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.

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.

Running communications surveillance at a financial organization today often means being under increasing pressure to bring AI into daily workflows. For many organizations, this raises the question of how to have AI screen alerts and shape decisions in a way that is in accordance with regulatory requirements.

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.

Tracking project progress means producing one defensible number: the percentage of planned work actually finished. That number depends on the method used to credit partially finished work, and the choice changes the answer. A project with four of ten tasks done reads 40% under a 0/100 rule and 55% under a 50/50 rule — the same work, fifteen points apart.

A project management dashboard shows the few numbers that tell you whether a project will finish on time and on budget. The core set is schedule variance, cost variance, the schedule and cost performance indexes, and a forecast of final cost. All four come from three inputs: the budget, the percentage of work actually complete, and the cost incurred to date.