The CTO Lens

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.

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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.