Provided by Certinia
Every professional services leader knows the feeling: a pipeline full of promising deals, but an already stretched bench.
This is because growth has always been linked to the limited number of consultants with limited availability to work on projects. Even with strong market demand, most companies only capture 10% to 20% of their potential production line because they simply cannot hire work fast enough. Professional Services Automation (PSA) software has emerged to help improve processes, but the basic model has remained the same.
Fortunately, this limitation is about to change. The proliferation of AI agents triggers a new paradigm – Independent program support and management – Blending human expertise with a digital workforce, all managed by a central orchestration engine. The result is a system that allows companies to capture 70% to 90% of demand instead of leaving it on the table.
Why professional services have the greatest opportunity to transform with agentic AI
Many industries will be transformed by AI agents, but perhaps none more than professional services. Understanding why requires us to explore the difference between automation of the current situation and state autonomy in the future.
Traditional automation follows predefined rules: When X happens, do Y. It’s a logical workflow. On the other hand, autonomy is goal-oriented: The goal is Z. Analyze the data, select and deploy the best resources, and implement the steps necessary to achieve Z. It’s the difference between executing a workflow and executing an entire strategy.
This distinction is key because the basic operation of a professional services business is a complex strategy. Unlike a sales team managing a linear pipeline or a support team scanning an interactive queue, a services company is constantly working to solve a multi-dimensional problem. the "project" Not a license or physical item; It is the expertise of its employees, who work on a variety of tasks, usually delivered within discrete time units.
This means that the business model of a service organization contains layers of operational complexity that product-based companies should inherently avoid. Manual effort and guesswork often results in conservative bidding on new business, underutilized experts, and reactive staff that can jeopardize project margins and timelines. Taken together, this complexity represents a trillion-dollar opportunity cost for the global services economy.
The format engine that makes standalone PSA possible
The phrase “Autonomous PSA” describes an intelligent system designed to manage and coordinate a mixed team of human experts and their AI agent counterparts. It works by integrating a digital workforce of AI agents directly into your service delivery operations, providing a nearly unlimited supply of labor for repetitive tasks, all governed by a single engine. It is a fundamental shift from a model limited by human view to a model amplified at digital scale.
There is one enterprise software ecosystem that is uniquely positioned to make standalone PSA possible: Salesforce. The standalone PSA emerges from a combination of three of its core technologies:
Salesforce platform as a basis: It all starts with one source of truth. The Salesforce platform provides a unified data fabric for every aspect of the customer relationship. This foundation extends across the entire platform, giving the autonomous engine the full data context it needs to function.
Agentforce as an AI engine: Agentforce represents the industry’s most secure and reliable layer for building and deploying AI agents that provide digital labor. It gives organizations the ability to execute complex tasks at scale, transforming AI capabilities from a mere concept into a tangible part of the future resource stack.
Salesforce’s native professional services automation software as the orchestration brain: The database and AI engine need a command center. The native Salesforce solution for automating professional services such as Certinia Acts as the coordinating mind that defines goals, rules, and workflows for agents, deploying them alongside human resources to improve project outcomes from sale to delivery.
The cornerstone of this new paradigm is the coordinating brain, which is like a watchtower for a hybrid human-AI workforce. It is a system designed to manage a flexible supply of resources, instantly scaling delivery by pairing advisors with digital agents. Instead of scrambling with spreadsheets, hiring becomes a real-time, AI-driven personalization process based on skills, availability, and project needs.
This combination creates a unified platform that gives the orchestration engine the context it needs to make smarter, faster decisions across the entire project lifecycle.
For executives, the impact is direct. Now that they are empowered to overcome the limits of human capabilities, peace support personnel can expand pipeline capture from just 10% to 20% to as much as 70% to 90%. This growth is also more profitable, as margins improve when low-value work is converted to digital, allowing people to focus on high-value delivery. Furthermore, project timelines are accelerated, with 24/7 AI capability timelines shortening and time to value accelerating.
Most importantly, this speed and efficiency do not come at the expense of quality; Human oversight remains an integral part of every engagement, ensuring that customer trust is maintained through strong governance.
Prepare your organization for a standalone PSA
Adapting to independent professional services requires leadership and insight. For organizations ready to get started, the journey begins with three key steps:
Rebuild your workforce model. The traditional hierarchical workforce hierarchy is transformed into a diamond structure as AI agents handle the repetitive work rule. This will create new roles such as coordination analysts and agent supervisors to manage this hybrid workforce. Your first step is to review your delivery processes and identify high-volume, low-complexity tasks prepared for this new digital workforce.
Invest in a native formatting engine. An autonomous system needs a central brain. This is your PSA solution, and should be native to your CRM platform to access real-time data across sales, service, and finance. If your project, resource, and financial data resides in different systems, your priority is to unify them on one platform to create the foundation for smart decision-making.
Experiment and then measure. Don’t try to convert everything at once. Start by automating one high-friction process, such as creating the project from a closed acquired opportunity or drafting the initial budget. Proving value at a small scale builds the business case and operational strength to systematically scale across the entire lifecycle of your services.
The model behind the trillion dollar opportunity
Our analysis of more than 2,000 global professional services organizations indicates that companies today are leaving most of their pipelines untouched. Using human capacity alone, it typically only accounts for 10% to 20% of the qualified application. By blending digital workers into the mix, this capacity can rise to 70% to 90%. The difference – what we call ΔR – is enormous. For a large professional services organization (PSO) with a $6 billion pipeline, this shift alone unlocks about $3.6 billion in additional revenue.
This is just the starting point. Once you add amplifiers like faster delivery (acceleration), lower delivery cost (margin gains), and access to specialized expertise (skill gap coverage), the impact multiplies. In our model, these amplifiers increase fundamental earnings by approximately three-fold, bringing the total opportunity to $10 billion per company. Measure that across 100 of the world’s largest policy support organizations, and you arrive at a trillion-dollar prize.
Utilize the full market potential
The idea presented here represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redefine the economics of professional services. Companies that embrace independent PSA will capture a greater share of demand, achieve faster results, and free up their experts to focus on what matters most: customer success.
The era of independent professional services has begun. Synchronization drive is the key. How quickly does your organization seize the opportunity?
The full framework and analytical model are detailed in this new white paper, Unleashing a $1 trillion opportunity for professional services through independent PSA. I encourage you to download it and explore how your organization can prepare for this transformation.
Raju Malhotra is the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Certinia.
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