When the world shut down, professional services didn’t stop. it flipped its own model upside-down. It was a once-in-a-generation shift in delivery: Majority on-site client work to majority remote delivery, overnight. The data now shows, that switch is still reshaping how, where, and even why work gets delivered.
“The next advantage won’t come from being in the room. It will come from knowing which rooms still matter, and how to deliver measurable value from anywhere.”
From Boardrooms to Back Bedrooms
Few industries changed as visibly or as quickly as professional services during COVID. For decades, being “on-site” was synonymous with trust, value, security, and commitment. Then, almost overnight, consultants swapped client floors for kitchen tables and project rooms for video calls.
Off-site work, once the exception, became the default. Entire client relationships were built and delivered without ever sharing a physical space. By 2024, 68% of all billable hours were delivered off-site; a sharp rise that pushed the gap well beyond the previous 2021 high of 59%, signalling a lasting shift in delivery models.
As the pandemic crisis faded, many expected the delivery pendulum to swing back. Yet even as firms have gradually returned employees to offices in recent years, the share of on-site billable work simply hasn’t followed suit. Because it’s not just about where consultants work, it’s about how clients choose to engage them. Until clients re-open their doors to third parties, most PSOs will continue delivering remotely, no matter what their own internal workplace policies require. It is an important distinction: returning to the office for PS, still doesn’t equate to onsite billable hours.
More Projects, Not More Utilization
One fascinating side effect of this delivery revolution is that consultants can now work across multiple projects simultaneously; often spanning clients, regions, and even time zones. Technology has made it easier than ever to share capacity and collaborate asynchronously.
Yet, the numbers tell a paradoxical story: billable utilization hasn’t increased, post-COVID, it’s declined.
At the same time, firms have begun to rethink what utilization actually represents; with many shifting their focus from pure billable hours toward “profitable utilization”, “value-based realization” and broader measures of contribution to client success.
This raises a deeper question. If consultants are touching more projects than pre-COVID (a presumption, as we didn’t track this before 2023), yet utilization and profitability remain low, perhaps the very definition of “billable” has fractured. Many firms have stretched delivery models to keep people active, even if the hours worked aren’t tied to full-rate billable work or even to their own projects. It reflects a market doing what it must to stay busy, not necessarily to stay efficient.
The World Around the Work
The Great Switch may have taken place during COVID. But, that operating model, that gap between on-site vs off-site, is only growing. The increased split we see in 2024 coincided with one of the most volatile business environments in the last 5 years (excluding COVID); tariff wars, election uncertainty, global conflicts, a halt to business spending and the slowest revenue growth and profitability SPI has ever recorded.
PS firms and teams adapted in real-time, widening their delivery networks, reallocating resources, and resources taking on shared or smaller projects to preserve engagement. Off-site delivery flexibility became the stabiliser in a world that has been anything but stable lately.
AI: The Next Variable
Now, as AI reshapes the landscape again, the nature of delivery, and even what we count as “delivered”, is shifting. Automation can complete tasks faster. Predictive tools can schedule work smarter. But they also compress traditional delivery timeframe expectations and redistribute value away from the billable hour.
If AI handles part of a deliverable, does that make consultants more efficient, or simply less utilized? That may be the defining question for PS leaders in the years ahead.
The Redefinition of Delivery
The Great Switch wasn’t just about geography. It redefined what client engagement means; the visibility, proximity, and shared experience that once defined the profession.
Today, the question isn’t whether firms will go back to on-site delivery. It’s whether doing so would still create measurable value. Clients have learned to trust remote outcomes, in a world now dominated by video calls and Cloud platforms. Consultants have learned to thrive in distributed models. And performance metrics, once built around a world of travel, expenses and time, are struggling to keep pace.
The next advantage won’t come from being in the room. It will come from knowing which rooms still matter, and how to deliver measurable value from anywhere.
This data comes from SPI’s industry leading PS Maturity Benchmark™:
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About SPI:
Since 2006, Service Performance Insight (SPI) has been the leading authority on performance optimization for professional services organizations. As the creator of the Professional Services Maturity Model™ (PSMM), SPI provides proven frameworks, benchmarking data, and actionable insights to drive EBITDA, productivity, and scalable growth.
Our research spans five critical pillars of service performance — leadership, talent, client relationships, service execution, and finance & operations — and helps over 50,000 organizations every year navigate change and scale with confidence.