Presented by Certinia
Every professional services leader knows the feeling: a pipeline full of promising deals, but a bench that’s already stretched thin.
This is because growth has always been linked to a finite supply of consultants with finite availability to work on projects. Even with strong market demand, most companies only capture 10-20% of their potential pipeline because they simply can’t staff the work quickly enough. Professional Services Automation (PSA) software emerged to help streamline operations, but the core model remained the same.
Fortunately, this limitation is about to change. The proliferation of AI agents is unleashing a new model — standalone PSA — combining human expertise with a digital workforce, all managed by a central orchestration engine. The result is a system that allows companies to capture 70-90% of demand instead of leaving it aside.
Why professional services has the greatest opportunity for transformation with agent AI
Many industries will be transformed by AI agents, but perhaps none more so than professional services. Understanding why requires us to explore the difference between current-state automation and future-state autonomy.
Traditional automation follows predefined rules: When X happens, do Y. It’s a logical workflow. Autonomy, on the other hand, is goal-oriented: The goal is Z. Analyze data, select and deploy the best resources, and take the steps necessary to achieve Z. It’s the difference between executing a workflow and executing a complete strategy.
This distinction is critical because the core operation of a professional services firm is a complex strategy. Unlike a sales team managing a linear pipeline or a support team resolving a reactive queue, a services company is constantly solving a multidimensional problem. THE “product” it is not a license or a physical item; it is the experience of its people, who work on a diverse set of tasks, typically performed in discrete units of time.
This means that a services organization’s business model contains layers of operational complexity that product-based companies are inherently able to avoid. The manual effort and guesswork involved often leads to conservative proposals for new business, underutilized experts, and reactive personnel that can put margins and project deadlines at risk. Combined, this complexity represents an opportunity cost of billions of dollars for the global services economy.
The orchestration engine that makes autonomous PSA possible
“Autonomous PSA” describes an intelligent system designed to manage and orchestrate a mixed team of human experts and their fellow AI agents. It works by integrating a digital workforce of AI agents directly into your service delivery operations, providing a nearly unlimited supply of labor for repeatable tasks, all governed by a single engine. It is a fundamental shift from a model limited by human supply to one amplified by digital scale.
There is an enterprise software ecosystem uniquely positioned to make standalone PSA possible: Salesforce. The autonomous PSA arises from the combination of three of its main technologies:
The Salesforce platform as a foundation: It will all start with a single source of truth. The Salesforce platform provides a unified data structure for all aspects 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 trusted layer for creating and deploying AI agents that provide digital labor. It gives organizations the power to perform complex tasks at scale, transforming AI capabilities from concept to a tangible part of the future feature set.
Salesforce-native professional services automation software as the orchestration brain: The database and AI engine need a command center. A native Salesforce solution for professional services automation like Certinia acts as the orchestrating brain that defines the objectives, rules and workflows for agents, deploying them together with human resources to optimize project results, from sale to delivery.
The cornerstone of this new model is the orchestration brain, similar to a control tower for the hybrid human-AI agent workforce. It’s a system built to manage an elastic supply of resources, instantly scaling delivery by pairing consultants with digital agents. Instead of dealing with spreadsheets, staffing becomes AI-driven, real-time allocation based on skills, availability, and project needs.
The combination creates a unified platform that provides the orchestration engine with the context needed for smarter, faster decision-making across the entire project lifecycle.
For executives, the impact is direct. Now empowered to overcome the limits of human capacity, PSOs can expand pipeline capture from just 10-20% to 70-90%. This growth is also more profitable, as margins improve when lower-value work is transferred to digital work, allowing people to focus on delivering high-value work. Additionally, project timelines are accelerated, with 24/7 AI capability shortening timelines and accelerating time to value.
It is crucial that this speed and efficiency do not come at the expense of quality; human oversight remains embedded in all engagements, ensuring customer trust is maintained through strong governance.
Preparing your organization for standalone PSA
Adapting to Independent Professional Services requires leadership and vision. For organizations ready to get started, the journey begins with three key steps:
Redesign your workforce model. The traditional pyramid workforce hierarchy is shifting to a diamond structure, with AI agents taking care of the repeatable work base. This will create new roles, such as orchestration analysts and agent supervisors, to manage this mixed workforce. Your first step is to audit your delivery processes and identify the high-volume, low-complexity tasks ready for this new digital workforce.
Invest in a native orchestration engine. An autonomous system needs a central brain. This is your PSA solution and must be native to your CRM platform to access real-time sales, service and financial data. If your project, resources and financial data reside in different systems, your priority is to unify them into a single platform to create the foundation for intelligent decision making.
Try it and then scale. Don’t try to transform everything at once. Start by automating a unique, high-friction process, like creating a project from a closed opportunity or creating an initial budget. Proving value at a small scale creates the business case and operational strength for systematic expansion across the entire service lifecycle.
Model behind the trillion-dollar opportunity
Our analysis of more than 2,000 global professional services organizations indicates that companies today leave the majority of their pipeline intact. With human capacity alone, they typically capture only 10-20% of qualified demand. By adding digital labor into the mix, this capacity can increase to 70-90%. The difference – what we call ΔR – is huge. For a large professional services organization (PSO) with a $6 billion pipeline, this change alone unlocks about $3.6 billion in incremental revenue.
And that’s just the starting point. Once you add amplifiers like faster delivery (acceleration), lower delivery cost (margin gains) and access to niche expertise (covering skills gaps), the impact multiplies. In our model, these amplifiers nearly triple the base gain, bringing the total opportunity to $10 billion per company. Scale this across 100 of the world’s largest PSOs and you’ll arrive at a trillion-dollar prize.
Take advantage of the full potential of the market
The idea presented here represents a unique opportunity to redefine the professional services economy. Companies that adopt Autonomous PSA will capture a greater share of demand, deliver faster results, and free up their experts to focus on what matters most: customer success.
The era of Independent Professional Services has begun. The orchestration engine is the key. How quickly will your organization seize the opportunity?
The full framework and analytical model are detailed in this new white paper, Unlocking a Trillion Dollar Opportunity for Professional Services with Standalone PSA. I encourage you to download and explore how your organization can prepare for this change.
Raju Malhotra is Director of Product and Technology at Certinia.
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