Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Before I joined Teamwork.com, I spent years inside professional services firms watching the same pattern play out. A project would close, the team would celebrate, and then finance would run the numbers and discover we barely broke even. The margin had eroded slowly across dozens of small scope additions that nobody tracked individually but that collectively ate the entire profit.

See how remote time tracking sharpens estimates, capacity planning, and staffing decisions.

Extra hours don't equal long-term productivity. Fix priorities, meetings, and workload, then track output next to burnout signals.

AI budgets have moved to the CEO and CFO, and they want proof. That was the clearest message at TSIA World 2026 in Las Vegas. "These budgets are at the C-suite. This is your customer now. The CEO, the CFO... they want to see the results." Thomas Lah, Executive Director, TSIA Most services firms aren't ready to give them that proof. TSIA's survey of its advisory board found: We spent three days in sessions, on the floor and at our booth.

Every services firm I talk to is measured on three things: delivering on time, keeping billable utilization healthy, and delivering projects profitably without over-servicing. AI should help with all three. So far, it's helping firms deliver faster. It isn't yet making them more profitable. SPI Research's 2026 Impact of AI on Professional Services study shows the gap. AI now touches 43.6% of projects, nearly double a year ago, and firms using it on most of their projects deliver far more of them on time.

AI is used on 43.6% of professional services projects in 2026, nearly double the 23.1% in 2025, according to SPI Research's 2026 Impact of AI on Professional Services study of 245 firms. But the payoff is uneven: 84.8% of firms say AI saves them time, while only 29.9% say it generates revenue. The study covers management and IT consultancies, professional services teams inside software and SaaS companies, and other professional services firms across the Americas, EMEA and APac.

Meet Pula, a mountain guide who has led expeditions up the same peak forty times in fifteen years. Pula knows which routes turn dangerous once the afternoon weather rolls in. He knows the camp where teams always underestimate the altitude, and the north facing shortcut that looks faster on paper and costs two days every single time. He has watched expeditions fail for the same reasons, in the same places, at roughly the same point in the climb.

Is it already the end of October? Wow. Time truly flies when our team is busy working on updates. This month, there are tons of useful improvements for everyone! You can now see what your resource bookings are worth with the new bookings-based revenue, and set up automated rules about time off and bookings. And that’s not all – from task dependencies in the project task list to subtasks in task bundles, there’s plenty more below.

Zendesk is retiring Explore live reporting on 25 January 2027. Prebuilt live dashboards will be removed, and live components in custom dashboards will stop displaying data. If your team relies on an Explore wallboard, now is the time to plan its replacement. Zendesk’s replacement is real-time monitoring, available to Professional and Enterprise customers. Geckoboard gives you another route: custom live dashboards on TVs, alongside your other tools, without changing your Zendesk plan.