The IT Nerd

Certinia, today released its 2026 Global Service Dynamics Report, based on an independent survey of 1,000 professional services and IT/technology leaders around the world. One of the report’s top conclusions is that the clearest predictor of performance in the sector this year isn’t how much a company has invested in AI or talent, but whether that business runs on a single, connected system across the organization.

Organizations reporting the strongest AI results, highest profit margins, and account expansion are consistently more likely to report full operational alignment across sales, delivery, finance, and customer success than those struggling on the same measures. Companies with successful AI outcomes are more than three times as likely to be fully integrated as those with mixed results (28% vs. 8%). Firms achieving peak profitability, with margins above 40%, are also three times more likely to have fully integrated operations compared with barely profitable competitors. And among organizations achieving net revenue expansion above 100%, 68% are aligned or fully integrated, well above the 22% sector-wide rate of full integration.

The report’s additional findings reveal further gaps in perception, hidden operational risk, and early shifts in how services businesses price and staff their work.

The Perception Gap

Executives and delivery teams are living in different realities: Executives consistently rate their own organizations’ performance more favorably than the people actually delivering the work. Leaders rate their forecasting confidence 24 points higher than practitioners do, their AI success 16 points higher, and their ability to grow without adding headcount 10 points higher.

Retention goals aren’t reaching the front lines: 62% of executive leadership teams have defined net revenue retention goals, compared with just 45% of services/delivery teams, despite these teams often being closest to the customer experience that drives retention.

Operational Blind Spots

Confidence collapses in the “messy middle”: Just 38% of partially aligned organizations report high confidence in their resource, demand, and revenue forecasts. This compares to 75% among fully siloed companies and 78% among fully integrated ones — evidence that half-finished tech connections carry the costs of interdependence without the benefits of a shared system.

Account expansion is a massive missed opportunity: Just 6% of organizations globally are achieving net revenue expansion above 100%. This untapped growth opportunity is highly regional; expansion rates above 100% are more than four times as common in North America (9%) as in Asia-Pacific (2%).

AI performance is unevenly distributed: Among organizations that have deployed AI, the share reporting moderate or significant success ranges wildly by sector — from just 43% among accounting, tax, and audit firms to 74% among IT service providers.

Shifting Business Models

Pricing is moving decisively toward outcomes: 75% of organizations expect to increase outcome-based pricing over the next 12 months, even as nearly one-third already report difficulty managing hybrid or complex billing models.

Hiring priorities are shifting toward AI expertise: 82% of leaders name AI and data specialists their top hiring priority for the year, even as 82% of organizations expect to grow revenue without a proportional increase in billable headcount.

The 2026 Global Service Dynamics (GSD) Report was conducted by Sapio Research on behalf of Certinia, surveying 1,000 professional services and IT/technology decision-makers across the US, Canada, UK, Australia/New Zealand, and Singapore in June 2026. The full report, including chapter-by-chapter analysis of operational alignment, AI maturity, pricing models, talent, and financial performance, is available for download at certinia.com/services-report.

Certinia, today announced the launch of Veda: an enterprise-grade intelligent operations engine built to transform services organizations from reactive, manual workflows to autonomous professional services.

As Certinia’s suite of AI specialist agents and intelligent actions, Veda delivers rules-bound, trusted and ROI-focused autonomous workflows, combining Certinia’s decades of institutional memory with advanced AI reasoning. Built alongside Certinia’sleading Professional Services (PS), Customer Success (CS), and Financial Management (FM) Cloud solutions, Veda’s flexibility allows it to be accessed through, and seamlessly integrated into, existing business workflows to drive immediate and measurable value.

A Modern AI Engine for a Transforming Industry

Professional services firms are struggling to achieve AI adoption and ROI with generic AI tools, models, and point solutions just as the industry hits a structural inflection point, driven by a mandate to move beyond AI curiosity toward strictly defined, tangible use cases. Services organizations also face mounting pressure to shrink the quote-to-revenue cycle and shift from billable-hour models toward outcome-based pricing, creating demand for a new class of infrastructure that fragmented, legacy systems were never built to support.

Veda answers this need with production-ready AI solutions grounded in Certinia’s deep domain expertise, eliminating the manual tax on teams to deliver measurable, evidence-based growth. As the AI engine powering Certinia’s portfolio, Veda orchestrates a hybrid operational model where specialist AI agents bring reasoning, judgment, and execution to services operations, working alongside human experts so they can focus on the strategic work and decisions that move the business forward — together redefining the unit economics of profitable service management.

Where generic AI platforms rely on a single generalist model, Veda is purpose-built and domain-specific. At its core is the industry’s only suite of specialist AI agents, each grounded and permissioned for a distinct functional domain, making it the only intelligent services operations engine in the PSA category built specifically for the complexity of services delivery and management. These agents operate across two integrated layers: generative intelligence that surfaces insights and synthesizes complex data into clear narratives, and specialist AI agents that execute tasks, orchestrate workflows, and drive outcomes end-to-end.

Veda in Action

The Veda suite of AI specialist agents and intelligent actions delivers proven and demonstrable ROI for each core team across the complete services lifecycle. Where Certinia’s core solutions already set a high bar for operational performance, Veda acts as the force multiplier that maximizes tangible value across the entire business.

• For resource managers, Veda automates staffing analysis, bench matching, and work reallocation, returning up to 10 hours of capacity per month on top of the 10 to 25% productivity lift already delivered by Certinia’s core solution.

• For project managers, on-demand summaries across project financials, staffing, risks, and deliverables eliminate the administrative overhead that consumes delivery time, returning up to 20 hours per month.

• For customer success teams, Veda automates time-intensive workflows such as success planning, account and activity summaries, business review preparation, and tailored playbook creation. By surfacing renewal risks and expansion signals before they appear in the numbers, Veda drives an incremental 1% lift in expansion revenue and churn reduction. Because that retention improvement flows directly into utilization, a 1% utilization gain translates to a 1.5% EBITDA improvement, worth tens to hundreds of millions of dollars annually for large services organizations.

With intelligence embedded across the services journey, Veda ensures insights are never siloed within a single department. Users interact with Veda through natural language, and the system routes each request to the appropriate specialist agent to execute the task, meeting users where they work, whether inside Certinia or in collaboration tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Veda’s agent suite covers the full breadth of services operations, from estimation and resourcing to delivery, financials, customer success, health monitoring, and customer lifecycle orchestration. Together, they give firms the context and execution capability to move faster, operate with greater precision, and scale with confidence.

Built for Enterprise Scale and Value

AI adoption moves at the pace of trust. Veda combines the power of advanced AI reasoning with domain-specific context and intelligence, grounded in Certinia’s decades of institutional memory and services-specific ontology, to deliver autonomous operations and outcomes that are deterministic, rules-bound, and auditable — trusted AI built for the complexity of real services organizations.

Beyond its generative and agentic capabilities, Veda is engineered to solve traditional barriers to AI adoption through an architecture that prioritizes flexibility and long-term value. A single Veda subscription ensures universal access to Certinia’s entire evolving AI suite, giving teams access to Certinia’s latest AI capabilities through a transparent consumption model that pairs per-user fees with usage-based scaling, ensuring a predictable path to ROI that aligns directly with actual business output.

Veda is available today to organizations ready to transition from reactive delivery to autonomous operations. To see Veda in action inside real services workflows, join Certinia for a live webinar on Wednesday, April 22 at 10:45 AM EDT. Register here or visit Certinia.com for more information.