Season 2: Episode 19 - Liz Kendall, Falling Robots and Data Teams Are More Important Than You Think!

The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 19, and this week David and Sophie are firing on all cylinders with a packed news agenda and a guest who really knows his way around a data pipeline.

This episode covers Roblox's controversial facial analysis age checks - and whether that's really the best we can do for child safety online. The UK's AI minister Liz Kendall gets the David and Sophie treatment after it emerged she doesn't actually use AI in her job. Sweden's decision to ditch screens and go back to pens and paper in classrooms raises some uncomfortable questions about where tech actually belongs. Allbirds' spectacular pivot from eco-friendly footwear to AI compute infrastructure gets a thorough reality check. And Tinder and Zoom want to scan your eyeball to prove you're human - with Sam Altman's fingerprints all over it.

David and Sophie also sit down with Shamim Mirzai, Head of Data Engineering and AI at Atheneum, for a grounded and genuinely fascinating conversation about how software, platform and data teams are evolving - who owns what, where the friction lives, and why your data engineering team might just be the most strategically important people in your organisation right now. Shamim brings decades of experience across banking, shipping, hospitality and tech - including a memorable stint at Mumsnet - and some refreshingly practical thinking on what it actually takes to make AI initiatives work at scale.

And in this week's listener mailbag, David and Sophie tackle the questions keeping tech leaders up at night - do we still need project managers, who's accountable when AI writes bad code, and should engineers be paid more for doing 5x the work with AI? As ever, they don't always have the answers, but they're asking the right questions.

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