Tech Talks

Somewhere in a port right now, a cargo document is being stamped by hand. By the figures Steve Hemmings has seen, between 60% and 80% of global maritime trade is still on paper. That’s not because the technology doesn’t exist, but because people trust the paper. That trust gap is the real story. The industry carrying the global economy is putting serious money into AI that stalls at prototype, because the foundations underneath it (governance, data and change management) were never built. David sits down with Steve Hemmings, Client CTO at Insight, to unpack three things: why maritime fell behind, what shipping could learn from how airlines move your luggage, and his “cart to market” model for spotting who is pulling your transformation forward and who is dragging it back. If you’ve ever bought another tool because nobody used the last one, press play.

If you’re heading to Web Summit and looking for a different way to meet attendees, we’re hosting a breakfast run club on Tuesday November 10th at 7am. Come and meet some new, friendly faces: ⁠https://luma.com/mpv6bmso⁠ 
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 few weeks before this conversation, a global hotel group believed its AI agents were under control: registry, governance, real-time token tracking. Then millions of visits hit its website that nobody could identify. They were personal AI agents, acting for real guests, searching and booking rooms. Turning them away wasn’t an option. The team had 24 hours to decide what to control.
Wei Manfredi, SVP of AI and Architecture at IHG Hotels & Resorts, takes David inside that scramble. When an agent scrapes the wrong rate and the booking collapses, who answers to the guest? Why do agents scrape web pages when an API sits ready? And why is so much of what we call AI risk really poor engineering? We also unpack how to turn staff who fear replacement into builders. If agents are already shopping on your site, this is your early warning.

If you’re heading to Web Summit and looking for a different way to meet attendees, we’re hosting a breakfast run club on Tuesday November 10th at 7am. Come and meet some new, friendly faces: https://luma.com/mpv6bmso 
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 AI safety really about existential risk, or about the here-and-now? David Savage reconnects with Gaia Marcus, now Director of the Ada Lovelace Institute, five years after they first spoke while she was working on the UK’s National Data Strategy.
Gaia shares findings from I Love It, But I Hate It, the Ada and Nuffield Foundation research with 50 young people aged 14–24. The digital-native generation is bucking the usual trend: they are more wary of AI, not less. She also explains why fluency with interfaces is no substitute for social maturity.
They discuss the hidden costs of putting AI into real workflows. Ada’s research on social workers using AI transcription found strong enthusiasm, but also inconsistent use, hallucinated records and unresolved questions about liability. They also cover why individually sensible decisions to cut entry-level hiring could create a sector-wide talent crisis.
On regulation, Gaia explains the “Swiss cheese” model of layered defences and why middle powers can still set conditions for access to their markets. She also describes how surprised the public is that chatbots aren’t regulated already. She closes with advice for 20-year-olds: critical thinking, broad skills, and an experiment that shows how much human knowledge AI models simply can’t see.
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 happens when an AI-first mindset meets critical national infrastructure?
David is joined by Berian James, a machine learning and AI product leader whose career runs from payments at Square to supply chain transformation at Maersk, energy trading, and now tem, where he’s helping rebuild how UK businesses and generators buy and sell energy.
Berian makes the case that “move fast and break things” simply doesn’t apply when the energy grid is at stake. He explains why risk management, done well, is an engine for growth rather than a cost to be controlled, and how pricing fixed contracts three years out depends on deep regulatory and domain knowledge, not just clever models. David presses him on a question every buyer of AI should be asking: if your provider runs on agents, how can you trust today’s price in two and a half years?
They also tackle the jobs question head-on. With graduate roles down by a third since ChatGPT launched, Berian argues that AI-native graduates may actually have a head start, and that today’s shift in engineering is the next leap in abstraction, much like the move from assembly to compilers.

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.

Overnight, Neil Fox argues, a developer can become a supervisor of AI agents. That is not a tooling upgrade. It is an identity shift, and most organisations have no plan for it.
Neil, Chief Transformation Officer at Artizent, has spent a lifetime in software and now works as much with business leaders as with engineers. He explains why agile teams of seven to nine are shrinking to pods of three, why the bottleneck has moved from writing code to deciding what is worth building, and why treating AI as a time-saver misses its real value: running thousands of experiments at once. We also get into the token budgets CFOs have no idea how to plan, and the question Neil wishes more leaders asked: what does all this do to us as a society?
Press play if your job title is about to mean something different.

If you’re heading to Web Summit and looking for a different way to meet attendees, we’re hosting a breakfast run club on Tuesday November 10th at 7am. Come and meet some new, friendly faces: https://luma.com/mpv6bmso 
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.