Presented by Certinia
Every professional services leader knows this feeling: a pipeline full of promising deals, but a bench that’s already stretched thin.
This is because development has always been linked to a limited supply of consultants with limited availability to work on projects. Even with strong market demand, most companies are only able to achieve 10-20% of their potential pipeline because they cannot work fast enough. Professional service automation (PSA) software emerged to help optimize operations, but the core model has remained the same.
Thankfully, that limit is about to change. The proliferation of AI agents is giving rise to a new model – Autonomous PSA – Blending human expertise with a digital workforce, all managed by a central orchestration engine. The result is a system that allows companies to capture 70-90% of demand rather than leaving it on the table.
Why is the biggest opportunity for transformation in professional services with agentic AI?
Many industries will be transformed by AI agents, but perhaps none more so than professional services. To understand why we need to explore the difference between present-state automation and future-state autonomy.
Traditional automation follows pre-determined rules: When X happens, do Y. This is a logical workflow. Autonomy, on the other hand, is goal-oriented: The target is Z. Analyze the data, select and deploy the best resources, and execute the necessary steps to achieve Z. This is the difference between executing a workflow and executing a complete strategy.
This distinction is important because the core operation of a professional services business is a complex strategy. Unlike a sales team managing a linear pipeline or a support team clearing a reactive queue, a service firm is constantly solving a multi-dimensional problem. "product" There is no license or physical object; It is the expertise of its people, working on a variety of tasks, usually distributed over varying units of time.
This means that a service organization’s business model has layers of operational complexity that product-based businesses naturally avoid. The manual effort and estimates involved often lead to conservative bidding on new business, underutilized experts, and reactive staffing that can jeopardize project margins and timelines. Overall, this complexity represents a trillion-dollar opportunity cost to the global services economy.
The orchestration engine that makes autonomous PSA possible
“Autonomous PSA” describes an intelligent system designed to manage and organize 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 virtually unlimited supply of labor for repetitive tasks, all controlled by a single engine. This is a fundamental shift from a model constrained by human supply to one amplified by digital scale.
One enterprise software ecosystem is uniquely positioned to make autonomous PSA possible: Salesforce. Autonomous PSA emerges from the combination of its three core technologies:
Salesforce Platform as a Foundation: Everything will start from a single source of truth. The Salesforce platform provides a unified data fabric for every aspect of the customer relationship. This base spans the entire platform, giving the autonomous engine the complete data context it needs to function.
AgentForce as an AI Engine: AgentForce represents the industry’s most secure, trusted layer for building and deploying AI agents providing digital labor. This gives organizations the power to execute complex tasks at scale, transforming AI capabilities from concept to a solid part of the future resource pool.
Salesforce-native business service automation software as the orchestration brain: The data foundation and AI engine need a command center. A Salesforce-native solution for business service automation certinia Orchestration acts as the brain that defines goals, rules, and workflows for agents, deploying them with human resources to optimize project outcomes from sales to delivery.
The core foundation of this new model is the orchestration brain, which is similar to a control tower for a hybrid human-AI agent workforce. It is a system built to manage an elastic supply of resources, connecting advisors with digital agents to instantly scale up delivery. Instead of fiddling with spreadsheets, staffing becomes a real-time, AI-powered allocation based on skills, availability, and project needs.
The combination creates a unified platform that gives the orchestration engine the context needed to make better, faster decisions throughout the entire project lifecycle.
For officials, the impact is direct. Now empowered to overcome human capacity limitations, PSOs can increase pipeline capture from a mere 10-20% to 70-90%. This growth is also more profitable, because when low-value work is shifted to digital labor, margins improve, allowing people to focus on higher-value delivery. Additionally, with 24/7 AI capability shortening schedules and accelerating time-to-value, project timelines are accelerated.
The important thing is that this speed and efficiency does not come at the expense of quality; Human oversight is embedded in every task, ensuring that customer trust is maintained through strong governance.
Preparing Your Organization for Autonomous PSA
The adoption of autonomous business services requires leadership and foresight. For organizations ready to get started, the journey begins with three key steps:
Reorganize your workforce model. The traditional pyramid workforce hierarchy is shifting to a diamond structure, with AI agents handling the base of repetitive work. This will create new roles such as orchestration analysts and agent supervisors to manage this hybrid workforce. Your first step is to audit your delivery processes and identify high-volume, low-complexity tasks for this new digital workforce.
Invest in a native orchestration engine. An autonomous system requires a central brain. This is your PSA solution, and it should be the core of your CRM platform to access real-time data across sales, service, and finance. If your project, resources, and financial data reside in different systems, your priority is to integrate them on a single platform to create the foundation for intelligent decision making.
Experiment, then scale. Don’t try to change everything at once. Start by automating a single, high-friction process, like project creation from a closed-win opportunity or initial budget drafting. Proving value at small scale builds the business case and operational strength for systematic expansion across your entire service lifecycle.
The model behind the trillion-dollar PPopportunity
Our analysis of over 2000 global professional services organizations indicates that companies today leave most of their pipeline untouched. With human capacity alone, they typically achieve only 10-20% of qualified demand. By adding digital labor into the mix, that efficiency can increase to 70-90%. The difference – which we call ΔR – is huge. For a large professional services organization (PSO) with a $6B pipeline, that change alone opens up approximately $3.6B of incremental revenue.
And that’s just the starting point. Once you add amplifiers like faster delivery (acceleration), lower delivery costs (margin profit), and access to specific expertise (skill-gap coverage), the effect multiplies. In our model, those amplifiers roughly triple the base profit, increasing the total opportunity per firm to $10 billion. Measure this against the world’s 100 largest PSOs, and you’ll reach a trillion-dollar prize.
Take advantage of the full potential of the market
The idea presented here represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redefine the economics of professional services. Companies adopting autonomous PSA will capture a larger share of demand, deliver results faster, and free their experts to focus on what matters most: customer success.
The era of autonomous business services has begun. The orchestration engine is key. How quickly will your organization take advantage of the opportunity?
The complete framework and analytical model are detailed in this new white paper, Opening up a trillion dollar opportunity for business services with autonomous PSAsI encourage you to download it and find out how your organization can prepare for this change.
Raju Malhotra is Chief Product & Technology Officer at Certinia.
Sponsored articles are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or that has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they are always clearly marked. Contact for more information sales@venturebeat.com,
