AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 25, 2026--
Certinia, the leading global provider of AI-powered Professional Services Automation (PSA), 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.
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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.
“You cannot scale a modern services business on fragmented infrastructure," said DJ Paoni, Chief Executive Officer of Certinia. "Connection is the true differentiator for the organizations pulling ahead this year. This data shows that organizations fully integrated across sales, delivery, finance, and customer success are consistently outperforming on AI adoption and profitability. Removing that fragmentation frees people to focus on what matters most: delivering exceptional value to customers.”
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.
"Organizations that move directly to AI deployment without first establishing a clean, unified data environment consistently encounter the same problems: AI outputs that are unreliable, workflows that break under edge cases, and a rapid deterioration of user trust,” said Mickey North Rizza, Group Vice President, Enterprise Software and Agents, IDC. “The failure is not the AI — it is the data infrastructure beneath it."
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.
About Certinia
Certinia is the leading System of Action for services businesses, powering organizations with the complete customer visibility, trusted, domain-specific context, and agentic action to bring the right knowledge and judgment to every decision across the entire services lifecycle. Purpose-built for professional services, customer success, and financial management, the world’s leading services organizations rely on Certinia to maximize margins, deliver faster time-to-outcome, and grow customer value with certainty. Certinia is backed by Haveli Investments, Salesforce Ventures, TA Associates, and General Atlantic. For more information, visit www.certinia.com.
According to the 2026 Global Service Dynamics Report from Certinia, 49% of PS organizations plan to launch new AI-enabled services in the next 12 months nearly matching the share prioritizing team skill-set growth (44%) and forecasting accuracy (42%). AI is simultaneously a business objective, a market pressure, and an operational imperative.
