Your Spreadsheet Can’t Do This: AI That Actually Knows Your Business (with CEO of Forecast, an Accelo Company)

Tim Fisher: Why is AI the thing, you guys are leading it too hardest right now? What's the strategic bet here for you?

Joe DiPaulo: Historically, these businesses have scaled by adding people. So the bet with AI and more intelligence and automation is that these businesses can leverage that as a tool to help them improve their performance, improve the customer experience, and ultimately scale without adding head count.

Tim Fisher: When I see tools like this, I think about the meeting killer aspect of all of it to be able to go to a user interface and get deep, contextualized answers from inside your business.

Joe DiPaulo: And this could be a resource manager, it could be somebody who's more of a, in a leadership role looking for reporting information that they want to get out of the system, looking for project status, those kinds of things.

Tim Fisher: What makes all of these different from just using ChatGPT or Claude or Copilot with just a dump of data and then asking questions against it?

Joe DiPaulo: Systems like ours have more—

Tim Fisher: Hello and welcome to The Future of AI and Project Management — a series where we go beyond the pitch deck and dig into how AI actually is changing the way teams plan, deliver, and manage work. Today we're featuring Forecast PSA, an Accelo company.

If you're running a professional services team, and you've been wondering where AI actually delivers value, not theoretically, but in the tools you use every single day, then this is the conversation to be in. We'll hear their perspective on what's broken in project delivery and talk about where all this is heading.

My name is Tim Fisher. I am VP of AI at The Digital Project Manager, and my job is to figure out where AI actually works and where it's still just marketing slides. So I'm gonna be asking the questions that your team would ask. Joining us today is Joe DiPaulo, CEO of Accelo, the company behind Forecast PSA. Joe spent his entire career helping professional services teams build more predictable and scalable delivery organizations. And today he'll share how AI is shaping that future.

Joe, great to have you here.

Joe DiPaulo: Awesome to be here, Tim. Thank you for having me. I'm excited about the topic and how this is shaping our professional services world.

Tim Fisher: Joe, give us like the 30 second version of Forecast, like what does it do and who's a billPort?

Joe DiPaulo: Sure. So Forecast is a modern PSA or professional service automation platform.

It's designed for professional services firms that are typically growth oriented and they're working to scale their businesses. So I think that's the most important part. We focus on functions from project planning, capacity and Forecast delivery, execution, revenue operation. So our mission is really to give our customers visibility into their data.

Predictive insights into what's taking place with their business and how they're delivering and help them manage their business as effectively as possible.

Tim Fisher: So Forecast recently joined forces with Accelo. What does that combination unlock that neither platform really had on its own before?

Joe DiPaulo: Yeah. The goal with the combination of the two organizations and platforms is to bring a true end-to-end operating system for professional services organizations.

Forecast has been really exceptional at AI driven project planning, resource forecasting, demand planning from a resource management perspective and providing a lot of good forward-looking visibility. Accelo has a lot of strengths in CRM capabilities, client workflow management, financial workflows. So together that connection kind of covers the whole pipeline from our perspective of a professional services organization and acts as a key system of record.

Tim Fisher: Awesome. That makes sense. So a nearly comical question, why is AI the thing you guys are leading into hardest right now? Like what's the strategic bet here for you?

Joe DiPaulo: I don't think anybody's talking about this, are they?

Tim Fisher: No, not at all. No, never comes up.

Joe DiPaulo: We're leading into AI because for our customers that are service oriented businesses, they're operating in a very margin constrained, complex environment.

There's a lot of factors that go into delivering for their customers. Historically, these businesses have scaled by adding people. So the bet with AI and more intelligence and automation is that these businesses can leverage that as a tool to help them improve their performance, improve the customer experience, and ultimately scale and be a more profitable business.

So AI in our perspective, allows leaders to move from what's happened historically and being somewhat reactive to helping them really have a much more proactive type of business. So, you know, again, I'll probably say this a lot today, but it goes back to allowing our customers to scale and ultimately scale without adding headcount and allowing teams at our customers to really focus on the value add of their services and build relationships with customers and make sure that.

They can continue to grow to optimize their delivery process. So, you know, that's why our focus is there and it's ultimately because our customers want us to help them grow their businesses, so.

Tim Fisher: I wanna get your take on like just what you're seeing across the industry right now. So you're talking to professional services firms every day, like agencies, consultancies, IT service shops, you know, a lot of them. What's actually changing in how work gets delivered right now?

