The Digital Lighthouse: building strong tech leadership networks in the Age of AI

Everyone’s talking about GenAI.  And everyone’s looking to CTOs for answers. But how are they really feeling about it all?

Softwire partnered with CTO Craft to survey over 200 technology leaders to find out.

In this episode of The Digital Lighthouse, host Zoe Cunningham discusses the report findings with Nick Bates (COO, CTO Craft) and Yemi Olagbaiye (Director, Client Portfolio).

Join them as they discuss:

• Creating actionable insights from community feedback
• The evolution of tech leadership communities and their growing importance
• Building and nurturing professional networks in the technology sector
• Balancing traditional technology delivery with emerging technologies
• The role of community support in addressing tech leadership challenges
• The importance of meaningful conversation in tech leadership

Listen below:

About our guests

Transcript

[00:00:01] Zoe Cunningham: Hello, and welcome to the Digital Lighthouse. I’m Zoe Cunningham. On the Digital Lighthouse, we get inspiration from tech leaders to help us to shine a light through turbulent time. We believe that if you have a lighthouse, you can harness the power of the storm. Hello, and welcome to Software Tech Talks. I’m Zoe Cunningham. Today, I am delighted to welcome Yemi Olagbaiye, who is a client portfolio director at Software, and Nick Bates, who is the COO at CTO Craft. Could I ask you both to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your journey, so how you came to be doing the role that you’re doing today.

[00:00:43] Nick Bates: Yes. So I’m Nick Bates. I have been COO of CTO Craft for about three years now, and my background is a long time in publishing and the book world and often operational roles. So things in a lot of pies, basically, in the workplace. And that brought me to CTO Craft three years ago just post lockdown. I was the first full time team member after the CTO crowd community had grown a lot through lockdown for obvious reasons as technology leaders were looking for feedback and space to talk with other people about the challenges they were going through. And since then, we’ve continued to grow, but in a different world, obviously, with in person events growing and the desire to people to network and meet up in person. That’s been a big focus for us over the last three years, and the community continues to grow.

[00:01:37] Zoe: Amazing. Thank you.

[00:01:38] Yemi Olagbaiye: Cool. I will go next. Like you said, Zoe, I’m a client director or client portfolio director at Softwire. So I look after one half of our private sector portfolio, clients across the media, entertainment, leisure, retail, sport. And how I’ve come here, I guess, I’ve spent sort of 15 years on the business development and some transformational side of the industry kind of you know, in the early days, the, dare I say, cold caller sat in a room with a phone book and a and and a phone. But, you know, as time went on, really kind of getting to the core of helping companies navigate digital transformation technology, now more recently, the rapidly evolving AI landscape. And I think it’s really cool actually because what’s particularly interesting about my role is that it’s that intersection of traditional technology and emerging technologies like Jet AI. So I’ve gotta go in. I’ve gotta help clients figure out practical, valuable ways to implement them. And I think that’s a really interesting parallel with the survey, right, that we’ve done. You read the survey and you see, well, actually, lots of the tech leaders of the CTO Craft community and beyond, you know, they’re increasingly having to balance traditional technology delivery with some of these emerging technologies like AI and Gen AI. They’re now responsible, right, for the implementation of all of that, and I think it’s interesting seeing that gap, right, between adoption and governance and legacy versus new. And that’s exactly the sort of challenge, I guess, that I help organizations navigate. So it felt like a very poignant survey to be doing.

[00:03:11] Zoe: Yes. So that’s the kind of challenge that you thrive on.

[00:03:14] Yemi: Exactly. Yes.

[00:03:16] Zoe: So we’ll come on to what the survey is in a little bit. Nick, could you maybe tell us a bit more about what CTO Craft is and why CTOs might wanna get involved with it?

[00:03:27] Nick: Yeah. Absolutely. So CTO Craft is a community for senior technology leaders. And that, as the name suggests, orientates chiefly around chief technology officers, but it’s broader than that. It’s a broader church than that. And the roles that it encompasses, the names of those roles vary depending on where you are in the world, like from VP of Edge, head of engineering. But that’s the senior technology roles, the people that are grounded in technology, but leadership is a core part of what they do. And they come to the community for support in dealing with a whole host of challenges from recruitment through to dealing with stress, their own stress, that of their teams, to technology challenges, specific implementations, specific technologies that they want help with or that they want some input from the community are. There’s a real wide range of conversations happening in the community. And more than that, we supply resources and learning resources to support the community. As I mentioned in the introduction, that is seen as doing a lot of in person events in over the last few years. So we do a lot of online and offline events. We do several conferences each year, and this year, that spread out into Europe. Next year, that’s gonna spread into North America with our first conference in Toronto. And our next conference is in London in March 2025, and that tends to be our biggest annual conference. And we provide other resources. So besides the Slack community, which is the kinda heart of the business, we work on blog posts with people. We do a whole range of content pieces of which this survey is one of them.

