Key Themes from Smarter Services Executive Symposium 2025

Last week at the Smarter Services Executive Symposium in Chicago, the Skyllful team saw more than just familiar faces, we saw renewed energy around driving value in field service, preventing revenue leakage, and using tech + human-centered design not for its own sake, but as an enabler.

Here’s what stood out to us.

Kicking Things Off: Connection + Context

To set the tone, we hosted a cocktail party to start the week. It was a great way to reconnect with partners and new friends alike, aligning on where the market is, where it’s headed, and what keeps service leaders up at night.

From these early conversations, several themes began to ripple through the event: tech decisions need to be grounded in operational realities; mistakes aren’t just “oops” moments, they can become costly if they scale; and frontline readiness (people, process, and tools) is non‑negotiable when technology changes.

Workshops: Lessons from Leaders Driving Real Results

We were proud to host two dynamic sessions featuring powerhouse leaders who are driving measurable impact in their organizations and showing what it really takes to make tech adoption stick.

Unisys: Avoiding tech disruptions by being frontline-ready on day one

In our first session, Patrycja Sobera, SVP & GM of Digital Workplace at Unisys, joined Skyllful CEO Justin Lake to walk through Unisys’ approach to transforming tech adoption across their global field team.

The challenge? Inconsistent documentation, uneven compliance, and process breakdowns that were causing revenue leakage. The solution? Bringing modern, mobile, simulation-based training directly to the frontline.

The results:

✔ Reduced missed revenue

✔ Boosted compliance

✔ Over $1M in measurable improvements in just four months

If you’re preparing for a major tech rollout or want your AI investments to start from clean, trusted data, this conversation made one thing clear: success starts with frontline readiness.

STERIS: Understanding what’s really preventing digital initiatives from meeting expectations

The next day, Laura Mather, VP & GM of Global Services at STERIS, joined Justin for a hands-on workshop that dug into why so many digital transformations stall and what can be done to prevent it.

Despite the best tools and intentions, organizations often miss the mark because they leave the people using the tech out of the equation until it’s too late.

Key takeaways from the session included:

• What success really looks like (hint: not just going live)
• Why adoption breaks down, even with good tools
• How bad frontline data quietly sabotages big-picture goals
• Why fixing these problems now is essential for AI readiness later

The conversation struck a chord with attendees who are tired of “hope it works” rollouts and ready for strategies that drive lasting, scalable change.

Tech Showcase & the Power of One Small Error

One of the more memorable moments came during the Service Council’s Technology Showcase, when our CEO, Justin Lake, shared a story from his own fast food experience.

He had an order entered wrong in the POS system. It wasn’t dramatic, just a mis‑entered item. But the result: extra food, at no charge, that the restaurant didn’t intend to give away. What’s interesting is thinking about what that error costs when it happens once per day, across nearly 50,000 locations. Even tiny cost items multiply fast.

Then Justin asked: if this happens with something as “small” as a fast food item, what kinds of revenue leakage are field service organizations dealing with when every service call, every scheduling decision, every mis‑entered report, or misrouted ticket could represent similar leaks?

The audience’s reaction made clear: this was more than a thought experiment. It resonated. Because where many orgs see cost of error as “inevitable,” this reframes it as avoidable, and Skyllful provides tools and frameworks to prevent those leaks.

Key Themes that Emerged

From our conversations, workshops, and presentations, here are some of the recurring patterns:

1. Revenue Leakage Is Everywhere, And Often Invisible
Small data‑entry errors, misaligned processes, tech gaps: these might feel administrative or “on the margins” until you scale. The fast food example was a vivid illustration: a small mistake with a low‑cost item, repeated often, adds up. For field service orgs, where margins are tighter, and cost of dispatch / labor / parts is high, these leaks matter even more.

2. Tech Must Be Used With Context + Discipline
High potential for AI, automation, data visualizations, etc. was everywhere. But leaders kept asking: “Will this make things more complex for the frontline, or simplify them?” “Is this solving a pain point, or creating a new one?”

3. Frontline Readiness = Resilience
Whether because of changing customer expectations, staffing constraints, or moving parts in the supply chain, the margin for error is shrinking. Teams that invest in training, tools, and real‑time feedback loops are better positioned to catch errors before they scale.

4. Human + Tech Integration Over Pure Innovation
The most compelling sessions weren’t about new tech for its own sake. They were about use cases: how culture, process, and people must shift alongside tech to generate real value.

Moving Forward: Listening, Learning, and Building for What Matters

The conversations at this year’s Smarter Services Executive Symposium confirmed what we’ve long believed, and gave us even more clarity about where to focus next.

Across sessions, sidebars, and workshop feedback, a few key themes kept surfacing:

• Frontline readiness is essential to operational excellence
• Tiny errors can scale into costly consequences
• Tech investments only succeed when paired with real-world usability
• Accurate frontline data is foundational for AI and analytics to work

As we move forward, these takeaways will guide how we continue to evolve Skyllful, not just as a training platform, but as a core enabler of performance, compliance, and data integrity for the frontline.

Most importantly, we’ll keep listening to the people doing the work and to the teams who support them. Because every feature we build, every lesson we design, and every decision we make is in service of making frontline performance not just possible, but powerful.