Tech Talks

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Meet the Company on a Mission to Inspire a Million Children to Read Oct 02, 2026

Show notes

Every time the writer pitched one more personalised detail, the CTO's workload grew exponentially: hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of artwork permutations for one children's book.

Now AI has made that product easier to build and the job harder. Mark Daniell (writer and education lead) and Alex Pond (CTO), co-founders of You Are The Star, turn children into the heroes of personalised sports stories, in print and in a digital library. Alex argues that AI hasn't removed work; it has stripped out the routine and left a relentless stream of high-stakes calls on risk, compliance and accuracy, with children on the platform and rights holders scrutinising every frame. We unpack why they build artwork from 3D models rather than generating it, why a printed book still beats an app, and why Mark stopped blaming the phone.

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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.

AI Won't Fix the Hole in Your Roof Oct 01, 2026

Show notes

A customer told Taksina Eammano something that morning that should worry anyone running a physical workforce: 17% of their people will retire in the next few years, and decades of know-how will walk out with them.

Her bet runs against the doom narrative. While AI disrupts desk jobs, she expects a surge back into the trades, because no model is fixing a roof or rewiring a building, and the global data-centre boom needs people on site.

Recorded at Dreamforce, David Savage and Salesforce's EVP & GM of Field Service unpack where the "human premium" is worth paying for, why robots are taking the dull, dirty and dangerous work first, and the question almost nobody is asking: how do you performance manage a team when AI makes everyone 70% as good?

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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.

Why I Spent $30k on a GPU and Lost Four Kilos Testing AI Sep 30, 2026

Show notes

Three months after ChatGPT launched, Navan co-founder and CTO Ilan Twig bought a $30,000 GPU, spent months testing uncensored models and lost four kilos in the process.

His question: if a model gives five different answers to the same prompt, how do you trust it in production? One finding stuck. It knows what a lie is, and will use one to avoid losing. That discovery shaped an AI agent that now resolves more than 62% of customer chats with zero critical hallucinations. We unpack why he's moving most of his AI onto small in-house models, why he calls the industry's reliance on Chinese open-weight models a ticking bomb, and why he believes the race to superintelligence cannot be stopped. Then comes the uncomfortable part: in that future, we're the gorillas.

WhatsApp us your comments and questions on +447392087344

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.

What Will You Do With the Hours AI Hands Back? Sep 29, 2026

Show notes

When Tom White joined Salesforce, his pre-sales engineers (the people meant to be ahead of every tech shift) told him they were totally overwhelmed. His response was to clear their diaries every other Friday for learning, because you can't master agentic AI from the sidelines.

As VP Solution Engineering, he argues that software is becoming infrastructure you never log into, and that the shift will trigger a decade of process redesign.

We unpack whether AI is genuinely handing hours back or quietly refilling them with busywork. We also get into why customers want their vendors to stop sitting on the fence, and the gap between how leaders think work gets done and how it really does.

WhatsApp us your comments and questions on +447392087344

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.

Would You Let a Teacher Work Two Days a Week in Your Team? Sep 28, 2026

Show notes

What if your next hire spent three days a week in a classroom and two in your team? It's the idea Beverly Clarke MBE admits she's putting out "in a really wild way". She means it as a fix for the widening gap between what schools teach and what industry says it needs.

She and Rebecca Franks, co-hosts of Tech Journey Insights and both former teachers, argue the stakes are rising. AI is thinning out the junior roles that used to absorb new talent, and many teachers still can't see how far their skills travel. We unpack why a teacher is effectively 30 roles at once, why one of them walked out of the classroom with no job lined up, and why the other is bootstrapping rather than let investors reset her priorities on children's data.

If you hire, lead or once taught, press play.

WhatsApp us your comments and questions on +447392087344

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 Truth About AI Launches: "Is This Real?" Sep 25, 2026

Show notes

The question Salesforce hears most on the conference floor isn't about features. It's three words from the technical crowd: "Is this real?"

Vendors announce strategic direction; the product sometimes lands weeks later. Meanwhile, buyers have budgets to set and a six-month roadmap to defend. Go all in on an autonomous sales agent today, or spend that time fixing the data it will depend on?

Recorded at Dreamforce in San Francisco, away from the polished keynote messaging, David Savage talks to Dan Blackmore, Principal Solution Engineer at Salesforce. They unpack why "data is hard" opens every customer best-practice session, why regulated firms still hesitate when zero data retention comes with US processing, and why smaller, less glamorous use cases build the skills that matter.

WhatsApp us your comments and questions on +447392087344

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.

Is Your AI Strategy Just a Science Project With a Budget? Sep 24, 2026

Show notes

Most AI programmes begin with the exciting part. Prashant Hinge, Chief Information and Transformation Officer at MSIG USA, argues that is exactly why so many aren't delivering value. He describes how the specialty insurer took a different route, the first transformation of his career to start with data: consolidating 15 insurance systems into a single data model in 12 months before building on top of it. We hear why he warned leadership the work could slow the business for the first 18 months, why a wrong number on a dashboard usually has to be fixed in the source system rather than the reporting layer, and why he believes the industry is jumping straight to AI while data, process and integration are still missing. He also makes the case that most basic process problems do not need a frontier model at all.

WhatsApp us your comments and questions on +447392087344

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.

From Trafficking Survivor to AI Engineer: Rethinking Who Belongs in Tech Sep 23, 2026

Show notes

Too often, the story of human trafficking ends at the rescue. The survivor leaders Laura Hackney worked with wanted something different: a job, stability, a career. So who gets to build the technology the rest of us use?

Laura is co-founder and CEO of AnnieCannons, a US nonprofit that trains survivors of human trafficking to become software and AI engineers. Students join a 12-month paid programme with health benefits and work on production code while they learn. Many don't arrive wanting to be coders. They arrive wanting a career that supports their family.

David and Laura discuss why financial independence is a critical part of the healing journey, and where the "rescue" narrative falls short. The biases companies bring about who "makes it" in tech, and how investor attitudes have shifted. How apprenticeships at growth-stage companies are converting at around 80% into full-time hires.

WhatsApp us your comments and questions on +447392087344

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.

Can You Afford Two Transformations at Once? Productivity Leakage and the 20% AI Reality Check Sep 22, 2026

Show notes

If AI promises 20x gains, then why are most enterprises seeing only 20%?

In this episode of Tech Talks, David Savage sits down with Andrew Daniels, Group CIO of Betfred. Together, they unpack the reality of managing AI alongside ongoing digital transformations, tackling "productivity leakage", navigating player safety regulations, and confronting the hidden tokenomics of enterprise AI.

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

WhatsApp us your comments and questions on +447392087344

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.

What Elastic’s CISO Wants You to Fix Before Deploying Autonomous AI Sep 21, 2026

Show notes

How do you secure autonomous AI agents when zero-trust fundamentals are still lacking?

Mandy Andress, CISO at Elastic, joins David Savage to break down the reality of securing AI-driven enterprise data. From Elastic’s "Customer Zero" framework to grounding AI in context to prevent hallucinations, Mandy shares why tightly scoping permissions and deploying deception strategies are essential for modern resilience.

As we mention in today's show, we'd love you to complete( our Digital Leadership Report. Just click here.

WhatsApp us your comments and questions on +447392087344

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.

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