Joe DiPaulo: Yeah. I think our customers are evolving from, you know, experimenting, I would say with AI over the last year or two to really trying to leverage it more effectively as a resource in their organization.

How they deliver work they're looking at. Identifying their business and using that to help them deliver for their customers. And I think everybody's at, you know, a different stage in that journey, but they are working to produce repeatable results, optimizing those results through AI and you know, I think that's the evolution that we're seeing right now.

Tim Fisher: Yeah. We I think we've all seen the news articles recently about, you know, AI not performing for organizations or not like living up to the hype or the promise. I think there's definitely a focus right now in like real practical outcomes and definitely feels like what you guys are after here.

So just doing a little digging and like your platform data shows that teams report utilization about like 75% compared to 40%, which is industry average. What do you think drives that huge gap?

Joe DiPaulo: You know, when you're able to operate more consistently and when you're able to use tooling to help you be more predictable in what you're doing, you can be much more proactive.

And I think, you know, one of the things that we try to do in the PSA system is to, you know, give our customers insight into work that's coming down the pipeline from their sales organizations, drive repeatable, consistent processes and. Allow them to kind of see who's doing what and when. And the more that they can predict and be proactive about those things, you know, the better they can operate.

So when they can plan ahead for work that's coming 1, 2, 3 months down the road, or when they can see exactly what everybody's working on. They're able to not overwork individuals, but to leverage them to their best and highest potential and capacity. So the more that they can leverage those operational capabilities, the better off that they can run their business.

And we see that translating into better utilization results.

Tim Fisher: Very related. So like, you know, you look across these like 2000 plus professional services firms that you guys work with. And what are all the biggest gaps that you see? You know, whether that's like margin leakage or like this famous thing that I think is still happening today, which is resource management off of spreadsheets and all of the spreadsheets just lay visibility into problems.

Like what does that all look like to you right now?

Joe DiPaulo: There's a couple different topics to unpack there, but in terms of margin leakage in professional services, you know, we certainly, that's something that our customers tend to struggle with in terms of, you know, it's never something that happens all at once, right?

It's something that happens, you know, bit by bit as a. Project or an engagement with a customer goes over time, they'll see issues that they might have in terms of how they assign resources or which resources they're leveraging. Are they the right people? Am I overutilizing, you know, a certain skill set or a certain high performer?

They'll often see delayed visibility into risks in their work projects that are going adrift. So things like that are what we try to solve. I mean, I think another thing that plays into margin is scope creep. So, you know, we're really leveraging the system to help them detect and predict when they've got challenges like that.

And ultimately that results in, you know, margin improvements. I mean, you know, again, there's lots of places in the lifecycle that this can happen, but the more that we can alert and help customers proactively predict when those things are taking place, the better that they can respond to that in terms of working off spreadsheets.

I think that's common for smaller organizations or, you know, and lots of times people say, I'm more agile this way. I can be more responsive. But I think that's a bit of a fallacy and obviously I've, we've got a tool that helps solve that problem. But, you know, as soon as businesses grow in their complexity or the number of projects that they're doing, the different types of pricing models, they structure, how their engagements are structured, the more teams that they have, that becomes more and more challenging.

You lose some of the accuracy and the real time controls, you start to break patterns or break processes that will impact margin and kind of your discipline around margin. So, you know, in organizations that are really leveraging data and you know, like I talked about before, pulling in work from their CRM and analyzing that and looking ahead down the road to figure out how do I need to staff this?

What are the people I need? They're able to really. See the value outside of just managing the process in a spreadsheet and get a lot more predictive and hopefully run their business much more effectively and smoothly.

Tim Fisher: So Forecast was built AI native from day one. I don't think a lot of PSA tools can say that.

That's not something I'd actually heard before. That's impressive. So like, given what we just talked about, you know, like margin pressure, scaling, late disability, all that sort of stuff, like what does this essentially mean in practice for like how your product tackles these problems differently?

Joe DiPaulo: Sure. Yeah, and that's right. The system is really founded around the concept of leveraging machine learning models to help teams do better staffing and resource planning. And ever since the beginning, it's evolved and grown. You know, the goal is to have the AI act as a guide for professional service organizations, so helping them address inefficiencies, helping them get past scale ceilings or scale challenges that they have.

As we look at it, as firms can get more predictive, they can avoid risks, they can drive a better customer experience, they can leverage their resources, you know, more effectively and optimize how they're leveraging their resources so they can keep their teams happy and high performers from being overutilized and burned out.

