By Connor Budden (né Metcalf) , Global Director, Service Performance Insight
In a world where AI gives us access to all the data we could ever need, real advantage comes not from more data – but from the right data.
For nearly twenty years, SPI Research has studied what makes the world’s best professional services organizations perform. We’ve benchmarked thousands of firms, across hundreds of metrics, and one thing has always been clear: performance improvement starts with visibility.
Now, as artificial intelligence reshapes how services are delivered, we’re entering a new phase – one where trusted context and the quality of insight define the difference between useful AI and a meaningless echo chamber.
AI Is Here – But It’s Not Yet Working Hard Enough
If marketing pages are to be believed, AI has transformed every platform on the planet. The truth is, its real impact on performance is still catching up to the promise. In our upcoming AI study release, only 11% of respondents rated AI as 4 or above (out of 5) for improving the performance of their PSA solution.
That’s a telling statistic – and a massive opportunity. Other core platform scores are below.
When AI is applied with the right data, it delivers results. Yet, our upcoming study release shows firms remain cautious in their expectations – estimating a modest 9.5% average ROI within the first 12 months of implementing AI technology.
One challenge dominated leadership concerns in our study across the professional services industry: data quality.
Without clean, structured and trustworthy data, even the smartest models start to drift – producing unclear answers or outright hallucinations. That’s where SPI come in.
The Power of Proprietary Data
For years, we’ve known that the strength of any insight depends on the quality of the data behind it. But as AI becomes integral to decision-making, the importance of domain-specific data has never been greater.
Large language models can summarize the world’s public knowledge – but they can’t tell a professional services firm whether its project margins, utilization or win rates are competitive against peers.
That level of context comes only from a purpose-built dataset – and SPI’s is the most trusted in the industry.
With more than 9,000 benchmark submissions, 165 key performance metrics, and over two decades of longitudinal data, SPI has built the definitive model of how professional services organizations perform, grow and evolve.
That’s the data we’ve now made available, securely and intelligently, through SPI Inside™.
In a world where AI gives us access to all the data we could ever need, real advantage comes not from more data – but from the right data.
Introducing SPI Inside™
SPI Inside is our new embedded benchmarking engine – designed to bring SPI’s proprietary performance data directly into the tools that power the professional services industry.
Through a secure API, SPI Inside enables PSA, ERP and other technology vendors to deliver trusted benchmark insights directly to their users – in real time, at the point of decision. It also gives partners the ability to train their in-platform AI models using SPI’s proprietary dataset.
With SPI Inside, every forecast, project plan, and resource allocation is guided by two decades of trusted benchmark data. Even an AI chatbot or agent query now returns insight grounded in real-world performance – turning benchmarking from something you look back on into something that helps you look ahead.
Why This Matters
Professional services leaders are making faster, more complex decisions than ever before – balancing growth, delivery, margin, and innovation, often with incomplete data.
SPI Inside changes that equation. It lets firms compare, predict, and plan with confidence – right inside the systems they use every day – powered by insights no public AI could ever match.
When vendors integrate SPI Inside, they don’t just add benchmarking features – they add intelligence. The data can train proprietary AI models, support context-aware recommendations, and provide trusted foundations for everything from pricing algorithms to predictive utilization forecasts.
And because the data is aggregated, anonymized and continually refreshed, it delivers relevance without compromising integrity or independence.
Our First Partner: Kantata
We’re proud that Kantata is the first PSA vendor to integrate SPI Inside. Their leadership team immediately saw the value of embedding real-time SPI benchmarks within their platform, giving users continuous visibility into how they compare against their peers.
This first integration is a milestone for the professional services industry – but it’s only the beginning. SPI Inside was built as a neutral, vendor-agnostic solution, and our goal is to bring it to other leading platforms that powers this market.
As Sarah Edwards, Chief Product Officer at Kantata, recently wrote:
“The smartest firms aren’t chasing more dashboards – they’re rethinking the DNA of performance measurement itself. Benchmarking stops being an annual event and becomes a way of life: an always-on conversation between how you’re performing and what great looks like.”
We couldn’t agree more.
A New Chapter for Benchmarking and AI
The professional services industry is evolving fast. AI agents are entering the delivery cycle. Teams are learning to balance human expertise with machine assistance. And success increasingly depends on how intelligently firms can prompt, consume and apply insight – not just how quickly they can act.
In this new environment, trusted, industry-specific data is the differentiator – and SPI Inside is how we make that advantage available to everyone.
By connecting SPI’s decades of benchmark intelligence to the next generation of AI systems, we’re ensuring that decisions are guided by evidence, not assumption – and that innovation is built on evidence, not noise.
The future of AI in professional services won’t be defined by who has the biggest model, but by who has access to the best data.
That’s what SPI Inside delivers: intelligence you can trust, built into the tools you use every day.
And that’s where the next decade of progress begins.
Global Director, Service Performance Insight (SPI Research)
This data comes from SPI’s industry leading PS Maturity Benchmark™:
To take part Today in the 2026 Benchmark assessment – visit: https://spiresearch.com/reports/2026-ps-maturity-benchmark/
What You Get When You Participate:
- Company-wide SPI Maturity Scoring
- 10-page Executive Insights Report
- Full copy of the 2026 PS Maturity Benchmark™ Report (valued at $2,795)
Free of charge. No pitch. Just a lot of value.
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.