[00:05:02] Zoe: Brilliant. This survey that we are very shortly going to talk all about. And if you’re listening and you do want to learn even more about CTO Craft, we actually have a whole podcast episode that we did with the founder of CTO Craft, Andy Skipper, that we did back in 2022. So check out the link in the comments and have a listen. So to kind of set the scene, everyone’s talking about Gen AI. So why do we need to be joining in with this conversation?

[00:05:32] Yemi: Yeah. Everyone is talking about GenAI. I feel like I’m one of those people because I’ve tons of insane amount of talking about it myself on the, um, public speaking circuit. It’s interesting. Right? Because I think you look at the survey and you see this really interesting mix of emotions about AI. Right? Like, amusement, acceptance, anxiety, all these sort of things. And I think it for me, what it told me was that there’s this recognition amongst that community of both sides of the coin. Right? Both the potential and the hype. You’ve got some leaders that see the competitive advantage, but there’s also that healthy dose of pragmatism. And so that suggests that, you know yeah. Like I said, there’s this recognition of the potential, but also the need to cut through the noise and to find practical applications. Right? Realism about how this stuff actually works and how it’s gonna impact you as a business or as an enterprise. So I think not joining the conversation, I think it just risks you falling behind because these technologies are evolving so fast. I’m not gonna say they’re reshaping industries because I think we’re kind of as far as the hype cycle, we are going through that fusion that we’re trying to figure out. Although on a separate note, I would say, is that I think there’s also that sort of time to value that people don’t realize. Right? Everyone wants the magic wand of let’s do AI for the whole business, and we get the results now. And it’s actually you know, there’s a lag. There’s a lead time there. But I think that recognition of the two sides of the coin and also that there was something else in the survey that was talking about leaders or people within their teams are using AI tools daily, but very few of them have, you know, guidelines or policies in place around that. Right? How that their individuals of apartments and business units are using it. So I think all of these gaps, I think, are exactly why everyone needs to join in the conversation. Right? We need to have, as a community, whether it’s CT aircraft or just wider tech communities, we need to have more open and we need to have, uh, more informed discussions around all of this because it’s I see it as a bit of a learning journey, and that’s kind of half the reason why I’ve done so much of this looking into it and researching and talking. I love learning about all this stuff, and I think more people need to approach it like that. Be more open. Try and find a way of having informed discussions with your peers, with whoever in your community about how to implement AI responsibly and effectively. And also just to kind of keep track, really, of where this stuff is going. What we can’t afford to do is just sit and dig our heads in the sand if we’re saying that there’s lots of noise that we need to cut through. Can’t dig your head in the sand. What you really do is find some noise canceling headphones and really focus then that noise into kind of exactly where you’re looking to get that learning.

[00:08:03] Zoe: Well, Nick, maybe you can tell me a bit about our noise cancelling headphones that we’ve developed in the form of a survey. Why is a survey a good way to do it? Why does this help us move on the conversation?

[00:08:18] Nick: So, I mean, Yemi referenced probably my favourite quote from the survey there, which was somebody who had said, the height curve is in full swing, and we’re in the pit of despair. And it makes meaningful conversation difficult. And I think that really kind of that’s a lot of what Yemi was talking about, and I think that really cuts to the heart. There’s like, it’s about meaning there’s a lot of conversation, but what people are crying out for is meaningful conversation. And, again, Yemi referenced it. As tech leaders, people are gonna look to you for an answer. Like it or not, they’re gonna come looking in your direction. So the CTO Crafted community is a fantastic place for that support. That is kind of what the community is all about. It’s about people articulating those questions and getting an answer and getting support from other people. And the anonymity of a survey like this allows them the freedom to do that without fear of judgment or anything else, which is why you get this spectrum of responses. We took a specific angle, you know, obviously, working with software. What we find increasingly is that the drier the survey, the less informative the response. So we wanted kind of the whole idea of the spilling the tea was to start from an angle of, like, the water cooler moment. CTOs round the water cooler sharing the stuff that they don’t get the opportunity to necessarily share on a daily basis because they’re in a senior position, and they haven’t necessarily got that privilege of being able to kind of share their anxieties, their stresses, their concern, all of those things. So we talk about ground truth in the reporting, but, also, there’s a bit of humor, and that’s where we kind of dug into the emotions there. We started with the emotional response, you know, which is a pretty unusual place to start, I think, you know, just to get that kind of gut instinct, that gut feedback. And, actually, that proved to be really informative, but you’ve got a real spectrum of things going on there. But some really standout moments like acceptance being one of the core emotions that people feel. It’s neither kind of positive nor negative. It’s just something that is happening to me, and I’ve got to accept. And on the whole, again, it was a spectrum of responses the survey opens with, but it skews to the negative side, to emotions around kind of fear, apprehension, those kind of thing. But then when you get on through the responses to the survey, there’s this contradictory response where people are excited about the impact of Gen AI on their businesses and actually fully expect it to have a significant impact on their business in the next 3 years. And you think that is a weird friction going on there. That is you know? It’s happening to me. I’m concerned about it, but I expect it to have a massive business impact and be really positive for our business. It’s an odd thing. I also found that.

