How Autonomous PSA Will Unlock a Trillion Dollar Market Opportunity

For its entire history, the professional services (PS) business model has been defined by a structural cap on growth. Revenue has always been tied to a finite supply of human expertise and the perishable billable hour; if you don't have the people, you can't take on the work. It’s a simple, and frustrating, reality.

That era is coming to an end as the emergence of agentic AI introduces a nearly limitless supply of digital labor. AI agents can execute repeatable tasks with a speed and scale that fundamentally disrupts the traditional economics of service delivery. This presents a massive opportunity for every professional services organization (PSO).

What does this mean for how we sell, staff, and deliver services? It means we can now build powerful hybrid teams, blending autonomous agents with expert human consultants to augment capacity and accelerate delivery. It means we can finally break free from the constraints of the rigid pyramid staffing model.

Most important, it means we can start capturing the 60-70% of qualified pipeline that most PSOs are forced to leave on the table today.

This transformation is the focus of a new thought leadership paper I co-authored with R "Ray" Wang, a leading analyst at Constellation Research: Unlocking a Trillion Dollar Opportunity for Professional Services with Autonomous PSA.

In the paper, we introduce a framework for this new hybrid human-agent workforce. We outline how an orchestration engine, built on a leading cloud platform like Salesforce, is the key to managing this new workforce and reshaping service delivery. We call this desired state Autonomous PSA — an evolution of our traditional software that we believe can transform how PSOs operate and grow.

The services industry is at a pivotal moment. I invite you to read the full paper to explore how your organization can begin preparing for this shift and start capturing its share of this trillion-dollar prize.

If you’re headed to Dreamforce, you can hear more on this topic at our session, “The Agentic Era: How AI is Reshaping Services Work.” On Wednesday, October 15, hear from Kurt Kuelz, SVP of Global Customer Success at Siemens, who will share how they are using Certinia with Agentforce to fulfill more pipeline and orchestrate delivery at scale. He’ll be joined by SalesforceBen.com editor Ben McCarthy, who will offer his perspective on the latest Agentforce updates. Click here for more info and to register!