Joana Meneses of Styling You Confident is a style strategist, and she's quick to point out that her work goes much deeper than colours and shopping trips. She starts with identity (how you want to be seen and what you want to communicate), moves on to personal branding, and only then gets to the fun part: the clothes. Her path there runs through 15 years in fashion retail, watching women lose confidence in the fitting room, and a patriarchal upbringing that told her women mattered less than men, a message she has been challenging ever since.

Why is a stylist on a tech show? Because, as Natalie puts it, we buy confidence. Joana explains enclothed cognition (the idea that what we wear shapes how we think, feel and act) and tells the story of a client who moved from the end of the boardroom table, where she was the one asked to turn the TV volume up and down, to the side where decisions get made, and went on to lead a department. They also get into decision fatigue, the 'pretty or smart' messages many women grew up with, and why dressing one notch above the expected dress code is a useful rule of thumb.

In the final part Joana shares practical tips for moving from a formal meeting to a relaxed networking event, explains why AI colour-analysis tools can get it badly wrong (lighting and what you're wearing in the photo both skew the result), and reveals that she worked only with men for her first couple of years in the business.

Guest: Joana Meneses, Styling You Confident (stylingyouconfident.com)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 25 September 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Paul Cook of The Transformation Guide has spent 30 years in change management, and he's here to prove it isn't boring. His route in was unexpected: a maths degree, a first job as a statistician measuring the UK economy at the forerunner of the ONS, forecasting for a newspaper group, then five years at PwC during the 1990s wave of big enterprise systems, before going solo as a serial programme manager (a former boss once called him 'unemployable', which he took as a compliment).

Now he teaches teams to do change themselves. His starting question is always the same: what is it you're actually trying to do? Using Natalie's own idea for a nonprofit as a live example, he shows change management in practice: explain it clearly, energise people and draw them in. He walks through the levers of change beyond technology (people, products and services, process, structure, customers and markets) and describes the strange split AI has created, with some people adopting it at astonishing speed while others simply aren't getting involved.

Paul's central message is that the answer is already in the building. The people doing the work usually know what's broken, and ideas they help create are far more likely to land. He also explains why he built an AI version of himself as a coach, how he built his own CRM in an evening with Claude's help despite never having written Python, and why accountability can't be outsourced to consultants.

Guest: Paul Cook, The Transformation Guide (thetransformationguide.co.uk), author of the weekly Change Brief newsletter

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 18 September 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Julia Stamm is the founder and CEO of She Shapes AI, and a sociologist at heart with a PhD in sociology and philosophy. She left academia because she wanted her work to have real-world impact, spent years in research management bringing people together across disciplines, and now advises and speaks on responsible AI alongside running She Shapes AI.

Natalie asks the philosopher in the room about the headlines claiming AI labs are hiring philosophers. Julia's view: it's good to see, but research funded by the labs happens in a very particular context while public-interest research is drying up, and that skews the story we're told. She wants more nuance between the two dominant narratives about AI, endless abundance on one side and doom on the other.

She Shapes AI began in 2024 to show that women are already doing groundbreaking, responsible AI work (they aren't absent, they're busy working), through awards, events and training for female executives. Natalie makes a confession about feeling judged for using AI to build software, which opens up a conversation about why women are often more sceptical of AI and judged differently when they use it. Julia argues that scepticism is healthy, that opting out of the conversation isn't the answer, and that using AI well depends on real expertise and judgement. There's also a strong case for pen and paper.

Guest: Julia Stamm, founder and CEO, She Shapes AI

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 11 September 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Emma Dunn is co-founder of Friday Initiatives, a data governance company, and she came to data late. She spent her first ten years in public relations, in Australia and then the UK, including a spell at the competition regulator. That PR background shows in how she talks about data: she thinks it has a bad reputation and has been made needlessly inaccessible, when it's actually fairly simple. What information does your business hold, and what can you do with it?

Emma argues for the messy middle between hoarding data to monetise it and locking it all down for fear of GDPR fines. Why spend money protecting data you don't use, and why wouldn't you protect something so valuable? She makes the case that GDPR isn't anti-business, that transparency is simply good practice, and that the first step for any organisation is to know its data estate, especially with AI, where garbage in means garbage out. She explains why one-off workshops don't work for data mapping, and how Friday's tool (called Antonio, because everything always gets named after women) maps data continuously without reading individual records.

