Tech Talks

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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?

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.