How AI is Reshaping the Services Business Model
- Services Delivery Alliance
- Sep 25
- 5 min read
In years past for SaaS organizations, the Professional Services function rarely took the spotlight when it came to growth strategy. All that is changing, and potentially at a faster rate than many expected (or are ready for).
Today, services are becoming a core driver of initial sales, as well as improving adoption, expansion, and retention rates. This shift has been termed by us at the Services Delivery Alliance (SDA) as Services-Led Growth, and it’s a concept that is being enhanced by the rise of AI. By weaving data and context driven planning with scalable service design into operations, services leaders are creating new business models that are more predictable (risk-free), profitable (repeatable), and customer-first.
At SDA, we’ve been hearing the same refrain from our community: AI is no longer a “nice to have”, it’s becoming a cornerstone of how services scale; but with many being tasked to “do something with AI” and a laundry list of challenges, the difficulty often lies in, “where do I start?”
Services-Led Growth Entering the Era of AI
Services-Led Growth is about more than more billable hours. It’s when the services function is an active part of the sales processes, driving customer adoption, fueling expansion opportunities, and strengthening retention.
AI can amplify this approach by:
Reducing delivery friction, uncovering project risk and speeding up outcome driven KPIs.
Personalizing and easing customer experiences at scale.
Surfacing signals for upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
It’s not that the above can’t be done at the human level, but with motivations of doing more with less, the time for such tasks becomes constrained. So instead, think of AI less as a replacement for talent and more as your best employee, perhaps even branding it as your team PA/Assistant - one that never sleeps, never forgets, and helps your team focus where human impact matters most.
Data Capture: Freeing Talent to Focus on Value
Many services teams still lose hours on updating teams or manual tasks, like project reminders. AI is changing that.
Data capture: AI meeting assistants are going beyond simple call transcription and notetaking - they can ensure all details, and pertinently client needs, are captured accurately*. But the power of AI comes post this; GPTs can ensure that that information is analyzed, prioritized and disseminated to the right teams so nothing gets lost.
Project mitigations: Intelligent assistants now have the ability to flag risks before they derail delivery, based on historical data. Again, a person could achieve this but they’d have to statistically analyze the trends of former projects and map them to ongoing or forecast ones, something that would take time. Get AI to do the legwork.
Operations: Automated reporting cuts down on repetitive admin. AI can source information listed above and send it to those who know, so people both senior and junior never have to chase for the information. A more inventive method of this came from an SDA member who ran their business systems on Google Workspace, and therefore had access to Notebook LM; existing project documentation could be run through the AI interface and in doing so a podcast would be created, containing all of the relevant project information. People can then more actively listen to this when out for lunch, making a coffee or doing their admin.
The result? Teams are shifting their energy away from their role as a “remember-all” to higher-touch engagement and details orientated outputs with an effort to building trust with customers and shaping outcomes that actually move the needle.
*ok caveats are needed, AI makes mistakes, something they state themselves, so currently the human element can never be lost. Therefore only task AI with the items that sing to its strengths.
Data-Driven Planning: Turning Services Into a Strategic Engine
Services have always used data, no question, but historically it’s been rear-view mirror reporting and for Services-Led Growth you need to surface data that can truly impact your function. AI helps with that. How it does that is multifaceted, but here are some ways:
Surface the relevant information: as mentioned already, you can use AI to really get to the detail that matters that typically could be lost to documentation practices and organizational issues. Fix these and demand prediction, resource capacity planning, margin insight, risk calculations and other items are all easier to find, understand and mitigate.
Strategy and change management: get to the delivery data faster and use it to further inform product and sales strategy.
Predictive analytics: to understand key KPIs and objectives before projects even start.
Even more importantly, with services insights (enhanced by AI) allowing feedback into product and sales strategy, instead of being the last to know, services become the source of foresight, driving decisions that impact the entire customer lifecycle.
The Human-AI Partnership
None of this works without people. AI creates capacity, but it’s humans who interpret data, bring real knowledge and knowhow, plus the creativity to the design of services, and therefore deliver with the empathy that customers value most.
The new skills for services leaders are less about spreadsheets and more about:
Interpreting AI outputs.
Designing repeatable, scalable customer experiences.
Building the moments of human connection that AI can’t replicate.
It’s not about man versus machine. It’s about man with machine, creating a stronger, more resilient services function.
The Future of Services Business Models
Looking forward, we’re seeing a clear direction with a shift from one dimensional billing methods to value/outcome-based services. You’ll start seeing services positioned as a revenue engine that strengthens ARR, not one that drains margin.Then with AI embedded in the foundations you can create scalable, high-margin, customer-first service portfolios.
For professional services leaders, the opportunity is not just to adopt AI, but to rethink the services business model entirely.
Join the Conversation
September is AI Month at the Services Delivery Alliance, and this is just the start of the discussion. Throughout this month and next, we’ll be hosting working sessions, sharing perspectives from peers, and exploring how services leaders are putting AI into practice.
SDA is a no-sell, peer-to-peer community where you can learn, share, and build strategies that actually work in the real world. If you’re a services leader navigating this shift, we’d love to have you in the conversation.
Therefore if you want tangible results from AI in your own organization, join for free today and learn how leaders are doing it themselves. We are also offering a limited amount of AI workshops, some open but some org specific; if this is of interest to you, join using our form and request one!
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