Luke Cleall found ChatGPT early, took it seriously, and kept going. His description of the shift from "paste into ChatGPT, paste back" to automated systems — where incoming emails are picked up, processed, a draft reply is generated and waiting in your outbox when you get back to your desk — is a good illustration of what AI automation actually looks like in practice versus in theory.

The conversation covers what good automation looks like (human in the loop for the things that matter, automated for the genuinely repetitive), why most people are still using AI at about 10% of its potential, what's changed since the early ChatGPT days, and the practical steps a business can take to start building workflows that actually reduce the mental overhead of running a company. Luke is clear throughout: this isn't about replacing people, it's about removing the tasks that drain energy without adding value.

Guest: Luke Cleall — LinkedIn: search Luke Cleall

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

Simon Strong's career has taken some unexpected turns. He came out of advertising — including time at Saatchi & Saatchi — and at some point discovered improv comedy and specifically Second City, the legendary Chicago theatre that has trained performers from John Belushi to Steve Carell and also runs a corporate training division. The improv experience changed how he thinks about creativity, collaboration and the conditions under which people actually learn.

Now he runs Download Learning, a company that uses neuroscience research to design learning experiences that stick. The central argument is straightforward but uncomfortable for a lot of organisations: traditional training (sitting in a room, watching slides, taking a quiz) doesn't create lasting behaviour change. The brain doesn't work that way. Simon talks through what does work, and introduces the concept of "wicked problems" — complex, system-level challenges that resist conventional solution approaches and require a different kind of thinking to navigate.

Guest: Simon Strong, Download Learning

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 19 December 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Dolapo Agu's work sits at the intersection of cybersecurity and digital inclusion — the recognition that the people with the least digital literacy are often the most exposed to digital threats. Phishing emails, malware, AI-generated scams: these don't only target organisations. They target individuals, and they're increasingly convincing.

The conversation covers the specific risks that AI has introduced — voice cloning, fake urgency, social engineering that sounds like it comes from a real person — and what actually works to protect against them. Two-factor authentication and password managers get a full explanation because, as Dolapo points out, knowing these tools exist is different from knowing why they matter and how to use them. The digital exclusion angle runs through everything: good security advice has to meet people where they are, not where we wish they were.

Guest: Dolapo Agu

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 12 December 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Virtual production is the technology that lets filmmakers replace physical sets with real-time 3D environments rendered on massive LED walls — the same approach used in The Mandalorian and dozens of productions since. Jake Hawkins works in this space, with a career background that covers compositing (the art of combining filmed footage with digital elements seamlessly) and the shift toward Unreal Engine as the industry standard for real-time virtual environments.

The conversation makes a connection most people haven't made: the GPU infrastructure behind high-end visual effects and virtual production is the same infrastructure behind AI model training. That creates an interesting dynamic — the same shortage of compute that's driving up AI development costs is also affecting the film and games industries. Jake's take on AI and jobs in the creative sector is nuanced: it's not replacement, it's change, and the question is what skills remain distinctly human when the generative tools keep improving.

Guest: Jake Hawkins

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 5 December 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Raymond Akpan runs Parry Technologies, a Managed Service Provider (MSP) doing IT support for businesses. The job used to be mostly fixing printers and resetting passwords. Now a growing part of it is helping clients understand and respond to AI-powered scams that are getting harder to spot by the week.

The conversation covers deep fakes and voice cloning — the technology that lets scammers impersonate a CEO or a family member with audio or video that sounds and looks real. Raymond explains how scam labs operate: organised groups that systematically test attack methods, share successful approaches, and iterate faster than most IT teams can update their defences. The LinkedIn angle is particularly sharp — recruitment-style scams that exploit the fact that people are conditioned to accept connection requests and respond to job opportunities, making the platform a reliable entry point.

The practical advice is grounded: what to look for, how to verify a request that feels off, and why the most important layer of defence is still human awareness rather than any particular piece of software.

Guest: Raymond Akpan, Parry Technologies

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 28 November 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Domestic Angels connects clients with home cleaning professionals through a matching algorithm — the kind of tech you'd expect in a recruitment or dating app, applied to a sector that's still largely run on phone calls and paper invoices. Sam Acton talks about how technology changed the business: Xero for cash flow automation, algorithmic matching to reduce the friction of finding the right person, and AI tools for marketing that a small team can actually use.

