Deltek ProjectCon 2025 marked a defining moment for the entire Deltek community. Held November 10-12 in Denver, Colorado, the conference brought together thousands of project-based businesses to experience Deltek’s next-generation intelligent platform, a bold brand evolution, and a wave of innovations that redefine how firms manage their project lifecycle.
Last year, Replicon Time and Polaris PSA made their debuts at ProjectCon and set a bold new vision for how project-based businesses should think about time tracking and professional services automation (PSA). This year, that vision didn’t just continue – it accelerated. Across breakout sessions, product deep -dives, customer conversations, and live demos, one message became unmistakably clear: time tracking and PSA have evolved from necessary back-office to powering strategic decisions that drive profitability. Project-based businesses are no longer forced to choose between moving fast and staying compliant, between innovation and control, or between efficiency and accuracy. The leaders of the future are the ones that embrace both, and Replicon is engineering the intelligence that makes that “both/and” approach not only possible, but the new standard.
A New Era: Deltek's Platform Evolution
Deltek ProjectCon 2025 will be remembered as the moment Deltek unveiled not just new features, but a fundamental reimagining of what an intelligent platform for project-based businesses looks like. The company's brand evolution positions Deltek as more than software – it’s a unified ecosystem built to deliver speed, clarity, and control throughout the project lifecycle. This platform vision rests on three pillars:
- Designed for the Way You Work: A unified platform that connects ERP and accounting, project management, business development, and delivery through agentic orchestration. For Replicon, this means deeper integration with Costpoint, Vantagepoint and other Deltek products – transforming time tracking and PSA and professional services automation from an isolated function into connected intelligence.
- Intelligence at Every Step: Dela, Deltek's AI orchestrator, embeds intelligence throughout the platform, automating workflows and surfacing insights that free teams to focus on strategy and innovation rather than administrative tasks. This isn't AI as an add-on feature, its intelligence woven into the fabric of how work gets done.
- Governance and Control Built In: The Deltek platform embeds compliance, access controls, and audit capabilities by design. This is especially critical for customers in regulated industries where labor compliance isn't optional, it's existential.
For Replicon users, this signals a fundamental shift in how their investment delivers value – moving from process efficiency to strategic intelligence that shapes project outcomes.
Building Momentum: Replicon Time and Polaris PSA Innovations in 2025
Throughout 2025, Replicon Time and Polaris PSA showcased foundational capabilities that strengthened visibility, governance, and delivery precision. Here’s an overview of our capabilities showcased at ProjectCon this year:
Smarter Project Visibility & Control in Polaris PSA
- Project Links connect phases, change requests, and related workstreams to see true effort, cost, and revenue
- Task-Level Allocations enable granular staffing and accurate performance tracking
Enhanced Workforce Management in Replicon Time
- Project Manager’s Visibility into Team Time Off helps improve project planning and forecasting
- Enhanced Shift Scheduling adds regulatory compliance-specific validations, faster schedule creation via CSV uploads, on-call tracking through non-working shifts, and lets project managers manage shift schedules for their own project teams
- Time Off Deletion lets you manage time off policies by preventing employees from deleting past bookings and requiring supervisor approval for any deletion requests
Additionally, User Templates standardize provisioning and reduce setup time across integrations.
AI in Action: What Stole the Spotlight at Deltek ProjectCon
One of the standout sessions this year was the AI in Action session in the Replicon product track. The room was packed, and the response was overwhelmingly positive as users saw how Replicon and Polaris are already delivering meaningful AI value, not someday, but today. The session highlighted:
- Intelligent time tracking with ZeroTime™, which learns from user patterns to automatically populate timesheets with unmatched accuracy.
- AI-powered resource management in Polaris PSA, giving project & resource managers smarter visibility and resource recommendations to improve allocation.
- Current AI capabilities that seamlessly set the stage for Dela™, enabling an effortless transition into the next generation of automation and intelligence.
Attendees saw real use cases that reduce administrative overhead, improve decision-making, and create high-performance project environments. This set a strong foundation and excitement for the coming year of innovations, reinforcing that Deltek’s AI journey is both powerful and practical.
