Accelerating with AI, Leading with Judgment: International Services Week 2026 Is Here

Professional Services is facing its most disruptive period since the internet rewired how knowledge work gets done. AI is compressing timelines that once took months into days. Workforce models that were considered standard operating procedure three years ago are already obsolete. Client expectations have outpaced the delivery models most firms built their businesses on. And the gap between organizations that are navigating this well and those that are falling behind is widening faster than most leaders want to admit.

The questions this creates are real and pressing. How are the highest-performing firms structuring their AI adoption? What do the research and data tell us about where utilization, profitability, and workforce proficiency are trending? When the signals are contradictory and the pace of change is relentless, where do you go to get clarity?

Answering these questions requires a place where practitioners and business leaders can take in a wide view of the data, push back on each other's assumptions, share what's working and what isn't, and walk away with sharper thinking than they arrived with. That kind of collective intelligence is rare. When it exists, it matters.

That's exactly what International Services Week was built for.

This year, International Services Week runs June 22–26, bringing together services leaders, practitioners, researchers, and innovators from across the globe for five days of thought leadership, community, and activation. Certinia is proud to be a founding partner of this week-long celebration of the industry.

2026 Theme: Accelerating with AI. Leading with Judgment.

AI has moved deep into the heart of professional services. It's compressing project timelines, absorbing intelligence-heavy tasks, and fundamentally changing what it means to deliver services at scale. 

But that part of the story gets told often. The other half gets much less attention.

The firms pulling ahead right now share two defining characteristics. They've built the operational foundations to move at speed and scale with AI. They've also doubled down on the human expertise, ethical leadership, and strategic clarity that define the most durable client relationships. Organizations that move fast without strong judgment carry real risk. Those with deep expertise but slow execution lose ground. The ones developing both capabilities together are the ones shaping what professional services looks like in the years ahead.

That dual imperative sits at the center of Services Week 2026. Every day of the week, every piece of content, every conversation is designed to help services professionals navigate it.

Five Days to Learn, Lead, and Level Up

The week is structured around five daily themes, each exploring a different dimension of what it means to lead in this moment:

Monday, June 22 — Accelerating with AI. Leading with Judgment.

The week opens with bold, definitive thought leadership that captures the inflection point the industry is living through. We'll articulate what accelerating with AI while leading with judgment actually looks like in practice, and why mastering both is the defining challenge for services organizations today.

Tuesday, June 23 — Services by the Numbers

The signals are in the data. Tuesday cuts through the noise with the industry's most important research and benchmarks, including AI adoption rates, workforce proficiency, utilization, profitability, and shifting client expectations. Facts first.

Wednesday, June 24 — Strengthening Services through Dialogue

Transformation doesn't happen in isolation. Wednesday is about meaningful connections, bringing together industry experts, customers, and thought leaders to share insights, tackle challenges, and understand the forces reshaping the industry.

Thursday, June 25 — Level Up: Skills and Strategies for Growth

As AI accelerates execution, the premium on human judgment, expertise, and leadership has never been higher. Thursday focuses on the skills, mindsets, and strategies that services professionals and organizational leaders must deliberately cultivate to stay ahead.

Friday, June 26 — Service Beyond the Bottom Line

Services work is, at its foundation, a commitment to people helping people. The week closes by recognizing the impact of services organizations beyond financial performance, through community service, charitable giving, and a celebration of the people behind the work.

What We Have Planned

Certinia is hosting a handful of marquee activations during Services Week, each tied directly to the week's themes. Here’s a sneak peek:

International Services Week 2026 Virtual Keynote: 

The Services Dialogue: Bridging the Gap Between AI Expectation and Operational Reality

Wednesday, June 24 | 11:00 AM EDT | Online

The numbers behind AI adoption in professional services tell a complicated story. Only 11% of enterprises worldwide are currently obtaining measurable results from the majority of their AI projects, yet 44% of organizations are actively replacing their current Professional Services Automation (PSA) solutions to get there faster. In this research-driven webinar, IDC Group Vice President Mickey North Rizza will cut through the noise with hard data on what's actually happening across the industry, examining how agentic AI is redefining the core levers of services performance: utilization, margin, backlog quality, pricing, and client experience. She'll also address where human judgment, governance, and strategic clarity remain non-negotiable. Attendees leave with a practical framework for aligning their technology investments to their operating model and understanding where to trust AI and where not to. Register here.  

