Presented by CertiniaEvery 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 AIMany 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 ful …
