Chris Ward runs Vermont Systems, a managed service provider that looks after IT and cybersecurity for small and medium-sized businesses. As he puts it, the technology changes but the purpose stays the same: helping businesses use technology well while keeping them secure. That has meant learning cybersecurity fast when ransomware stopped being theoretical, and now working out what AI is actually good for, both inside his own business and for his clients.

Chris explains why so much of his team's value lies in the diligent, unglamorous work nobody chases them for: keeping configurations to best practice, patching vulnerabilities, and making sure things still work after the person who built them has left (a cautionary tale about Power BI dashboards tied to one employee's account). He also makes a surprising admission. After years in the industry, starting at IBM, he's realised he isn't really a technologist. What fascinates him is people, and he now thinks of himself as a gardener, creating the right conditions for his team to grow.

The conversation turns to peer groups and the loneliness of leadership, why mid-sized SMEs often struggle to adopt technology and may face a stark divide with AI, gatekeeping in tech, and how people with privilege can use it to amplify others, including why curiosity and a willingness to ask questions make such a difference.

Guest: Chris Ward, Vermont Systems

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

Seemin Suleri is one of the driving forces behind ReConnect Conference, a community-led tech event born in Dorset that has grown into something with genuine international reach — featuring speakers like Kevlin Henney alongside a deliberate, values-first approach to who gets on stage, who volunteers, and who can afford a ticket. Every organiser is a volunteer. There are no profits. Super early-bird tickets started at £20. That is not an accident; it is the point.

The conversation starts with how the conference came about — there had been a conference in the region before, it disappeared, and Seemin and her colleagues decided something needed to replace it. What they built from scratch is notable less for its line-up than for its structure: a 50/50 male-female speaker split maintained since the very first year, an outreach programme that gives away 20% of tickets plus all volunteer passes for free, and an application process designed for people who don't already move in tech circles and wouldn't think to put their hand up.

The exchange on gatekeeping is the heart of the episode. Seemin is clear and specific: the problem isn't that diverse people don't exist in tech, it's that the spaces where tech is discussed and celebrated aren't designed to include them. She talks about how they actively built a volunteer base that was 70–80% from under-represented backgrounds — and how that changed who came to the event, who felt comfortable, and who got to see themselves on stage. Natalie, who has heard the "it's just hard to find female speakers" line more times than she can count, pushes back on the excuse with relish.

Guest: Seemin Suleri, ReConnect Conference (community-led tech event, Dorset/South of England)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 19 June 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Shahab Al-Baghdadi came to GDPR from a commercial and sales background — a route that turns out to be exactly the right preparation for what he does now. Because getting an organisation to take data protection seriously is, as he puts it, fundamentally a negotiation: you have to find out what matters to them, meet them where they are, and work from there. The compliance-as-confrontation model rarely sticks; the compliance-as-conversation model does.

The first half of the interview establishes the foundations — what GDPR actually is, what it requires, and why the principles of transparency, accountability and data minimisation are not bureaucratic obstacles but a framework for organisations that want to use data well. Shahab is a good explainer: he takes the legalese out and replaces it with practical language, including a brisk tour of what ICO fines actually look like and what triggers them.

The second half is where it gets particularly timely. Companies are racing to implement AI tools on top of their existing data — CRM systems, customer records, operational databases — and many of them are doing so without asking the questions GDPR requires: Do you have the right to use this data? Do you know where your AI tool is sending it? Can you tell your customers what you are doing and why? Shahab walks through a practical checklist for navigating AI adoption without creating a liability, and makes the point that the organisations getting this right are not the ones treating GDPR as a constraint but as a discipline.

The conversation closes on culture: how different national and professional cultures shape attitudes to negotiation, compliance and risk — and why understanding that is increasingly central to Shahab's work with international clients.

Guest: Shahab Al-Baghdadi, GDPR Training Ltd

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 12 June 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Vanessa Vallely OBE left school at 16 with few GCSEs and none in technology, and went on to become a chief operating officer at a major bank. Looking around a leadership table full of supportive men, she kept asking why there weren't more women in the room, and why there was nowhere free and open for women to find role models, events and networks. So in 2008 she started WeAreTheCity (her husband built the website: he doesn't buy her flowers, he builds her websites). It has since grown into a movement that includes WeAreTechWomen, the TechWomen100 and Rising Star awards, hundreds of events and the national Women in Tech Week each October.

Vanessa shares the findings of the Lovelace Report, research she worked on with the Tech Talent Charter and Oliver Wyman that puts an economic cost on failing to develop women in tech: billions of pounds a year, with somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 women leaving the industry every year. The top reasons are progression, pay transparency and recognition. Childcare was cited by just 3 per cent. Women wait twice as long for early-career promotions, and many are paying for their own certifications and still not moving up.

