James Daly is an AI Engineer with the Innovation Products Team at CloudSmiths, a Dynamic Technologies group company. James began his journey with the company while completing his degree in data engineering, working part-time and juggling his studies with his career.
After earning his BEng (Data Engineering) at Stellenbosch University, James joined CloudSmiths full time in January 2025. He now works on ObjectiveFoundation, CloudSmiths’ proprietary product that gives businesses everything they need to configure, deploy and monitor their own agentic workforce.
His story highlights how important it is for businesses such as CloudSmiths to invest in up-and-coming tech talent.
James started as a background/Python engineer in the ObjectiveFoundation team. As his experience and expertise grew, he began building and presenting demos for prospective clients. This natural progression led to him managing client projects and, ultimately, overseeing deployment of ObjectiveFoundation for clients.
“ObjectiveFoundation is Lego for AI in business. It gives you all the pieces to build whatever agentic use case your business needs,” explains James. “That could be a customer-facing WhatsApp agent, integrations with platforms such as Gmail, Outlook, Google Drive or Salesforce, or internal automation workflows. The real benefit to clients is that they don’t have to build any of this from scratch. They get a proven, flexible platform and a team that helps them figure out exactly how to apply it to their specific context.”
As a lead on the client side of ObjectiveFoundation, James’s responsibilities have included selected presales activities and building and developing product demos. He is also in charge of scoping out new client use cases, implementation of the cases and being the focal point for client support. In addition, he has facilitated several workshops and discovery sessions with existing clients to uncover new AI use cases and guide strategic AI roadmaps for clients.
For James, the future of AI in business is clearcut. He says, “I believe the future of agentic AI in particular gives business users access to their own ‘mini me’ agents. These agents will understand their user’s role, the business domain and their day-to-day activities. When that’s in place, they can take on repetitive, time-consuming tasks that currently eat into a person’s day – drafting communications, pulling reports, updating systems – freeing people up to focus on the work that requires human judgment. For businesses, this will mean faster execution, fewer bottlenecks and people operating at a higher level. The productivity gains will be significant.”
As James continues to build a career at CloudSmiths, he has set himself some goals. He says, “My personal goal for the year is to continue growing as an engineer and as someone who can bridge the technical and business sides of AI. I want to deepen my expertise in agentic systems and take on more complex, high-impact client projects. Professionally, I’m focused on helping our clients get real, measurable value from the work we deliver – not just deploying AI, but making sure it actually changes how their businesses operate. I’d also like to keep developing the workshop and discovery side of my role as I find the strategic road-mapping work genuinely exciting.”