Go Deep with our Partner Webinar Series

Beyond the Pilot: Building AI You Can Trust | An Architectural Review of Agentforce and Veda Frameworks

Monday, June 22 | 9:30 AM EDT | Online

Services Week opens with a conversation that gets past the agent hype and into the architecture question most organizations are avoiding: what sits underneath the agent matters more than the agent itself. Certinia CPTO Raju Malhotra and John Pettifor, SVP of Innovation at Diabsolut, bring a practitioner-to-practitioner perspective grounded in real deployments, not demos. Pettifor's team has been building and shipping Delivery Intelligence, a live production agentic AI system on Salesforce and Certinia, in bi-weekly release cycles. Raju brings the platform lens: why governance isn't a compliance burden but a delivery accelerator, and what it takes to move from AI experimentation to AI that drives real margin impact. If your organization is somewhere between pilot and production on AI, this one is worth your Monday morning. Register here

Connecting the Dots: How BTS Built an AI Copilot to Solve Global Support Challenges

Wednesday, June 24 | 1:00 PM EDT | Online

This session makes the abstract concrete. BTS Finance Director Peter Hicks walks through the journey of designing and deploying an AI-powered support agent built to solve a specific, real problem: global teams operating across multiple regions, with institutional knowledge scattered across Slack channels, shared inboxes, Dropbox folders, and documentation platforms. The result was an agent that crawls the entire knowledge ecosystem and surfaces accurate, actionable answers on demand, driving self-service without disrupting localized workflows. Greg Plaisance of VFP Consulting joins to cover the architecture side: how to unify fragmented data securely, establish a performance baseline, and build something that scales. A grounded, practitioner-level case study for any services organization still wrestling with knowledge fragmentation. Register here.

Join our open LinkedIn Live conversations with industry experts

We’re hosting two LinkedIn Live conversations on Wednesday, June 24, each designed for a different layer of the AI conversation.

Can You Actually Measure How Well Your AI Agents Are Working?

Wednesday, June 24 | 2:00 PM EDT | Online

Certinia CBO Prasad Narasimhan Sulur, SPI Research's Connor Budden, and diginomica co-founder and editor Jon Reed take on the question that most organizations still can't answer: are the AI agents they've deployed actually performing? For most firms, investment in AI agents is outpacing the ability to evaluate them. There are no widely accepted standards for measuring agent performance, no common definition of what "good" looks like across business functions, and little consensus on ROI when the work agents do is probabilistic by nature. This session gets into why measurement is the gap that will define the next wave of AI adoption in professional services.  Register here.

Everybody Is Accelerating with AI. Not Everyone Has the Right Direction.

Wednesday, June 24 | 4:00 PM EDT | Online

Certinia CPTO Raju Malhotra joins Lisa Eisenberg, Head of Technology Partnerships at Salesforce for a candid conversation about what responsible AI deployment looks like in production services environments. The discussion covers the difference between speed and velocity in AI adoption, what "rules-bound AI" means when your P&L depends on it, how the hybrid human-agent model functions in real deployed work, and the accountability question that every services leader needs to answer before they scale.  Register here.

Consulting Magazine's 2026 Top Consultants Professional Series

Thursday, June 25 | 3:30 PM EDT |  New York City

Certinia is proud to sponsor Consulting Magazine's Top Consultants 2026 Professional Series at the New York Marriott Marquis. The program, titled Consulting at the Inflection Point: Redefining Value in an Age of AI and Uncertainty, pairs three lightning talks with a deep-dive panel discussion on the forces reshaping the consulting industry: AI impact, economic volatility, and the rising sophistication of client demands.

Certinia CBO Prasad Narasimhan Sulur will take the stage with a session most consulting leaders will find uncomfortably timely. Drawing on nearly two decades leading services practices at Bain & Company, Prasad examines how agentic AI is forcing firms to rethink how they price, staff, and deliver work, and lays out three imperatives for capturing value through the shift: AI governance, delivery model redesign, and building a credible AI-native identity. The evening closes with the awards dinner recognizing the Top Consultants of 2026. If you're in New York on June 25, registration is open here.  

Certinia's Global Day of Service with CareerVillage

Services Week closes the way it should: with people showing up to help other people. On Friday, June 26, Certinia teams across our global offices will step away from their desks and volunteer in support of CareerVillage.org, a nonprofit that connects underserved students with career advice from professionals. It's a natural fit: the expertise that defines professional services has real value beyond the billable hour, and CareerVillage is a platform built on exactly that idea. If you're a services professional looking to contribute your own expertise and support the next generation of talent for our industry, we'd encourage you to join us.

How to Get Involved

International Services Week has always been a community effort. In 2025, participating organizations from around the world drove dozens of blog posts, events, and community activations throughout Services Week. This year, we're inviting organizations and individuals across the services sector to participate in whatever way fits your voice and your audience:

• Write and publish an article on your blog aligned to one of the week's daily themes
• Host a discussion or workshop, virtual or in-person
• Organize a satellite event for your team or community
  
• Show your support on social media using #ServicesWeek
• Give back on Friday's Day of Service

Three years in, International Services Week has become something the services community genuinely looks forward to. The questions at the center of it are real, urgent, and worth gathering around.

This year's questions are the most consequential yet. How do we capture everything AI makes possible without losing the human qualities that make services work worth doing? How do we move faster without outrunning our own judgment? The answers are in the collective intelligence of the global services community, brought together for one week in June.

We'll see you there!

Services Week is an industry movement to advance and celebrate the global professional services community, taking place June 22–26, 2026. Visit ServicesWeek.com to learn more, register your organization's participation, or explore the full program.