Tech Talks

Moletsane Mophethe grew up walking to boreholes for drinking water in Lesotho.

Now he's founded Metal Morph, recovering critical minerals like aluminium and iron straight from wastewater instead of landfill, cutting reliance on a global supply chain split between mines in Africa, Australia and Russia, and manufacturing concentrated in China.

From childhood scarcity to a £700k pre-seed raise and deals covering 56% of UK water, this is what happens when you've lived the problem you're solving.

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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.

AI is thinning out the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder. There are fewer entry-level roles, fewer easy starts inside big organizations.

OpenAI's Global Head of Founder Experience, Laura Modiano, doesn't dispute that. But she thinks the conversation stops one step too early...

On this episode, David pushes her on the trade-off directly: if AI is closing doors inside large companies, is "just start your own business" a genuine answer, or a convenient one? Laura argues young, digitally fluent builders aren't consolation-prize founders , they're better equipped to build and launch than any generation before them.

Whether that's a real opportunity or a reframe of a real loss is the question the episode leaves open. What do you think?

As David and Michelle discuss, our annual Digital Leadership Survey is open for submissions, and we'd love you to add your voice to the report: ⁠Just click here⁠.

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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.

Patrick Smith, the founder and CEO of Zally, returns to Tech Talks with an update on building the world's first foundational model for human behaviour.

Zally is a business that's grown from a Manchester ambition into a San Francisco-headquartered company with a research lab still rooted in the North of England. David and Patrick talk continuous authentication, the ethics of training AI on consented human behaviour, why the UK keeps losing founders to the US ecosystem (and what it could do differently), and Patrick's own hard-won view that technology should adapt to humans, not the other way around.

If you're in San Francisco next week, get in touch with David!

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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.

Is the EU AI Act keeping you up at night?

Box's Global Head of Public Policy, Leah Perry, argues that organizations are looking at AI governance all wrong. It’s not a legal hurdle; it’s an operational maturity test.

In this episode, we unpack why regulated industries are ahead, the real threat of ignoring employee upskilling, and how to build a cross-functional framework that keeps your business agile.

We are also discussing a press release sent to us on the 9th of September, it's a statement by ControlAI in repsonse to concerns over the threat posed by superintelligence AI. Here is the statement by Connor Leahy, US Executive Director of ControlAI:
“The leading AI companies are explicitly racing to develop superintelligence, fully autonomous AI systems powerful enough to completely outcompete humanity, and which we have no ability to control. Unless governments step in to stop the creation of superintelligence, the industry’s dangerous arms race will surpass the limits of human understanding and lead to human extinction.
“Jacob Coxon’s resignation must be a wake-up call about the danger superintelligent AI poses to humanity. There is still time to act to address this threat, and the bipartisan political coalition is growing. The only way forward is for governments to negotiate an international “trust but verify” regime prohibiting superintelligence now, while we still have time. Human life depends on it.”

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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.

AI agents write code faster than we can review it, shifting software developers from builders to managers of virtual colleagues.

Chris Plowman, Director of Enterprise Architecture, Data and AI at Slalom, joins David to unpack this existential shift. Why are we returning to the age of the generalist? And why are CIOs discarding business fundamentals in a rush to implement AI?

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.

Amber Vodegel built Pregnancy+ to 150 million users before selling to Philips. Now, she's back with 28x, a women’s health tracker tackling a massive risk: the monetization and exploitation of intimate health data.

In this episode, Amber shares why she's ditching cloud servers and central databases entirely for an on-device architecture, the reality of 'return on mission' funding, and why AI-driven hiring platforms make data privacy a matter of survival.

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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.

AI adoption isn't a tech problem; it's a profound organisational shift.

Wesley ter Haar, co-founder of Monks, joins David Savage to expose the uncomfortable realities of AI: the "silent sabotage" from teams on the fence, the paternalistic industry lies about job losses, and why most enterprises are set to fail the transition. It’s a raw, honest look at what it actually takes to rebuild an organization at the speed of Silicon Valley.

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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.

Everyone is pitching enterprise AI, but why is the CFO missing from the room? ShipStation Global’s Arjun Srinivasan joins David Savage to challenge the fluff. He explains why AI leadership belongs in Business Operations, not IT. From red-teaming AI at his dinner table to coaching pre-teens to build safely, Arjun shares how to move from framework to code and tackle the one metric everyone avoids: real, quantifiable business ROI.

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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.

Six hundred million automated decisions are made daily at Optimum, but what happens when the human agents go rogue?

Today's episode features a conversation with Sundar Krishnan, who reveals why customer service agents override AI recommendations, the long-term cost of short-term customer "credits," and why enterprise AI is guaranteed to hallucinate without a critical, context-driven semantic layer. Todays show underscores why it is so important to bridge the human-AI trust gap.

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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 companies chasing AI ROI are solving the maze from the outside in.

Stephen Henn, Managing Director of AI Innovation at DLA Piper, joins David Savage to explain why "AI-ifying" a broken human process just gives you an automated, expensive mess. From the token economics of scaling AI to the compliance risk of shadow "vibe coding," Stephen shares what it actually takes to work backward from real impact and get to deterministic, fiduciary-grade results.

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.