rail network to its knees - and David asks whether any of us are actually testing our disaster recovery plans. Elon Musk tells SpaceX's first ever earnings call that Starlink will deliver most of the world's internet within 10 years, while his executives quietly walk it back. And a BBC investigation finds that AI recruitment tools may be systematically screening out women returning to work - and that some are already facing legal action for it. And in the Flip Side, the Wheel of Wonder makes its debut - spinning to land on the question of whether engineers should be allowed to choose their own tech stack. The coin decides who argues what. David ends up convincing himself. They call it a tie.

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 up publicly online, and what that means for leaders who might not want their late-night ChatGPT queries seeing the light of day. Anthropic has admitted that Claude has broken out of its sandbox on three separate occasions since April, raising fresh questions about accountability and Sam Altman himself is now talking about deliberately pacing AI development. The Forbes Technology Council weigh in on outdated leadership advice tech leaders should ditch and David makes the case for why he might just be a modern, forward-thinking leader after all. There's also a look at a London hacker house betting against Silicon Valley's 996 hustle culture, and the silly news of the week: two people - a YouTuber and a Canadian politician - caught reading their AI-generated scripts.  David and Sophie sit down with Richard Tworek, CTO at Riverbed, to talk tool sprawl, why monitoring and observability has become a boardroom conversation rather than just an IT one, and why he believes vibe coding is brilliant for proof-of-concepts but a different game entirely at enterprise scale. Richard's advice for tech leaders navigating the unknown: build flexible platforms, put guardrails around automation, and always keep a human in the loop. And finally, the Flip Side returns - decided by a coin toss - to debate the question: are we building technology for humans, or asking humans to adapt to technology? David argues one side, Sophie the other, and by the end, even David isn't sure he picked the winning argument. Secure your spot at the London Tech Leaders Summit here: https://registration.crowdcomms.com/ltls2026/register

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, even if scrapping the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology remains a controversial call. An OpenAI agent broke out of its sandbox, performed over 17,000 actions in under two days and hacked its way into Hugging Face — and David thinks it was a stunt. Google has reported its first ever negative free cashflow since 2004, Tesla is back in the red, and both are blaming AI spending — but the markets aren't buying the story. Monday.com joins a long list of companies citing AI as a reason for layoffs, and the Financial Times finds that those companies have underperformed the NASDAQ by almost 10% in the 30 days following their announcements. There is also a fascinating discussion about AI distillation — and the uncomfortable irony of companies who scraped the internet to build their models now accusing others of stealing their IP. And the silly news of the week is Vibe OS — an operating system with no code base whatsoever, where everything is hallucinated on the fly. David and Sophie sits down with Etienne de Bruin, founder of 7CTOs, for a conversation about his CTO levels framework — a tool used by thousands of technology leaders worldwide to assess the health of their technical organisation and work out where to focus next. Etienne makes the controversial case that the CTO role is not a technical role but a business role — and explains why CEOs tend to find his framework more useful than CTOs do. Sophie also speaks with Anoop Tripathi, CTO at Sauce Labs, about what AI is really doing to technology leadership. Anoop has 32 years of experience across telecoms, networking, security and automation — and brings a refreshingly grounded perspective on measuring outcomes not just outputs, why engineering managers now need to orchestrate human and digital agents, and why he believes AI is making everyone a senior engineer whether they like it or not.

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 has reached the end of his tether with Waymo after a string of incidents including driverless cars blocking streets on the 4th of July, gridlocking the city during a power cut and driving into crime scenes. China's AI startup Moonshot launches Kimi K3 with 2.8 trillion parameters and challenges every major American AI firm. A not-for-profit called Current AI is building open public AI infrastructure in 22 Indian languages for offline use - and David asks whether not-for-profit can ever really compete with the trillionaires. And in the stupidest tech news of the week, Apple and Google are quietly profiting from deepfake apps that are illegal to use but perfectly legal to download. David and Sophie also dig into the leadership characteristics that have stuck with them throughout their careers. Admitting when you don't know something. Finding inspiration in the people above you. Staying calm when everything breaks at three in the morning. Balancing humility with confidence - a word David cannot stand. Empowering your team without becoming a clone factory. And knowing when to step in before someone sticks their finger in the electric socket. And in the Flip Side, David and Sophie debate whether the UK should appoint a dedicated minister for AI. David says no. Sophie says yes. David flips. They land somewhere sensible, as is becoming tradition.

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 the company that invented the whole thing. Apple is suing OpenAI after an ex employee allegedly walked out with proprietary data still on his laptop - and David has some thoughts on non-compete clauses, data loss protection and what happens when a hired gun leaves with the ammunition. There is also the curious case of Bill Gates' daughter's company, which raised $40 million from celebrity investors including Chloe Kardashian and Hailey Bieber - and then got caught cookie stuffing. David recommends getting an enterprise architect. And Elon Musk and Sam Altman are at it again - this time arguing about data centres in space, which David has helpfully suggested could also solve climate change. Patent pending. The main conversation this week is one that will resonate with every senior technology leader in the audience - what actually happens after you stop being a CTO/Senior Technology Leader? David shares four years of hard won experience as a fractional consultant, interim leader and NHS non-executive director. What he missed, what surprised him, how he got every single piece of work, why posting on LinkedIn twice a week got him absolutely not a sausage, and why he eventually went back to a permanent role. Sophie asks the hard questions. David gives good testimony. And in the Flip Side, David and Sophie debate whether AI is making engineers faster and worse at the same time. David argues yes. Sophie argues no. They both end up agreeing that coding is essentially solved - it's the thinking bit that isn't. Watch out for your acceleration whiplash.