By the VFP Consulting at Chicago Certinia Live
We were in Chicago last month for Certinia Live, and we left with a clear conviction: the professional services industry is standing at a genuine inflection point, and most organizations don’t realize they’re standing on the wrong side of it.
Across the sessions we attended, two things were consistently true: the data on what separates high-performing firms from the rest was compelling and specific. And the thinking on how AI actually accelerates that gap, rather than simply closing it, was almost entirely missing from the conversation.
That gap is where we live. Here’s what we took away.
Maturity continues to drive margins, and the data tells a clear story.
SPI Research presented survey data from 509 professional services organizations, organized across five performance pillars: Leadership, Client Relationships, Talent, Service Execution, and Finance & Operations. Firms are measured on a 1–5 maturity scale.
The financial results by tier were not subtle.
- Maturity Level 1 → Average EBITDA: -2.0%
- Maturity Level 4 → Average EBITDA: 13.8%
- Maturity Level 5 → Average EBITDA: 27.0%
The most striking detail: fewer than 100 of the 509 firms surveyed sit at a Level 4 or 5. The majority are clustered between Levels 1 and 3. That’s not a technology problem, it’s a structural and strategic one.
AI amplifies strong foundations. It does not fix weak ones.
This was stated plainly from the stage, and it’s something we’ve seen play out directly with our clients. Organizations that invest in AI before getting their data, processes, and fundamentals right tend to accelerate their existing problems rather than solve them. The firms that see the biggest returns from AI are the ones that first earned them through operational maturity.
What Certinia’s new product signals and what it doesn’t solve
The Veda session was the most forward-looking of the conference. Certinia has repositioned its AI product from service automation to what they’re now calling service autonomy agents that not only surface information but also make recommendations and take action independently. The demo was genuinely impressive, particularly the ability to manage projects and resourcing through a natural Slack conversation.
But there’s a meaningful question buried in the product’s architecture: which of the agents are actually relevant to you, and at what cost? Only about a third of the current agents are native to PSA; the rest sit in CS Cloud or the Services Estimator. Licensing runs through both Certinia and Salesforce Agentforce, which introduces pricing complexity that the product’s polish doesn’t yet fully resolve.
More importantly, the product can only perform as well as the processes and data it’s built on. The firms that will get the most from Veda are those that have already done the hard work of operational alignment.
The lesson hiding in the QTC session
Doug Johnston, our COO, led this session alongside Jeremy Bower, Managing Director at ACA, and it turned out to be one of the most candid conversations of the conference.
We were there to talk about why QTC transformations stall and why the conventional wisdom around sequencing often leads firms into exactly the trap they’re trying to avoid.
The session drew on our work with ACA, a real program mid-journey, with real friction, and real lessons we felt were worth sharing openly.
The core issue: ACA had embarked on a QTC transformation while simultaneously trying to define what they actually sell. Reengineering your quoting and billing processes before you have a clear, agreed-upon product catalog creates compounding internal change, and that’s precisely what extended the program well beyond its original timeline. In hindsight, the sequence mattered as much as the strategy itself.
Jeremy was direct about the change management piece too: it needed to start earlier, not as a downstream communication effort, but as a foundational part of the program design. That’s a lesson we’ve seen validated across engagements, and it’s one we’re increasingly explicit about with clients at the outset.
Know your business before you try to automate it. This applies as much to AI as it does to QTC.
The discussion resonated not because the challenges were unique to ACA, but because they weren’t. These are patterns that show up across firms of every size. And the takeaway isn’t that transformation is too hard; it’s that the order of operations is often underestimated, and the cost of getting it wrong compounds quickly.
Where we see the opportunity
One thing that stood out across every session we attended was the lack of a clear framework linking operational maturity to AI readiness. The maturity data is already there, and AI tools are evolving fast. But there’s still a gap in connecting the two, helping leadership teams understand where they actually are today, which operational improvements would have the biggest impact on margins, and how to sequence AI adoption in a way that fits that reality.
This is the work we’re built for. If you’re evaluating AI investments, navigating a QTC or systems transformation, or simply trying to understand what “mature” looks like for your organization in practical terms, we’d welcome the conversation.
To start an AI readiness conversation, reach out to our team https://vfp-consulting.com/request-a-consultation-2/