So, you know, the AI is gonna help them kind. Identify those concerns and risks drive efficiencies. You know, one of the other things that we hear from customers is, you know, as I'm managing projects or engagements across different parts of my business or different departments, you know, they tend to be able to see data better across their entire organization.

So, you know, if they need to leverage resources across functionally or, you know, make decisions that are across those barriers, they tend to be able to do that. Effectively. So AI is certainly helping with that. And then, you know, as you hinted at, as we look forward, AI will certainly get more and more central in how professional services firms actually do work and deliver outputs.

And that's the exciting part about, you know, what's taking place today. And again, going back to how businesses scale and how AI will allow them to do that more effectively.

Tim Fisher: You mentioned machine learning, which I feel compelled to bring up because we all use the term AI and even use the term like large language model, but just dropping that phrase tells me that you guys have been working on this before ChatGPT dropped into the world, and this is more foundational to how you've been thinking.

I think that's very cool.

Joe DiPaulo: Yeah, I agree. It's exciting. I'm glad that we had that history and that started years back, but we're certainly continuing to invest and take advantage of all of the newer technology that's coming out to help our customers.

Tim Fisher: Definitely. Let's take a few minutes and look a little bit forward.

So the PSA market is projected to nearly double by 2030, which is wild to think about, and obviously AI tools and project management are growing even faster than that. So, Joe, where do you think this goes from here?

Joe DiPaulo: I hinted at this in the beginning, but really excited about how AI is enabling professional services business to leverage agents to help deliver for their clients more effectively. We're gonna see organizations use agents to deliver work and take some of that off of humans, and that's gonna mean quicker time to value for their customers. It's going to mean a better customer experience, and it's going to mean better profit margins for the user, our system.

So I think that's an exciting proposition.

Tim Fisher: Definitely. So share what you'd like or you know, at whatever level, but without giving us your full roadmap. Like what's the capability gap that you are most excited about closing with AI and how does that change what your customers are gonna be able to do?

Joe DiPaulo: Yeah, I mean it's building on that theme that I was just talking about. I mean, we certainly hear tools like Claude and others like it helping software development teams, right? I mean, and helping to write code and do that more efficiently. And we wanna be part of that ecosystem and help our customers kind of identify their workforce.

And, you know, allow them to orchestrate and connect with their operational systems into those agents to most effectively run their business, see information in context of their business and workflows, but take advantage of the capabilities that agents are offering to meet their work more robust and deliver it more quickly.

So we're certainly believers in that we're doing that within our own company and we can see how that can affect and improve our customers' businesses quite dramatically.

Tim Fisher: I like to ask this question a lot. We are three or four years from now, what does day-to-day look like to you for a project manager?

How does that role evolve? Is there even a project manager? Do you see AI taking that role over? Like how do you see the future from your vantage point?

Joe DiPaulo: Yeah, I mean, I think we're gonna see massive shifts in how works done. I think that there's still going to need to be people involved to help organize and you know, think about the outcomes that we're trying to achieve and really.

Throwing a buzzword around, but really help orchestrate these systems to deliver. So, you know, there's gonna have to be a lot of thought process into what are the inputs that I'm putting into these machines? What's the outcome that I want to achieve? There's still gonna be quality controls and things that are gonna have to be done, but I think all this stuff is taking place faster than just, you know, the next three years.

I mean, we're gonna see significant changes and. Agents acting as workers and organizations. You know, if we're not seeing it now, it's certainly gonna happen in the next 12 to 36 months and it's gonna get more and more adopted by very specific well across many industries, I'd say. So. Yeah, I think it's fascinating.

Tim Fisher: Yeah. It very much is. So, okay. Thank you so much for walking through all that with us. Like very insightful conversation. So for anybody watching and thinking, okay, I wanna see Forecast in our environment with our data, like what's the best next step for them to take?

Joe DiPaulo: The best thing they do is to come to our website is forecast.app.

They can request a demo and a consultant will reach out to them. You know, usually they'll wanna understand the business that they're running a little bit so they can tailor demonstration, discussion and kind of define how we would show value for them and go through that process with them. So that's what I'd recommend.

We're also gonna be publishing a AI readiness assessment, so that's another thing that customers can interact with and engage with. You know, we can certainly reach out and contact to 'em if they're interested after that as well.

Tim Fisher: Alright, well, that's all the time we have for today, Joe. Thank you so very much for joining us. This was fantastic. Thanks, Joe.

Joe DiPaulo: Thank you so much, Tim. Appreciate it.