The conversation also covers data sovereignty and depending on platforms you don't control, why SMEs shouldn't hold themselves to the standards of big companies that get it wrong, data trusts, and the fair value exchange consumers deserve when loyalty schemes use their data.

Guest: Emma Dunn, co-founder, Friday Initiatives

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 4 September 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Becky Lodge is a tech entrepreneur on a big, hairy, scary mission: to use education technology to give young people, especially neurodivergent young people and those with special educational needs and disabilities, real choice about their future. Before founding Desk2Educate she was an international sales and marketing director in radio broadcast software and engineering infrastructure, then ran a consultancy helping universities build entrepreneurial innovation spaces. She also founded Startup Disruptors, which began with nine people in a Portsmouth pub and has since helped around 10,000 founders and SMEs.

Becky explains what drives her. Her parents were teachers working on inclusion long before it was mainstream, she grew up on the edge of a council estate, and as a neurodivergent woman she knows how badly the school system can fit some brains. Desk2Educate uses AI to personalise learning to how each individual is wired, and helps learners understand how they learn best. It's now running paid pilots, including one with Portsmouth City Council.

The conversation also covers rejection sensitive dysphoria and why high sensitivity can be an underrated strength (it helped make her a top-performing salesperson), her white paper for the Business AI Alliance on the barriers facing women in business and STEM, being streamed away from science at school, and why she believes neurodivergent people will shape the next wave of technology.

Guest: Becky Lodge, founder, Desk2Educate (desk2educate.com) and Startup Disruptors

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 28 August 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Vikki Szymanski started her career as a lawyer, and it was curiosity that pulled her into tech. Working as the legal stakeholder on the Lloyds Banking Group integration after the 2009 recession, she kept asking why the technology teams needed her terms and conditions months in advance. The answers drew her into the systems themselves, then into project management, and she never went back to law.

She tells Natalie about the journey that followed: leading payment and document systems, moving Lloyds' Microsoft Dynamics platform into the cloud (the bank's first highly confidential application to go there), advising an investment bank, working as a programme director at PwC on public-sector transformation, and now working as business design lead at the Pensions Regulator. The thread through all of it is sitting at the intersection of business, data, architecture and technology, and translating between them.

Vikki is also a passionate advocate for women in tech. She supports Women in Tech Birmingham, mentors 15 people, and visits schools as an ambassador to show children that tech careers are for everyone. She shares her view on why women leave tech in the 'sticky middle' of their careers, why she stayed, and why AI will only work if the data foundations are right. There's also a warning about the gap between an AI policy on paper and what staff are actually uploading.

Guest: Vikki Szymanski, business design lead, mentor and women-in-tech advocate

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 21 August 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Mark Bishop has spent around 30 years in HR, from junior roles to senior positions and then running his own HR advisory business. Now he's built Phronesis HR AI (the name comes from the Greek for practical wisdom), an AI agent that answers low-risk, everyday HR questions for employers and employees.

Mark explains how it works. It can be loaded with an organisation's own policies, so staff can ask things like 'can I take a second job?' without interrupting their manager. It can also advise employers on issues such as managing performance, drawing on his own experience and trusted sources like ACAS guidance. Natalie asks the obvious question: why trust it more than a general chatbot? The answer is guardrails. It's told not to make things up, it cites its sources, it gives a confidence rating for every answer, and it flags risky situations (a dismissal involving protected characteristics, for example) and tells the user to speak to a human expert.

They also discuss why much of HR is really a process, how far AI agents have come in the last few months, and why AI works best as a very capable junior colleague rather than a replacement for experience. Mark describes the other side of the coin too: employees are using AI to write strikingly polished grievance letters and information requests, making HR issues more complex for small businesses.

Guest: Mark Bishop, founder, Phronesis HR AI

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 14 August 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

It's the middle of a heatwave, so naturally Natalie and Tim Brock are talking about heating. Tim, who many local businesses will know from the Federation of Small Businesses, is part of the team behind NexGen Heating, a technology invented in Hampshire and made in Romsey that takes a different approach: instead of heating the air, it heats people and objects directly.