Charting the Future: Strategic Themes for 2026 and Beyond
Looking ahead, Replicon Time and Polaris PSA are entering a new phase of intelligence, automation, and deeper integration capabilities. The roadmap for 2026 and beyond focuses on strengthening project financials, elevating user experience, deepening labor compliance capabilities, and embedding AI into every layer of delivery. Here’s an overview of the strategic themes shaping the next chapter:
Dela™: Ushering in the Next Era of AI-Driven Project Delivery
In 2025, Dela™ emerged as one of the most transformative advancements across Replicon Time and Polaris PSA – elevating how teams plan, staff, forecast, and execute work. Dela is redefining efficiency, precision, and decision-making for project-based businesses. Here’s what’s next with Dela™:
- Automated Resource Management creates resource requests from SOWs, BRDs, and project requirements; recommends best-fit talent based on skills, certifications, and availability, and even suggests alternative resources for optimal staffing.
- Resume Parsing & Skill Intelligence automatically extracts skills from uploaded resumes, updates resource profiles, and applies a smart five-star skill rating model, helping organizations build high-performing teams faster.
- Conversational Insights with Ask Dela™ surface insights on projects, hours worked, time-off, timesheet activity, and more, turning complex data into clear, actionable answers.
Together, these innovations position Dela™ as a breakthrough AI layer – one that helps project-based businesses operate smarter, respond faster, and stay several steps ahead.
User Experience & Self-Service
- Instant feedback and error-highlighting to help users correct timesheet issues faster across key components like the Time Distribution Grid.
- Overtime pre-approvals enable employees to request overtime ahead of time and give managers tighter cost control by requiring pre-authorization and preventing submission of unapproved overtime.
- Time-off sellback workflows enabling employees to request sellback of unused balances.
- Report insights from DelaTM help run your favorite reports to uncover trends and insights about your business, projects, and teams with easy-to-read graphs and charts.
Project Delivery & Financials
- Ability to track AI agent usage for time capture and calculate costs and bill clients as per agent usage – redefining time tracking and billing in the era of agentic AI.
- Rules-based costing engine distributes costs for salaried employees, includes overtime in total cost calculations, supports multiple rates for gig workers and contractors, and handles internal chargebacks across multi-entity organizations.
- Dela™ resource optimization helps to quickly spot hidden bench and overallocated resources and uses AI-driven insights to recommend when to hire, redeploy, or upskill for maximum capacity efficiency.
- Soft allocations enable tentative resource allocation without blocking a resource’s availability.
Integration & Ecosystem Expansion
- Deeper integration capabilities to be introduced with other Deltek products
- SAP-endorsed integration between Replicon Time and SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP SuccessFactors supporting more use cases and more flexibility along with automatic retries and improved error management.
- Improved ADP and Jira integrations with modernized configuration options, and more actionable visibility into integration errors.
- Self-serve integration tools, including business-rule-based user template assignment and a new UI to configure sync logic and criteria.
Administrative Control & Governance
- Expanded audit logging with detailed visibility into what changed, who changed it, and when.
- Region-based administrator data segregation that reduces clutter and minimizes configuration errors by limiting admin access to region-specific shifts, pay codes, and time off types.
Labor Compliance & Risk Management
- AI predictive compliance identifies early signals of non-compliance risks, and recommends risk mitigation strategies.
- Automatic rules configuration using plain language and AI to easily find and configure the right business rule, reducing configuration overhead and time.
- Simplified country-specific configuration of overtime, non-working day rules, and other local labor requirements.
- New wellness dashboards with localized rules and smarter overtime validations to help organizations manage workforce with confidence.
These themes reinforce a unified goal: give customers a connected, intelligent system that drives predictability, profitability, and performance.
Closing Thoughts: The Way Ahead
Deltek ProjectCon 2025 made one thing clear: the future of project delivery belongs to companies that pair operational excellence with intelligent automation. With Replicon Time, Polaris PSA, and the Deltek platform, users can elevate every stage of the project lifecycle – from planning and staffing to labor compliance, costing, and delivery insights. The innovations unveiled this year are not endpoints, they’re accelerators. They signal a shift toward a world where time data becomes intelligence, where AI becomes a trusted co-pilot, and where complexity gives way to clarity.
Thank you to everyone who attended Deltek ProjectCon and shared their valuable insights. As we move into 2026 and beyond, we remain committed to partnering with our users, listening to their evolving needs, and shaping solutions that help them operate with speed, clarity and control. Stay connected and visit Deltek Learning Hub to access existing and upcoming training resources, product guides, videos, and release notes.