[00:11:19] Yemi: Such an interesting contradiction. I think it was specifically, it was 65% expect to see a direct impact from AI in one to three years, but then only 36% use any kind of process for, like, evaluating exactly what it’s doing, how they’re gonna get something out of it. And so, again, there’s another gap there that says to me there’s this really urgent need not to join the conversation, obviously, right, because otherwise you’re just gonna get left behind, but also to join the conversation, I guess, actively rather than passively. Right? So joining the conversation to be part of the shaping of how the industry and how the community are kind of figuring out as they go along how to implement these technologies, how to govern those technologies. To use another analogy, moving on from my noise cancelling ad posts, you can’t expect to eat if you’re not gonna pull up a chair to the table to sit down with everyone else. Right? And so I think that’s the way that I look at it is you gotta be in it to win it, really.

[00:12:10] Nick: One final thing I’d say about the survey specifically is that we, at CTO Craft, we love to have something that’s actionable off the back of these surveys. When you find surveys and they kind of confirm what you thought or you feel that sense of, yeah, this is me. I’m getting some comfort from it. That’s great. That is partly what these things are designed to do, but we feel the frustration of community members in particular when there is you get to the end, and there’s that real so what moment of, like, well, what now and now what? What do I do with this information? Which is why there’s a kind of, you know, step by step at the end of it where we try to suggest some possible avenues and some specific things that people can do or think about in terms of where they go from that information.

[00:12:55] Zoe: We will share the full survey so that you can look at all of this data and draw your own conclusions as well. But before that, I do want to drill into a few of the topics that kind of stood out to me. So the first one is trust, and I think that how much, you know, CTOs trust AI is very interesting. Like, do they trust it to be able to do the job? I wonder if either of you have any thoughts on that

[00:13:25] Yemi: Yeah. I think the trust findings are particularly fascinating, if not just because it’s quite a nuanced picture. Right? They revealed multiple layers of complexity there. So you got this headline figure, right, that’s fairly striking of 62%, which actually kind of I wasn’t expecting it to be that high. Right? 62% of a respondent saying that Gen AI couldn’t be trusted with critical business processes and decisions. But like I said, the story is more nuanced. And, actually, when you start to dig deeper into the survey, you realize, well, that trust varies significantly by company size. So, you know, the smaller businesses showing the biggest range of responses, you go to the large businesses, there’s more distrust there. But I think you’ve got these trust concerns, but then you’ve got 85% of people say they or their teams are using Chat GPT regularly at work. So what is it? Is it kinda like a trust but very by approach that people are taking where they’re willing to use the tools, I guess, but they’re careful about how and where to apply them? I thought that that was all sort of quite interesting as a conflict or attention. And then the other thing that I thought was also a bit of an enlightening disconnect, shall we say, was, you know, you had 71% using tools daily, 60% then having some sort of an automated evaluation process, right, from what are the outputs of the AI, what’s it doing, and then only 36%, you know, having a fairly structured and organized sort of multistep evaluation process. So what that says to me is you’ve got well, trust might be low for critical processes, but there’s a lot of sort of relatively unchecked AI usage, right, that’s happening in day to day.

