The CTO Lens

Sophie and David are back for Episode 52.

For the guest slot this week, they’re joined by Adelina Chalmers, “the Geek Whisperer,” who works with CTOs at PE-backed companies to maximise value ahead of an exit. Adelina lays out her framework for the five stages of CTO evolution, from the purely technical “boffin in the lab,” through the translator and the commercial partner, to the value creator and finally the trusted advisor - an executive first, technologist second, who earns a seat at the table by bringing recommendations instead of menus, surfacing risk early, and never letting the board hear bad news for the first time in the room. She shares concrete advice on how CTOs can build the political and cross-departmental relationships that get them there.

In the news, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang at the centre of a scandal involving a suspected spy, a brutal AI stock sell-off following the US midterms, two major cybersecurity stories (a Binance hack via a fake job interview, and a vibe-coding platform exposing hundreds of thousands of users’ data), and a closer look at Canva’s surprisingly generous, and surprisingly debated, approach to layoffs.

The episode closes with a brand new segment, “Manager or Leader,” where Sophie and David put a series of statements to the test - debating, and often disagreeing with, where the line between managing and leading really falls.

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David and Sophie are back, this week tackling what it really takes to turn AI experimentation into business transformation.

They’re joined by Azita Esmaili, Chief AI and Innovation Officer at Atos, who shares insights from her upcoming book on leading successful AI transformation. Azita explains why so many AI pilots fail to scale, why organisations need to rethink how people and AI work together, and why proofs of concept fail when they’re handed to IT without domain experts involved.  

In the news, David and Sophie cover Binance’s reported $6.3bn breach and a wider wave of hacks that hit US immigration agents and European supermarket fridges. They also discuss the backlash in China after chilli sauce maker Lao Gan Ma linked a 92% headcount cut to AI, a sharp sell-off across AI and neocloud stocks, and Just Eat’s AI-generated menu images going very wrong.

The episode closes with a brand new segment, Hire, Fire or Promote. David and Sophie decide the fate of untouchable engineers, empire-building managers, talent multipliers and visionary risk-takers, raising the question whether your most relied-upon engineer deserves a promotion or a break? 

Make sure to like and subscribe to keep up with the latest episodes of The CTO Lens!

Listen to The CTO Lens Podcast on other platforms

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David and Sophie celebrate their 50th episode with a jam-packed week in tech.

They’re joined by Ant Davis, a cybersecurity awareness professional and content creator, who makes the case that the real skill gap in cybersecurity isn’t technical - it’s communication. Ant talks through his journey from an internal security awareness role at Ocado to building a following of over 90,000 on Instagram, why CISOs need comms training as much as technical training, and how clear, human, honest communication during an incident builds the trust that prevents panic and fear-mongering from taking over the narrative.

In the news, David and Sophie cover the PHP vulnerability that took a chunk of the internet offline, Elon Musk throttling Starlink for Ukraine’s military drones, a wave of AI-attributed layoffs at major companies colliding with research suggesting AI delivers zero financial payoff for most, and the Google Cloud outage that knocked Revolut and court systems offline.

The episode closes with one of Sophie and David’s favourite segments yet: inventing the jobs of 2040, from personal AI coaches and algorithmic appeals managers to “reality validators” who verify whether digital content is genuine, all sparked by the question of what work looks like once AI has reshaped the job market.

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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.

Sophie and David are back for episode 17.

This week's guest is Craig Smiley, CPTO at Plandek, a platform he describes as "Strava for engineers" - pulling together signals from across an engineering organisation to show teams how they're really doing. Craig explains why 94% of companies can't connect their engineering output to business outcomes, why the answer isn't a single productivity number but compensating metrics that stop teams gaming the system (including a brilliant example of a team that hit 100% sprint output by doing almost nothing), and why systems thinking - understanding how a change ripples left and right through the rest of the business - is the skill he wishes every technology leader had. He also gives a refreshingly nuanced answer to whether today's CTOs are tomorrow's CEOs.

Before that, David and Sophie go all-in on AI news this week. The Anthropic and DeepMind insiders warning there's a greater than 10% chance AI could wipe out humanity within a decade, and what it means that Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk are all suddenly agreeing we need to slow down. The 94% of companies still struggling to make AI pay. New MHRA recommendations for AI in UK healthcare. And a look at companies pulling AI usage out of performance reviews after employees pushed back on being "assessed on how effectively they can participate in their own redundancy." Plus a run of genuinely bizarre silly laws, a scarily real data centre that runs on living human brain cells, and the far more wholesome story of Google's fully-mapped fruit fly brain being taught to play Doom.

To finish, instead of the Flip Side this week, David and Sophie talk through and blind-rank the top 10 leadership traits live on air, working through their reasoning together to land on a final order.

Sophie and David are back for episode 16.

This week's guest is Dr. Claire Ann Banga, CEO of eMoodie, who speaks with Sophie and David on the human side of leadership. Claire explains how her background in child psychology led her to build both a mental health screening platform and, now, multimodal AI models that read vocal biomarkers to flag when someone is struggling, why early intervention delivers a 600-650% return compared to waiting until someone hits crisis point (a problem Deloitte pegs at £51 billion a year to the UK economy), and the uncomfortable truth that the very traits that make someone a great leader - ambition, perfectionism, relentless drive - are often the same ones that push them towards burnout. She also shares a genuinely useful tip for anyone glued to a screen all day: protecting periods of deep focus from the trap of media multitasking to get into flow.

Before that, Sophie and David run through the week's news: a first speaker announcement for the London Tech Leaders Summit (Kanishka Narayan, the UK's first AI minister, is giving the opening keynote), new research from VC firm Moderna on enterprise AI adoption showing budgets are rising even as pilot conversion stays weak and vendor loyalty collapses within months, the House of Lords pushing for a UK AI "kill switch" as part of the Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill, Elon Musk launching Tesla's pedal-less, wheel-less Cybercab in Austin days after a regulatory investigation opened - the same one Zoox spent years quietly working through - and a wonderfully daft story about a consumer group booking a fake listing for 10 Downing Street on Booking.com.

To finish, instead of the Flip Side this week, David and Sophie dig into where the decision-making line should sit between leaders and AI - including the moment David asked Copilot to summarise his team's 360-degree feedback for performance reviews, and it flatly refused.