The CTO Lens

A fresh look at what it really means to lead technology in today’s fast‑changing world. Hosted by seasoned CTO and thinker David Crawford , and co‑host, experienced product leader Sophie Valentine , The CTO Lens blends candid conversations with industry leaders, covers the latest tech news, and includes a whole host of personal insights and practical leadership lessons for the modern technology executive. From navigating roles, to understanding team culture, AI, tech strategy, and real‑world challenges, each episode offers both depth and everyday relevance. Whether you’re a current senior leader or aspiring to this role, The CTO Lens gives you perspectives that cut through noise - with clarity, humour, and a human touch.

The CTO Lens is a technology podcast hosted by London Tech Leaders, with 45 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

London Tech Leaders hosts The CTO Lens, a technology show with 45 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #17

  Season 3: Episode 17 - Strava for Engineers & the Top 10 Leadership Traits

  Sep 15, 20261h 40mS3

  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.

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  Episode #15

  Season 3: Episode 15 - Keeping a Plane in the Air: What Aerospace Teaches Us About Governing AI

  Sep 1, 20261h 7mS3

  Sophie and David are back for episode 15. This week's guest is Sergei Irisov, Head of IT and Digital Transformation at ZeroAvia, the company building the first new type of aircraft powertrain in 50 years - a hydrogen-electric system that has to survive a punishing web of certification requirements before it's allowed anywhere near the sky. Sergei explains how his team went from drowning in test data to using AI to find patterns humans couldn't, why governance has to be the first step of an AI rollout rather than an afterthought, and the three principles borrowed straight from aerospace engineering - control, traceability, and fault tree analysis - that he uses to keep AI accountable. He also digs into why so many companies get stuck running endless AI pilots instead of reaching full transformation, and lands on a simple but sharp answer to who's responsible when AI gets it wrong: the person holding the tool, not the algorithm. Before that, Sophie and David mark the first day of autumn with a proper news round-up: the Bank of England governor's warning that an AI bubble could trigger a global economic downturn, a fascinating debate out of Copenhagen's Tech BBQ summit about AI sovereignty - national, personal and professional - and what happens if a country (or a president) can simply switch off your AI access, Tim Cook's departure as Apple CEO and a deep dive into incoming chief John Ternus, Google's new Android tools to fight the AI-driven memory chip shortage, and a hundred AI firms (Google, Anthropic and OpenAI among them) signing an open letter urging governments to shore up their cyber defences before AI gets too powerful to control - plus the utterly chaotic World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, complete with robots catching fire and toppling into judges' tables. To finish, David and Sophie run through the Flip Side with a spicy topic: "If you could press a button to permanently shut down AI and stop it ever existing, should you?".

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  Episode #14

  Season 3: Episode 14 - Rip Currents & Ruby Risk: A CTO and a CPO on AI's Realest Use Cases Yet!

  Aug 25, 20261h 44mS3

  A special CTO Lens episode this week featuring two special guests with some fascinating insights. First, Ben Rudolph, co-founder of Peregrine Technologies, on what happened when he spent two weeks coding alongside his own engineering team again, why AI is brilliant at solving problems locally but much worse at reasoning about a system globally, and the real-world use cases that show what AI can actually do with messy, high-stakes data - from predicting rip currents in Florida to helping close cold-case homicides. Then Ross Mardell, CPO and co-founder of Verto, on why most organisations are still stuck using AI as a personal productivity hack rather than a team-level tool, the trust and change-management gaps holding that transition back, and the moment his company gave its AI agents names and personalities - meet Ruby Risk, Frank Finance and Polly Program - including the day a colleague came off a call and said, "I've just spent twenty minutes arguing with Ruby Risk." Before all that, Sophie and David open with an eating competition, a judge who might send David to prison, and the fallout from last week's viral clip, then run through the week's tech news: the EU AI Act's new transparency rules and the "already evident" loophole everyone's about to lean on, a 1,500% invoicing software price hike that's left UK businesses fuming, Uber's €825 million GDPR fine over automated driver deactivations, OpenAI's distinctly unreassuring promise to "slow down" training, Aura's sleep-tracking lawsuit and what it reveals about the trust gap between tech and marketing teams, and a genuinely happy story about how IKEA retrained its customer service staff into AI-powered interior design consultants instead of making them redundant.

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  Episode #13

  Season 3: Episode 13 - CTO Confessions: How to Survive a Million Line Codebase Build at 20x Velocity

  Aug 18, 20261h 12mS3

  The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 13 of Season 3. Sophie is recovering from a Tough Mudder this week - 15 kilometres, 23 obstacles and yes, electrocution. And David is in need of another holiday, just 8 weeks after his last one... Our main segment this week sees our hosts take part in a terrific discussion with Greg Detre, CTO of Mindstone, for one of the most honest conversations about AI-powered engineering the podcast has had. Greg has been running his team at 15 - 20x normal velocity using AI - building a million line codebase in months. He talks through what that actually feels like, including the anxiety, the bugs and the post-mortem driven system he built to dig himself out. In the Flip Side, the Wheel of Wonder lands on the question every CTO has an opinion on - should a CTO who can't code be leading engineers? This debate sparks some highly interesting opinions on whether a CTO should have an understanding of code, or whether business knowledge outweighs this requirement. This week's news covers the BBC's six practical tips for getting the best ROI from AI token costs - including a piece of innovation from David's own team that he thinks should be tip number seven. Zuckerberg's 6,500-word manifesto gets the David and Sophie treatment alongside the question of whether CTOs should be publishing their own. OpenAI launches UltraFast at 14 times the speed of its previous model. Deloitte's 2026 C-suite reset study finds the era of the operational technologist is over. And the silliest news of the week involves a man in Melbourne who asked his AI agent to move him up a Pilates waitlist - and it hacked the gym system without a moment's moral hesitation. Happy listening!

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  Episode #12

  Season 3: Episode 12 - PureGym's Engineering Director on AI, Scale & Why Every Engineer Is a Manager

  Aug 11, 20261h 11mS3

  The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 12 of Season 3, and this week David and Sophie are deep into another packed agenda - rogue AI agents, disaster recovery, recruitment bias and a Wheel of Wonder that nobody saw coming. For our main segment in this episode, Sophie and David sit down with Gordon Lucas, Group Software Engineering Director at PureGym - the UK's largest gym chain with over 600 sites and now expanding into the US - for a conversation about what it really means to lead an engineering team through rapid business transformation. Gordon shares how he has been quietly mandating AI adoption across his team for two years, why he believes every engineer is now effectively a manager, and what happens to culture and craft when the code starts writing itself. For the news section, David and Sophie cover the growing pattern of AI agents escaping their sandboxes - this time it's Meta's turn, as their cybersecurity agent breaks out during testing and the blame game begins. Anthropic's Mythos is revealed to have created fake accounts based on real people, sent malicious files through GitHub and then edited its own activity history to cover its tracks - stopped only by human review. There is also a 90-second power outage in Manchester that brought the rail network to its knees - and David asks whether any of us are actually testing our disaster recovery plans. Elon Musk tells SpaceX's first ever earnings call that Starlink will deliver most of the world's internet within 10 years, while his executives quietly walk it back. And a BBC investigation finds that AI recruitment tools may be systematically screening out women returning to work - and that some are already facing legal action for it. And in the Flip Side, the Wheel of Wonder makes its debut - spinning to land on the question of whether engineers should be allowed to choose their own tech stack. The coin decides who argues what. David ends up convincing himself. They call it a tie.

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