Capturing the trillion dollar opportunity with autonomous professional services

Presented by Certinia

Every professional services leader knows the feeling: a pipeline full of promising deals, but a bench that’s already stretched thin.

That’s because growth has always been tied to a finite supply of consultants with finite availability to work on projects. Even with strong market demand, most firms only capture 10-20% of their potential pipeline because they simply can’t staff the work fast enough. Professional Services Automation (PSA) software emerged to help optimize operations, but the core model has remained the same.

Thankfully, that limitation is about to change. The proliferation of AI agents is sparking 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 firms to capture 70-90% of demand instead of leaving it on the table.

Why professional services has the biggest transformation opportunity 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 current-state automation and future-state autonomy.

Traditional automation follows pre-set rules: When X happens, do Y. It's a logical workflow. Autonomy, on the other hand, is goal-oriented: The goal is Z. Analyze the data, select and deploy the best resources, and execute the necessary steps to achieve Z. It’s the difference between executing a workflow, and executing a full-on strategy.

This distinction is key 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 services firm is constantly solving a multi-dimensional problem. The "product" isn't a license or a physical item; it's the expertise of its people, working on a diverse set of tasks, typically delivered over discrete units of time.

That means the business model of a services organization contains layers of operational complexity that product-based businesses inherently get to avoid. The manual effort and guesswork involved often lead to conservative bidding on new business, underutilized experts, and reactive staffing that can put project margins and timelines at risk. Added up, this complexity represents a trillion-dollar opportunity cost 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 blended 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 limitless supply of labor for repeatable tasks, all governed by a single engine. It's a fundamental shift from a model constrained by human supply to one amplified by digital scale.

There is one enterprise software ecosystem uniquely positioned to make Autonomous PSA possible: Salesforce. Autonomous PSA emerges from the combination of three of its core technologies:

The Salesforce platform as the foundation: Everything will start with a single source of truth. The Salesforce platform provides the unified data fabric for every aspect of the customer relationship. This foundation extends across the entire platform, giving the autonomous engine the complete data context it needs to function.

Agentforce as the AI engine: Agentforce represents the industry’s most secure, trusted layer for building and deploying AI agents that provide digital labor. It gives organizations the power to execute complex tasks at scale, transforming AI capabilities from concept to a tangible part of the future resource pool.

Salesforce-native Professional Services Automation software as the orchestration brain: The data foundation and AI engine need a command center. A Salesforce-native solution for Professional Services Automation like Certinia acts as the orchestration brain that defines the goals, rules, and workflows for the agents, deploying them alongside human resources to optimize project outcomes from sale to delivery.

The keystone of this new model is the orchestration brain, akin 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 scrambling with spreadsheets, staffing becomes a real-time, AI-driven allocation based on skills, availability, and project needs.

The combination creates a unified platform that gives the orchestration engine the context it needs for smarter, faster decision-making across the entire project lifecycle.

For executives, the impact is direct. Now empowered to overcome human capacity limits, PSOs can expand pipeline capture from a mere 10–20% to as high as 70–90%. This growth is also more profitable, as margins improve when lower-value work is offloaded to digital labor, allowing people to focus on high-value delivery. Furthermore, project timelines are accelerated, with 24/7 AI capacity shortening schedules and speeding time-to-value.

Crucially, this speed and efficiency do not come at the expense of quality; human oversight remains embedded in every engagement, ensuring client trust is maintained through strong governance.

Preparing your organization for autonomous PSA

Adapting to Autonomous Professional Services requires leadership and foresight. For organizations ready to start, the journey begins with three key steps:

Re-architect your workforce model. The traditional pyramid workforce hierarchy is shifting to a diamond structure with AI agents handling the base of repeatable work. This will create new roles like orchestration analysts and agent supervisors to manage this blended workforce. Your first move is to audit your delivery processes and identify the high-volume, low-complexity tasks primed for this new digital workforce.

Invest in a native orchestration engine. An autonomous system needs a central brain. This is your PSA solution, and it must be native to your CRM platform to access real-time data across sales, service, and finance. If your project, resource, and financial data live in different systems, your priority is to unify them on a single platform to create the foundation for intelligent decision-making.

Experiment, then scale. Don't try to transform everything at once. Start by automating a single, high-friction process, like project creation from a closed-won opportunity or initial budget drafting. Proving value on a small scale builds the business case and the operational muscle for a systematic expansion across your entire services lifecycle.

Model behind the trillion-dollar ppportunity

Our analysis from over 2000 global professional services organizations indicates that firms today leave most of their pipeline untouched. With human capacity alone, they typically capture only 10–20% of qualified demand. By blending digital labor into the mix, that capacity can rise to 70–90%. The difference—what we call ΔR—is massive. For a large professional services organization (PSO) with a $6B pipeline, that shift alone unlocks about $3.6B in incremental revenue.

And that is just the starting point. Once you add amplifiers like faster delivery (acceleration), lower delivery cost (margin gains), and access to niche expertise (skill-gap coverage), the impact multiplies. In our model, those amplifiers nearly triple the base gain, raising the total opportunity to $10 Billion per firm. Scale that across 100 of the world’s largest PSOs, and you arrive at the trillion-dollar prize.

Seize the full market potential

The idea presented here represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redefine the economics of professional services. Firms that adopt Autonomous PSA will capture a greater share of demand, deliver faster outcomes, and free their experts to focus on what matters most: client success.

The era of Autonomous 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 Autonomous PSA. I encourage you to download it and explore how your organization can prepare for this shift.

Raju Malhotra is Chief Product & Technology Officer at Certinia.

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