At Next Level 2026, 23–24 July at Western Sydney Convention Centre, James Eling will show Technology Service Providers how to use automation for real results, for themselves and their customers. Here, James will explain why the AI conversation must start with productivity and leadership, not the hype.
Two questions worth your whole year
For James, AI’s real significance is what it puts within reach. “The key thing that AI does is that it brings tools. It abstracted the layer of the developer,” he said. “In our company, our current theme is AI or die. And that’s because by the end of the year, everyone will code. Now, that doesn’t mean that everyone’s job is going to be a coder, but everyone needs to be able to understand how to write a script to automate something.”
The opportunity, he said, is to strip out work that adds no value. “Every business and every role has a large number of functions that must be done, some of these functions add no value to what the company does,” James said.
“Everyone now has the opportunity to get rid of 25-50% of the work that doesn’t add any value, so that they can then focus on the roles where they’re adding value for their customers.”
He distils the whole effort into two questions, “The first thing is, what can I automate? And the second thing is, how do I automate it? They’re the only two questions that I’m interested in for the rest of the year.”
Automate value, not vanity
James is wary of automation that looks impressive but changes nothing. “I know people who talk about how much they’ve automated and they come up with these incredible claims of ‘we’ve saved a thousand hours’, that’s fantastic but where is your profitability?” he said.
“When you dig into it, they’re automating things that don’t add business value. They’re automating the things that are easy to automate but not actually create productivity gains.” His framing is simple, “AI is just a tool. It’s all about productivity, because if you are more productive then it puts you in a really powerful position.”
It starts with the customer
That productivity, James argues, has to be pointed outward. “The number one threat that we’ve got is that we lose customers because they go out of business because their competitors are using AI to develop competitive advantages,” he said. “So I’m much more interested in creating automations for our customers to make them more profitable than I am in doing it for ourselves.
AI adoption is a leadership challenge
The hardest part of AI, in James’s view, is not technical. “AI adoption is a leadership challenge first and foremost,” he said. “You need to be able to build a vision, you need to be able to equip people to be able to see that vision in a way that’s non-threatening, and then you need to be able to lead them through it, give them the resources that they need to be able to prosper in an AI world.
James discusses his own method of leading by example. “One of the leadership values I live by is is going first,” James said. “I’m not telling people what to do. This is, follow me. So, I am building the skills so that I can demonstrate, and then embed into the team”.
Real world proof
James plans to bring concrete examples rather than live coding demos. One of his team’s biggest AI adopters, he said, is the web developer. “He has built an amazing website analysis tool that is twice as good as what we were using in the past, and it’s fully editable. And he built it in three days,” James said. “It’s saving us about 45 minutes every time we do a website analysis.” In his own work, he has compressed a four hour task to 15 minutes, noting that on one occasion “there was a day a couple of months ago where I did 12 hours worth of work in 15 minutes.”
What attendees will take away
James said the session is built for both the business and technical streams, and that he wants people to leave able to picture the path for themselves, their teams and their customers. The takeaway he settled on was practical, take a look at “how we’ve embedded AI, with some clear lessons on what to do and not to do in building an AI enabled MSP.”
James Eling speaks at Next Level 2026. Registrations are open now.
For tickets, the full agenda, and sponsorship details, visit https://nextlevel.smbitpro.org/.