The conversation takes a more philosophical turn in the final segment, covering AI adoption, imposter syndrome (the feeling that you're not technical enough to have an opinion on the tools reshaping your industry), and the specific importance of getting more female voices into the rooms where AI systems are being designed. Sam's point: the people who use technology shape what it becomes, and if whole demographics are absent from that conversation, the systems built will reflect that absence.

Guest: Sam Acton, Domestic Angels

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 14 November 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Victoria Oke's path into tech is a good one. She was working in healthcare, noticed the gap between what was possible with technology and what was actually being done, and pursued a Google scholarship that led her to a cybersecurity bootcamp at the University of Portsmouth. She went in knowing HTML and CSS. She came out having won a hackathon with a concept for software that tracks medication for vulnerable patients — the kind of idea that makes obvious sense to someone with a healthcare background and less sense to a room full of people who've only ever worked in tech.

The conversation covers what the bootcamp was actually like, what a hackathon win feels like when you hadn't expected it, and then takes a harder turn: the experience of having someone try to take credit for her work, and what that taught her about navigating the industry. Victoria talks about how she uses LinkedIn as a resource for finding mentors and building visibility, and what she'd tell someone just starting out — particularly women thinking about whether cybersecurity is a space for them.

Guest: Victoria Oke

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 7 November 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Smart Elephant builds technology for businesses, with a focus on AI solutions that are actually grounded in what the client needs rather than what's exciting to talk about at conferences. James Southgate is direct about the gap between AI hype and AI in practice: most organisations that think they want an AI chatbot haven't yet thought clearly about what question they're trying to answer or what problem they're trying to solve.

The conversation covers what good AI strategy looks like for a business that isn't Google, how to build a team around an AI project (and when not to), and the company's origins including the student partnerships that helped shape what Smart Elephant became. James is particularly interesting on the chatbot question — how long it actually takes to build one that doesn't hallucinate or send customers to the wrong place, and why the quality of the underlying data is almost always the real issue.

Guest: James Southgate, Smart Elephant

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast November 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Vissensa (the name smashes together two Latin words: Viz Power and Sensor — Powerful Thought) has been running for 17 years. Steve Groom started it doing co-location work, taking organisations' IT and running it from a data centre, originally with a heavy NHS focus. The company has evolved through the full arc of IT history — data centres, cloud migration, managed services — and is now deep into cybersecurity.

The conversation covers what's actually changed in the threat landscape and why human error remains the primary attack vector despite all the technical controls organisations put in place. Security Awareness Training (SAT) is the response: getting staff to recognise phishing attempts, social engineering and the patterns that precede a breach. Steve talks through what SAT programmes look like in practice, how to make the business case for the cost, and the compliance frameworks (like Cyber Essentials) that increasingly require it.

He also shares his personal journey — from CTO work in the NHS to founding a company that's now 17 years old — and what's sustained it through the changes that have reshaped the industry multiple times.

Guest: Steve Groom, Vissensa — https://www.vissensa.com/

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 31 October 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk

Damian Smith has an unusual combination of interests and they all turn out to be connected. He studied physics, moved into FPGA engineering at SSTL (Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd, now part of Airbus), and has worked on the hardware that goes into actual satellites — geostationary orbits, Starlink, the unglamorous reality of space technology and the company culture that supports long-horizon engineering work.

His PhD research is on deep learning interpretability — the question of why an AI made a particular decision. He gives a striking example: an X-ray analysis model that appeared to correctly identify pathologies, but was actually picking up on the position of pacemakers in the images (because patients with pacemakers are more likely to have certain conditions). The model was right for the wrong reasons. That's the black-box problem in miniature, and Damian is working on attribution methods that make the reasoning visible. He draws on a Malcolm Gladwell analogy to explain why explainability matters even when performance is good.

The final segment is about improv comedy — how Natalie and Damian met — and the "yes, and" principle. The idea that you never block a scene partner's offer, you accept it and build on it, turns out to be a remarkably good model for psychological safety in technical teams. Both are better when people feel their ideas won't be dismissed before they've had a chance to develop.

Guest: Damian Smith, SSTL/Airbus FPGA engineer and PhD researcher in AI interpretability

Recorded for The Technology Show on Voice FM 103.9, Southampton — broadcast 19 September 2025. Listen live on Fridays at 1pm. More episodes: thetechnologyshow.uk