She and Natalie talk about fixing the system rather than the women ('it's not the fish, it's the water'), why women need to be in the room when AI is designed, why leaders need training too, and her new workbook-style book, 404 Women Not Found. Her advice: stay curious about AI, use the free training that's out there, and build your network before you need it.

Guest: Vanessa Vallely OBE, founder, WeAreTheCity and WeAreTechWomen

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 5 June 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Chris Talintyre of Polything is back in the studio, and this time the conversation goes deep into what happens when a marketer, not a developer, goes all in on AI. Since January Chris has been working almost entirely with Claude, including Cowork (the tool that lets non-technical people get real work done on their own computer), and by his own tracking it has saved him more than 300 days of work across marketing, coding and even planning the first three months with his new puppy.

Chris explains the building blocks in plain English. MCPs let an AI model query up-to-date information from other services. Skills are reusable instructions (a standard operating procedure in a Markdown file) that can include scripts, so repeatable steps happen the same way every time. He describes his 'sovereign brain': around 5,000 notes exported into Obsidian and made searchable by his AI, with a layer only he can write to, a shared layer, and a layer the AI uses for its own change log. It even produces an 'invoice' at the end of each session estimating what the work would have cost if people had done it.

They also discuss Anthropic research suggesting around 65 per cent of marketing tasks can already be done by AI, and why the remaining 35 per cent (judgement, taste and reading people) matters most. The conversation covers why so many organisations struggle with AI adoption, the need for psychological safety to experiment, and why neurodivergent people often seem to be leading the way.

Guest: Chris Talintyre, Polything (polything.co.uk)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 29 May 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

SJ Walker works at Ecrubox, a digital agency specialising in e-commerce — Shopify, headless builds and the like — that was female-founded about nine years ago by Heather (the slightly accidental name comes from "ecru," a shade of cream, born of an early plan to do packaging and subscription boxes). SJ and Heather met on the agency circuit and have built a team SJ clearly adores.

The heart of the conversation is a thoughtful, optimistic take on AI. SJ loves it but understands exactly why people are frightened — the LinkedIn scaremongering about graduates being shut out of work is real — and her group's answer is a simple creed: you can be powered by AI, but you have to be human. Natalie, fresh from interviewing Microsoft, raises the "human in the loop" idea; SJ upgrades it to "subject-matter-expert in the loop," because not just any human can validate whether AI output is correct, and an LLM is only ever as good as the experience behind your prompt.

It's also a lovely episode about who people are beyond their job titles. SJ's "side hustle" — growing dahlias, 175 of them this year, as chair of a flower show — turns out to reveal as much about her as her day job. She's even enlisted Claude as her gardening assistant, managing her lists. Along the way: her route into tech (a particle-physicist dad who got her a computer in 1980 when she was six), a heartfelt thread on women driving early computing (Hidden Figures, the first programmers), and a gorgeous management analogy — a struggling employee isn't a bad worker, they're "a flower in the wrong part of the garden," and move them into the light and good water and they flourish.

Guest: SJ Walker, Ecrubox (digital/e-commerce agency)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 22 May 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

This is one of the show's longer, meatier editions — a near-uninterrupted conversation with Marc Esmiley, who leads product for FinTech within financial services commercial engineering at Microsoft and runs a significant global team. Across 20-plus years in technology, his route in was anything but traditional: no university, straight from his GCSEs at 17 into full-time work as a civil servant on the help desk at HM Coastguard, fixing broken printers and replacing toner.

From there the career arc is genuinely interesting. At the Coastguard he went on to run a modernisation programme — consolidating roughly 22 data centres into a two-data-centre model for the 999 service under the principle "change the technology, but don't change the business," and introducing AIS triangulation systems for tracking people and currents at sea so operators could work more effectively. He then co-ran a niche, technically-led consultancy (Systemup), working with small organisations, local councils, Parliament's digital services, HMRC and banks, partnering with Microsoft, Amazon and Google as the cloud providers took shape around 2015-16. A key lesson he shares: when he got pulled away from customers for a year or two, he lost touch with what really mattered to them in a fast-moving field — so they deliberately pivoted to keep directors on the ground with customers. The business was eventually sold through acquisition, which led him toward Microsoft.

The forward-looking half digs into AI — the hot topic of the moment — what it means for financial services, and Marc's advice for anyone who'd like a career like his over the next one to five years. A warm, candid, genuinely useful listen on building a tech career from an unconventional start.

Guest: Marc Esmiley, Head of Product for FinTech, Financial Services Commercial Engineering, Microsoft

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 15 May 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Josh Williams ran round the corner from Southampton station to talk about Town (full name Town Local Loyalty, on iOS and Android), an app built to support independent local businesses. The idea is simple and warm: open the app, discover cool nearby places to eat, drink and shop, and earn rewards in "town cash" through digital loyalty cards — making it easy and genuinely rewarding to back great local businesses.

The differentiator is the bit Josh is proudest of: Town works solely with independents run by one or two owners who really care about their communities — no national or regional chains. The whole point is to push more spend toward those businesses and the local economy. It launched six weeks ago in BCP (Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole), expanded to Bristol, and is now rolling into Southampton over the coming weeks — so for now a Southampton user downloading it sees a cheerfully blank map that's about to fill up with independents.

Natalie, a software developer herself, presses on the hard parts she knows from experience: the enormous data and onboarding work behind any local directory, and whether there are real success stories this early. Josh is candid and specific. Town is coded from scratch — no templates, no no-code tools — by his co-founder Allard. The team meets business owners, learns their challenges, and builds each a custom loyalty scheme they manage through a 24/7 dashboard. It's free for consumers (friction removed on purpose); businesses pay because the loyalty tech costs money to build and, over time, more than pays for itself in repeat customers and higher spend. Six weeks in, Town is live across around 30 places, with testimonials already on the website.

Guest: Josh Williams, co-founder, Town (Town Local Loyalty app)

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 8 May 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

We've spent a lot of this show reassuring people in construction, manual labour and domestic services that AI is coming for office jobs, not theirs. Antoni Dimitrov is here to gently tell Natalie she's wrong. Robots and automation are already disrupting sectors like cleaning — work done the same way for hundreds of years — and Antoni's take is refreshingly optimistic: rather than fear them, he calls these machines "co-bots," collaborative robots that people can be trained and educated to work alongside.

Before the cleaning, there's the data. Antoni is a serious triathlete who trains 10-12 hours a week and wears every sensor going — heart rate, core temperature, power meters, even goggles with a screen on the inside that show his pace and heart rate while he swims, and at-home lactate testing with his partner taking the blood samples. It's a properly geeky conversation about turning noisy data into real performance gains, with a detour into the sub-two-hour marathon and how physiology hasn't changed but training and technology have.

The second half traces Antoni's accidental path into cleaning. He arrived in the UK in 2010 with a dream of franchising waterless, petroleum-free car washes; the market wasn't ready, the franchising dream stalled, and he ended up running the car washes himself — "a humbling experience." That led, by 2012, into office cleaning done his own way: "sustainability by design" from day one, no bleaches or ridiculous chemicals, an ethos rooted in a Bulgarian childhood spent camping and running adventure races outdoors. The approach paid off — Eco Drift won Sustainable Business of the Year at the Portsmouth Business Awards. Along the way Antoni makes a sharp point about what "sustainable" really means: not just the environment, but whether a business can sustain itself through its life cycle without depending entirely on its founder.

Guest: Antoni Dimitrov, founder, Eco Drift (sustainable commercial cleaning)

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

This is a guest-free episode — just Natalie alone in the studio on a Friday afternoon, sharing the kind of reflections that don't need an interview to be worth hearing. She opens on the small automatic things we do without thinking (she still raises her hand to the live light even when no one's there) and the much larger things we take for granted — chiefly the internet. After a week of plasterers and contractors and a near-miss with the telephone cable, she found out exactly how much of her home runs through the connection: lights, TV, solar, all of it. It becomes a genuinely useful conversation about redundancy and backups — the 4G modem and spare SIM that keep two work-from-home professionals online if the line goes down — and why businesses and individuals alike should think about what happens when the thing that "just works" stops working.

From there she zooms out. She reports back from Solent Futurescape 2026 at the King's Conference Centre in Hedge End (where she won a stand and admits the AI-generated dancing robot rather unsettled her), flags open nominations for the South Coast Tech and Innovation Awards 2026, and runs through the week's headlines: Meta planning to cut one in ten jobs after spending billions on AI, the pattern of US firms over-cutting and quietly rehiring, the looming end of Tim Cook's era at Apple, and Anthropic investigating claims of unauthorised access to a powerful new Claude-based security tool.

Then the heart of it. Natalie wanted to challenge the idea that tech innovation is a young person's game — because the first person in her family to adopt AI (which he called "A1" for ages) was her father, who turned 79 this week. A lifelong songwriter who knew about five chords, he used AI tools to take one of his own songs — his lyrics, his melody, his voice — and enhance it into something broadcast-ready. The episode closes with that song, Skiff Wilson's "Falling in Love," played on the radio for what's probably its only time: the words and melody exactly as Natalie remembers them from childhood, with her dad's own voice, just gently lifted by technology. A proud, lovely moment to end on.

Guest: None — solo host episode (Natalie Haigh). Closes with her father's AI-enhanced original song.

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 24 April 2026. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk