Tech Talks

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

DeepL's Gonçalo Gaiolas is building the Babel Fish for real: voice translation that captures tone, emotion, even your own vocal fingerprint, live and at near-zero latency. 

He explains why DeepL isn't racing the frontier labs, shares a story about a silent colleague who finally spoke up once a language barrier disappeared, and makes an unusually candid case for talking more openly about what constant technological change is doing to our heads. 

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.

Stuart Fenton, CEO of Ingentive, joins David to discuss why the AI cost conversation is broken. Everyone asks "how much will the tokens cost, Stuart says that's the wrong question; the right one is how much you'll save. 

He unpacks the real economics of AI transformation, the relentless discipline it takes to stay current, and the personal sacrifice behind every entrepreneurial bet. A blunt reframe of cost, risk, and what building something real actually demands.

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.

General Mills' Sanchit Srivastava (Senior Manager Data Analytics) joins the podcast to talk about why unstructured data isn't the hard part of implementation, governance is.

He compares AI to a toddler ("it'll get there, but a lot happens on the way"), unpacks why token costs are about to explode, and makes the case that AI should be sold as an amplifier, not a replacer.

Today's episode is a sharp, practical look at where enterprise AI actually breaks-down.

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.