Tim explains the problem with conventional heating. A radiator warms the air near it, the hot air rises to the ceiling, and it disappears the moment someone opens a door. NexGen instead covers 70 to 80 per cent of the ceiling with gentle, low-voltage far infrared panels (the same kind of warmth you feel from the sun, without the UV), so a room feels warm in minutes rather than an hour. Radar sensors can detect where people are and heat only those spots, from the sofa in an open-plan home to occupied desks in a half-empty office, and the heat stored in walls and floors adds a second layer of efficiency. It can also help prevent and dry out damp and mould, which is why social housing is its main sector.

There's a surprise detour too. Tim is a farmer, born and bred, who worked in precision farming 25 years ago, and the family farm now runs a coffee roastery, a pizza business and glamping alongside its sheep. Plus: why picking strawberries is still the holy grail of farm robotics, and what AI could add to smart building monitoring.

Guest: Tim Brock, NexGen Heating (nexgenheating.com)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 7 August 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Dr John Flackett has been working in AI for 30 years, and his route in was anything but planned. He left school at 15 with virtually no qualifications, worked in a hi-fi shop, then became a mainframe computer operator at TSB in Andover. After a year backpacking around Australia he came home to find his job had been taken over by robots. That pushed him to study computing at what's now Solent University, where a single AI module (and a chatbot he built in Prolog) hooked him for life. He went on to become the course's first student to gain a first-class degree, then completed a PhD on encoding language in neural networks, the building blocks behind today's language models.

Today John runs AiLab, a vendor-neutral AI training company he co-founded in 2017 with Emma Berry. He explains why understanding how AI actually works gives people knowledge that lasts when the tools change, and why AI for good (predicting floods and bushfires, spotting the warning signs of homelessness before it happens) deserves far more attention than writing emails faster. He also picks Jamiroquai's 'Virtual Insanity' and explains why its lyrics feel so relevant now.

Natalie and John compare notes on vibe coding (he prefers 'coding with my agent', or perhaps 'hope coding'), why an MVP isn't a production system, and why you need to learn your craft first. He also introduces Couch to AI, his five-week programme for building AI confidence at work, and shares his message for local businesses: be responsible, start with a real problem and start small.

Guest: Dr John Flackett, co-founder, AiLab (https://www.ailab.world/)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 31 July 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Alan Lindstrom of Insider Media is back in the studio — pressing buttons, admiring the newly decorated Voice FM studio, and this time on a deadline: nominations for the South Coast Tech & Innovation Awards close in a week. Running since 2019 (it survived COVID as an online event), the awards celebrate technology and innovation across the Central South, from Basingstoke down to Weymouth and across to Chichester.

Before the awards talk, the pair go full nerd on their favourite new AI tools — Whisper Flow, Claude, Gemini — and Alan pitches his rename for AI: "amplified information", on the grounds that amplification never promised accuracy. Natalie, fresh from a conference talk on what vibe coders don't know they don't know, has strong feelings about presenters who wave away IP questions instead of just saying "I don't know". There's also the story of Alan's greatest April Fools' as a South African radio DJ: convincing an entire town that Boyz II Men were coming to visit. Chaos, escorted exits and home-baked cakes ensued.

Then the categories, with last year's winners as proof of range: AI Innovation of the Year; High Growth Tech Company (Tech Over, missile guidance systems, global but still rooted at the University of Southampton Science Park); Innovative Tech Company (Canary Care's home monitoring for vulnerable people); Large Tech Enterprise (Total Security); Managed Service Provider (Trust IT) — the unsung backbone companies you only notice when things break; Outstanding Achievement (IBM's Sarah Neenan, whose award Natalie presented); Rising Star for under-35s (IBM's Emma Dawson); South Coast Tech Company of the Year (CV-Library); Tech Employer (Trellint UK); Tech for Good (solar specialists Ecko); Tech SME; Tech Startup; and the judges' wildcard One to Watch, which last year went to two 19-year-olds with £2.5 million in VC backing.

The night itself: 15 October at the Leonardo in Southampton, hosted by Jason Bradbury of The Gadget Show — who reportedly arrived at the Thames Valley awards on a hoverboard. As Alan puts it, it's a party, but it's not just a party: shortlisting puts you in front of the region's movers and shakers, and winning carries real weight with investors and future hires.

Guest: Alan Lindstrom, Insider Media (South Coast Tech & Innovation Awards, 15 October, the Leonardo, Southampton)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 17 July 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk