The CTO Lens

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.

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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.
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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.

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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.