Certinia reimagines professional services — with agents at its core

Certinia Inc. wants to transform the professional services industry with artificial intelligence — tasking teams of AI agents to work alongside employees.

The company operates a Salesforce-native cloud professional services automation solution that spans professional services, customer success and financial management. As the industry shifts toward agentic workflows, Certinia (formerly known as FinancialForce) is embedding AI into its software portfolio to extend team capacity and streamline how work gets delivered.

“It comes down to [what] the whole nature of professional services has been,” said Raju Malhotra (pictured), chief product and technology officer of Certinia. “You can’t really sell something in professional services unless you have capacity to deliver it. That comes down to, do you have the skills? Are you available in the right time zone? And that constraint goes away to a large extent when you think about this as a hybrid team. Our thesis is, yes, it’s a disruption, but it’s a very positive opportunity for customers.”

Malhotra and Scott Hebner (pictured), principal analyst for AI at theCUBE Research, spoke with Gemma Allen, host for theCUBE, during an exclusive interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Certinia’s AI strategy and how agents are changing the standard software-as-a-service pipeline. (* Disclosure below.)

The future of professional services

In response to the growth of agentic AI, the enterprise world has been abuzz with worries over the “SaaSpocalypse.” Malhotra sees the traditional, automation-based software-as-a-service as appropriate for human users but not sufficient for an environment where humans and agents are working together.

That’s the ethos behind Certinia’s release of Veda, a suite of packaged agents and intelligent actions that will enable a collaboration between human and “digital” workers by combining SaaS capabilities with agentic ones.

“We’re going to need package agents that are role-based, that are specialists, that are trusted … but we also have intelligent actions that can be invoked anywhere in the enterprise based on the workflows that they have,” Malhotra said. “It’s going to be a combination of the software-as-a-service and the agentic. The launch that we have really calls out that differentiation that we are driving for our customers.”

The tech industry is undergoing what Hebner terms “digital labor transformation.” Since professional services is a very labor-intensive part of the marketplace, companies in that field have been eager to automate it. Agentic AI will not only automate repeatable, often tedious, tasks, but potentially contribute to knowledge workers’ decision-making.

“What Certinia is bringing to market with Veda is going to give these knowledge workers superpowers,” Hebner said. “The cloud over AI for the past decade has been, ‘It’s going to take everyone’s jobs.’ Our research shows that it’s actually going to be a net job growth.”

Certinia’s AI agent suite could save a project manager up to 20 hours per month, according to Malhotra, with that time savings scaling across the organization. Agents are not replacing human labor, but augmenting it.

“It’s not just an efficiency comparison,” Malhotra said. “Think about … an average Veda agent, a reflection of your best employee, because it’s trained on your best practices, it’s trained on your best policies, best data you have. So, it’s actually not your average sort of employee; it’s actually probably your best expression of your employee.”

Ensuring trust in the AI transition

Malhotra sees Certinia as more prepared than most to handle AI’s impact on SaaS. The company is one of the largest native independent software vendors on the Salesforce platform, which allows it to draw on a unified data store. What Malhotra terms the underlying “data fabric” is actionable and stored within a system of record that Certinia can harness as need be.

“We don’t create any copies,” Malhotra said. “We don’t integrate. How we are using Agentforce is very important because we bring our domain knowledge, we bring the data, the metadata … etc., to make the power of Salesforce platform with the data, with the power of the AI stack that is Agentforce, really provide that native ISV experience at scale for our customers.”

Trust is one of the biggest differentiators in AI products, according to Hebner and Malhotra. Although Certinia was an early adopter of AI, the company soon found that a large language model was just the baseline and further capabilities are needed to earn customers’ trust.

Since AI models are inherently probabilistic, Certinia applies a reasoning layer that brings in the determinism. That system of checks and balances, combined with Certinia’s deep knowledge base of the professional services field, is a powerful asset for its customers, according to Malhotra.

“There are certain policies about how a timecard should look, how a P&L should look,” he said. “That’s the policies, actually the determinism combined with the probabilistic power of LLMs — especially when used in a trusted context — becomes very powerful for customers.”

Here’s the complete video interview from SiliconANGLE and theCUBE: 

(* Disclosure: Certinia sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Certinia nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE