Next Generation of Tech Talent
During this session, I will share insights from EVG Start’s recent research on the evolving demand for digital talent and what it means for the future of work in IT and technology-driven organisations.
The presentation is based on conversations I had with IT decision-makers from nearly thirty organisations in the Netherlands, combined with broader labour market analyses showing a rapidly growing shortage of digital professionals. While the numbers highlight a significant challenge, the research also shows that the real issue is not only the quantity of talent, but the type of talent organisations need to remain future-proof in a constantly changing technological landscape.
Rather than focusing on traditional job profiles or technical skill sets alone, the session explores the shift towards underlying competencies that determine long-term success. Four key themes will be discussed:
The growing importance of thinking ability over specific technical knowledge
The increasing weight of personal qualities such as curiosity, ambition and coachability
The critical role of communication and collaboration in creating impact with technology
The importance of learning ability as a core predictor of future readiness
I will connect these insights to the broader question of how organisations can better prepare for a future in which a large share of skills will change within just a few years.
The goal of the session is to offer a fresh perspective on tech talent: not as a fixed set of technical requirements, but as a dynamic combination of adaptability, mindset and human potential.
More Tools Won’t Scale Your MSP
Most MSPs are doing what they are supposed to do. They invest in tools, implement processes, and introduce automation to improve performance and scale their services.
Yet scaling often remains a challenge.
In my experience, the issue is rarely the tools themselves. It is what happens in between. How teams collaborate, how decisions are made, and how aligned people actually are in their day to day work.
This is the layer that is often overlooked.
In this session, we challenge the assumption that better tools lead to better performance. Because in practice, adding more tools often increases complexity instead of solving the real problem.
We will explore where scaling actually breaks down, why adoption rarely works the way it is designed, and what it takes to create a way of working that truly sticks.
Expect practical insights, relatable examples from real IT environments, and a perspective that is simple, but not easy.
If you are looking to scale your MSP without adding more overhead, this session will give you a different lens on growth.
Why your AI agents clock out at five (Sub: And why you see so little value from them defying all the promises and potential)
Redesigning for agentic AI is not the same as automating what is already there
Most organizations are making the same mistake with agentic AI. They map their existing value stream, find the slow or repetitive steps, and automate them. The architecture stays the same. The handoffs stay the same. The accountability model stays the same. And so does the bottleneck. What they are missing is that proper use of agentic AI does not just change the speed of the work. It reshapes how decisions are made, how work flows, and where accountability sits. That requires a redesign, not an automation project. And the gap between the two is more visible than most leaders realize.
Agents do not sleep. They do not have time zones or Slack notification settings. They can run continuously, at full capacity, every hour of every day. But in most organizations right now, they are waiting. For a review, an approval, a decision sitting in someone's queue until Monday morning. Not because that is their limit. Because the humans they hand off to are.
If you have designed your value stream so that agents are gated by human availability at every handoff, you have not built a hybrid model. You have built a human workflow with faster individual steps.
The organizations that figure this out first will have a structural advantage that compounds. This session is about how they are doing it. Not inserting agents into what already exists, but redesigning the full value stream, from discovery and planning through to deployment and learning, around what agents can do natively and where human judgment is irreplaceable. Drawing on the Agentic AI value principles, a practical framework for evaluating whether a hybrid model is built correctly or just built fast, the session maps each function of the value stream against three layers: fully agentic execution, collaborative decision-making, and the human-essential work that must stay with people because accountability and long-term capability require it.
A significant part of the session is spent on where agents genuinely prove their value and where they quietly create new risks. It addresses what breaks if you do not measure what agentic AI is doing to your teams. DORA metrics, velocity charts, and adoption dashboards were not designed for this environment. The organizations flying blind on the human dimensions of performance will see short-term gains and miss the slow erosion of the capabilities that determine whether the system is sustainable.
If you don’t own adoption, you don’t own the customer
MSPs love to talk about security, cloud and AI. But if customers do not actually use what you implement, your value stays invisible. In this session, Carina challenges MSPs to rethink adoption, not as a soft add-on, but as a strategic lever for customer loyalty, differentiation and business growth. Because when you ignore adoption, you leave a gap in your customer relationship and someone else will fill it. The real question is not whether adoption matters. The real question is: who owns it?
AI is Not the Product: How MSPs Actually Make Money from AI
AI is dominating the conversation, but most MSPs are struggling to turn it into real revenue. Clients are asking about AI, yet projects often stall, expectations are misaligned, and the commercial value remains unclear.
The core issue is not the technology, but how it is positioned and delivered. Treating AI as a standalone product ignores the reality that most organisations lack the structured data, processes, and visibility required for it to work effectively.
This session reframes AI as the final layer of a broader system. It introduces a practical, operator-led approach that starts with eliminating manual processes through automation, builds visibility through reporting, establishes reliable data foundations, and only then applies AI where it can drive measurable impact.
Using real-world examples from operational environments, the session will show where MSPs can create immediate value, how to avoid stalled AI initiatives, and how to package services in a way that aligns with how businesses actually operate.
From Idea to Impact: Building Europe’s Next B2B Tech
Europe’s next wave of growth will be shaped by B2B technology: practical, mission-critical solutions that help companies become more productive, secure, compliant and competitive. In this session, Henk Kok explores where the strongest opportunities are emerging — from AI and digital infrastructure to data sovereignty, automation and skills-based ways of working.
The session focuses on what makes B2B tech succeed in a European context: solving real operational pain, understanding regulated markets, building trust, and creating technology that fits into complex enterprise environments. Attendees will gain a practical view on how Europe can move from promising ideas to measurable impact through focused execution, strong teams and a deep understanding of customer needs.
From Pricing to Profit: Building MSP Offers That Convert
During this session, I’ll share the classic mistakes in MSP offers and what to do instead to ease the sales process, increase conversion rate and average deal size thanks to higher prices or better cross-sell/upsell.
I’ll also share the right add-ons strategies and how to upgrade existing customers to an upper package.
Less Friction, Fewer Tickets — A Better Service Desk Starts Upstream
Most service desks see only the tip of the iceberg. Every ticket is a moment a user decided the problem was worth reporting. And behind every reported problem sits a much larger volume of unreported friction: the workarounds, the quiet ten-minute losses, the frustrations vented to a colleague but never logged. This invisible layer is where digital experience is actually shaped, day to day, and where service desk demand is silently generated.
ITIL5 has formally recognised Experience Management as a discipline in its own right. But naming a practice and doing it are very different things, and Experience Management starts at a point most IT organisations are not yet equipped for: knowing where the friction actually sits. That requires more than excellent ticket registration; it requires a deliberate measurement discipline for the problems users never report.
This session offers the practical foundation: a model that connects friction measurement, user adoption, and service desk demand into one picture, and that ITSM leaders and MSP owners can use to intervene where the leverage is greatest. Drawing on patterns across Dutch enterprises, it offers a vocabulary, a method, and a business case for working upstream rather than scaling support.
This is not a tools session. It is about turning a framework ITIL has just named into something that lives in your service desk on Monday morning: starting with the friction you can't yet see.