Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

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.

At 4:45 p.m. a customer asks if Friday’s delivery is confirmed. Operations have a date. Sales promised an update. The account manager is about to join another call. An AI email assistant can produce an answer in seconds.. The wrong answer might cost the team an entire afternoon. Business email needs more than sentences. The useful tools solve problems. Some retrieve the context of a thread. Some improve phrasing. Others stop colleagues from answering the same request twice.

AI makes it possible to produce work quickly, but it can also result in a lot of workslop—that is, work that looks polished, but does little to move the project forward. Sorting through workslop is time-consuming and undercuts the ROI on AI. It may look like productivity, but it just moves the actual work farther downstream. The Teamwork Lab realized that workslop isn’t an AI problem, or even a people problem.

Agentic PSA is professional services automation where AI agents do parts of the operational work, such as drafting a client update, and a person approves the result. A PSA, or professional services automation platform, connects projects, resources and financials in one system, and the "agentic" part is about who does the work inside it. At Teamwork.com, I run AI on my own project admin, status updates and reporting, and nothing goes out until a person has checked it. That check is why I trust the output.