[00:15:01] Nick: I’m not sure if I’m backing up exactly Yemi’s point here. But for me, it also speaks to the level of conversation within a business and the openness about what people are doing with AI and how much they trust the communication within their own business. I mean, you know, when you read the survey, they will see that in this area and the bit that Yemi’s referenced about inputs and outputs, there’s quite a lot to unpack, and there’s quite a lot of variation about what different businesses at stages of their growth and sizes of businesses are doing. As you’d expect, there’s a broad span. But you do get this feeling that individuals who responded to the survey perhaps are operating in a bit of a vacuum. Now that won’t be the case for everybody, but you do get the impression that some of them are kind of they don’t necessarily have the support network around them within work to mean that they’re all aligned within their own business on what their plan is around Gen AI. Like, what are they looking to implement, and what are they expecting the result to be? It’s a little bit of wild west going on where it’s kind of like they might all have an agreement about what tools they use a bit on process, but then what? Kind of the outputs and it’s like, well, where do we go from here? Maybe I, as a CTO, have one perception, but do my team, like, understand what that perception is? Does the board’s expectation? Have they got a different thing? And with that misalignment is where I think the trust bit creeps in because people don’t aren’t necessarily all singing from the same hymn sheet.

[00:16:41] Zoe: Well, that leads me very nicely onto my next question because I want to talk about talent strategies and what we found in the survey responses about how Gen AI is gonna affect businesses’ talent strategy. And, of course, that’s the one time you’re gonna be talking less freely, isn’t it? If you’re worried that the new talent strategy is not gonna have a place for you or is gonna be significantly changing what your job is.

[00:17:07] Yemi: Yeah. Talent is an interesting one. I guess what we saw is something quite revealing about how people really think, I guess, about the future of AI, right, in terms of how they respond to that sort of question. Starting in the beginning, you’ve got 36% of people saying that they want to, well, they expect, sorry, to change their talent strategies over in the next 12 months. And that jumping to 70%, I think it was, when you start looking at a much longer horizon. So that there’s a significant shift there, right, in terms of how organizations are thinking about their workforce in the future. But I think what’s fascinating is the size based disparity that the survey starts to show up. You know, you had sort of over half of micro businesses expectedly, I guess, expecting to see some big changes for them in terms of talent strategies within the next year compared to under 30% of your much more sort of larger scale businesses. So maybe one could argue that’s just smaller organizations are able to be more agile. They’re able to be more ambitious based on their size in terms of how they plan to do AI. But then I think you need to balance this with one of the other findings in the survey that, again, was one of those, well, initially standout things for me. 19% of respondents not expecting to make any changes to their talent at all. So you got some racing ahead with this big AI driven transformation, others holding back, and maybe that sort of that in itself creates this capability gap in the market. But I think there’s a, the, yeah, there was another interesting correlation with organizations rating their current AI expertise as higher than 6 out of 10, those being the ones that were more likely to plan near term talent strategy changes. So I guess maybe, again, there’s an argument one could logically arrive to there of the greater an AI and an understanding that you have, the more proactive that you can actually be in terms of planning what you want to do with your workforce and your talent pool.

[00:19:02] Nick: Yeah. And I think communities like CTO Craft are gonna be increasingly important to try and help support people with this kind of thing about, you know, with people coming in and saying, this is, this is where I’m at in terms of, like, the size of my company and the stage we’re at in our growth. And these are the issues we’re contending with because, again, the spectrum. I mean, I think this is, like, probably the source of a survey in itself or an investigation in itself because you’ve got skills gaps. I mean, I feel like some of these things, skills gaps, what specific roles there are going to be in terms of recruitment, and the process to recruit people. Like, how would you actually go about testing people’s skills? All of those things, Again, they’ll be on spectrum. Of course, they will, but I feel like they were all under scrutiny even before this subject came along. And that kind of circles back to the beginning, I think, about the development of this area is significant. I choose my words there because, you know, again, it will vary depending on people have different kind of perceptions of this. But I think what no one doubts is that the impact on your business, the impact on business will be significant. You know? It will. You can argue to cows come home about the scale of that and what that means internally to your business and, you know, your revenue and that kind of thing, but the impact will be significant. And so people need to start to think about these things, and they need to kind of formalize it. They need to have a plan and ask themselves some specific questions about formulating that plan.

[00:20:38] Zoe: There’s so much in this survey that we could talk about. There’s nuance and depth in all of them, so I do, uh, really recommend checking out the full survey. For now, could I just ask you both to kind of finish up by sharing, I guess, a couple of top tips, you know, from things you’ve learned from the survey or even just from your own personal experience. Like, what are the kind of first things that someone listening can go and do to kinda get the Gen a eyeball rolling in their organization? You’re just saying kind of the further you are ahead, the easier it is to know what to do next. So what should people, you know, focus on first to try and get that started?

[00:21:19] Yemi: This is something I, I talk about quite a lot in some of these keynotes that I’ve been giving it. And, and actually the survey really sort of backed that up, which was quite nice and quite helpful in terms of getting that real world backing. I think the first thing is to start with clear guidelines in governance. So as I said earlier, you know, that there’s the big gap, I think, that the survey showed. Right? Like, 50% of organizations don’t have any AI guidelines in in place as, as it stands. So get guidelines and governance in place. I think having these frameworks isn’t just about control. It’s, it’s, that’s just about enabling safe and effective use of tools. Right? The second thing is to invest in training. This is a learning exercise. It’s funny you’ve mentioned, Nick, about how how do you hire for these roles. Right? I sometimes think some of the people out there kind of pitching themselves as the experts and whatnot are somewhat charlatans because, you know, it’s just constantly evolving, and it’s still fairly fresh, right, or at least in the Jenny I space. We’re all still in this learning journey, and so investing in training, making that training practical is the only way that anyone kind of advances how this technology can be applied properly. And with that training, I think focusing on role specific applications rather than just kind of general AI awareness. I think there’s something in there about sort of having specific use cases, you use cases that are tied to specific processes and are tied to business strategy. This is something I always always talk about and I think specifically the specific processes bit. I see a lot of companies or I talk to a lot of companies that in that panic stage, and their instant knee jerk reaction is, right. Like, I need to completely transform my entire business. Right? Raw transformation of of AI, and that is like a surefire way to just wasting some money and looking a little bit silly in at the end of whatever program of, of stuff you do there. I think you wanna start really small. I think you wanna start very specific in the use case and kind of where you’re trying to apply that, but also make sure that’s still tied into, like, business strategy and and kind of what your company is doing or where your company is going. And then the last tip that I would say here is to just not neglect the human element. Someone once said to me, you gotta remember human is, is tech or something about nature. And I think there is a human element to this that we often forget because it’s just technology and profits and business and costs and whatnot, but there are humans involved in this. Right? And so there is anxiety and and, what, and lots of other emotions, right, as we saw in, in the survey. And I think making sure that you’re cognizant of that, that, you know, your team understands both capabilities and limitations and, and how that affects them. And then a bonus tip, I would also say join communities like CTO Cross, right, because then you get a whole bunch of peers that you can all learn from, and that’s the real positive thing, I think, your journey on AI, knowing that you’re not alone. There’s other people going through it, and you can just kinda soundboard and share experiences, and that’s all gonna be valuable in, in moving you forward.

[00:24:03] Nick: Yemi’s taken one of my tips and story. Well, I might have to kind of come up with a new one quickly, but mine 2 were related. The first one, it was about defining your role and your responsibilities quite precisely, like, actually writing them down. And I know for people who have been in senior leadership positions for a long time, that might sound like too basic, over basic. It may seem like, you know, kinda 101 type stuff. But I think the reason to do that is not just to clarify to yourself. This is a massive area. You know, the report really, like, hits home with it is. There’s a huge amount to think about in this space. And I think by writing it down, you identify more precisely what your responsibility is, but you also get clarity on what isn’t your responsibility. And that will differ, again, depending on size of business, stage of business, you know, whether you have a board in place, the size of your board, what the size of your team around you looks like, and how much of that responsibility you can delegate. But you start to kind of put the various pieces of the jigsaw with people, and then you might identify some stuff that isn’t owned. And it might be some really important stuff. You know, you might find that kind of nobody has looked at GDPR at all in relation to any of this, for example, and someone goes, oh, usually a lawyer goes, you might wanna look at that. And then the second one, it’s that kind of idea that you are not an island with such a broad area and the the strength of feeling that comes out through the survey that this is gonna be meaningful for businesses. This is gonna have an impact. It all comes with a burden of responsibility. So you don’t have to bear that responsibility entirely on your shoulders. Or if you do, work out what your avenues for help are. At one end of the spectrum, you’ve got the Seedograph community where you can actually speak to people who very likely will be able to give you specific feedback to your situation because there will be someone like you out there. At the other end of the spectrum, there’s formal training. Lots of avenues in that respect that Yemi’s articulated about putting in a structure and a framework to your business, but what it means is you can step back from that feeling that leaders often have, which is I have to sort this problem out. And you actually do start to sort it out, but you spread that problem out. And with that, you gain confidence and clarity.

[00:26:49] Zoe: Oh, fantastic. Thank you so, so much, Nick and Yemi, not just for your insights today, but also for all of the work putting together this survey and working out, you know, what are the right questions to ask and how can we get the most out of this and share it more widely. Thank you for listening. If you want to read directly the results of the survey or find out more about software, all of the links are included in the comments below. And, of course, you can catch up with all of our software tech talks episodes on SoundCloud, Spotify, and all other podcast apps.