Certinia, which provides management software for professional services organizations, delivered its first installment of AI agents built on Salesforce's Agentforce platform as part of its summer release.

The company has three primary clouds--Professional Services (PS) Cloud, Financial Management Cloud and Customer Success (CS) Cloud--with Certinia AI layered throughout. Certinia, previously known as FinancialForce, is looking to address customers' need for productivity, AI innovation and rising labor costs. Certinia's platform plugs into enterprise ERP and CRM systems.

DJ Paoni, CEO of Certinia, set the backdrop. "Leaders are being asked to do more with fewer resources, and they know they need to hit the targets. They need better alignment across the whole company, sales, services, customer success. And interestingly, while most leaders agree that tight collaboration across these functions would drive higher margins and retention, only about a third are executing on it," said Paoni, speaking on an analyst briefing. "This gap of what you say and what we do is often a result of disconnected systems and processes that can create friction between all the different teams that you have."

According to Paoni, AI is what will be able to close the gap between promises and actual delivery. In the big picture, Certinia is betting that it can turn professional services organizations into profit centers instead of a cost center with a big assist from autonomous systems, said Paoni.

Raju Malhotra, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Certinia, said the company's vision is to "empower technology and services organizations to deliver customer value with certainty." The company has been building out its platform and its CS Cloud became generally available at Salesforce Dreamforce 2024.

Here's a look at the Certinia platform, which is designed to cover the services continuum from services estimating, resource and project management, billing, revenue management, collaboration and planning and analytics.

Certinia kicks off its agent parade

With its 2025 summer release, Certinia launched two AI agents, which were built on Salesforce's Agentforce platform, available for early adopters. Certinia will launch more agents in future releases.

The newly released AI agents include the Certinia Staffing Agent and the Certinia Customer Success Agent.

Malhotra said resource managers need an easier way to reallocate work when someone is out for a period of time to ensure projects remain on track.

Typically, a manual process searches for a resource's assignments and then workflows start to find a qualified replacement.

Certinia's Staffing Agent aims to begin resource allocation with a conversation. The staffing agent is native to Certinia's Professional Services (PS) Cloud. The agent will find billable assignments and provide a shortlist of suitable replacements. Once a manager makes a decision, the agent reallocates the work.

According to Malhotra, Certinia's early adopters have seen the new AI agents "reduce what used to take them hours into a few minutes."

The company's second AI agent is Certinia Customer Success Agent, which aims to automate grunt work for customer success managers.

Certinia's Customer Success Agent is designed to enable success managers to cover more accounts in pooled models. The agent does the prep work for a case and provides a summary, drafts email to customer and creates a task list. When the work is finished, the agent handles closing admin tasks.

Malhotra said the two agents in the 2025 Summer release are just the start. Certinia is experimenting with more than 50 AI agents that will be built into the company's professional services automation software.

Certinia was an inaugural launch partner for the Salesforce Agentforce Partner Network and now is a Salesforce Agentforce Model Context Protocol (MCP) Partner.

Building on Agentforce

Since Certinia is built on the Salesforce platform and an early adopter of Agentforce, Malhotra has a front-row seat to how the AI agent market is developing. Key points:

  • Certinia's Staffing Agent and Customer Success Agent are built on Agentforce. "Agentforce has evolved from 1.0 to 2.0 and now it's the 3.0 and in terms of capabilities, has really come a long way," said Malhotra.
  • Building agents requires a strong foundation and focus on data quality, integrity and unification across disparate systems. Certinia leverages the Salesforce platform and Data Cloud but expects to work in third-party data sources on behalf of customers. "We expect that that this is a very heterogeneous environment. So, we expect that heterogeneity of data, system workflows, and we work within that construct, to make sure the personas we are serving have a very unified view of the data that they want to act on," said Malhotra.
  • AI agent platforms are developing rapidly and Certinia has a wish list that's often shared with the Salesforce platform team. Wish list items for Agentforce include improved ISV capabilities (packaging, monetization, telemetry), agent orchestration, performance and scalability, and enhanced enterprise security, said Malhotra.

As for Malhotra's wishlist for Agentforce. Here's a look at his punch list.

  • More data and tools to run Agentforce natively with independent software vendors. Malhotra said Salesforce has been working closely ISVs, but needs  to hone the packaging, monetization and telemetry and reporting for Agentforce so partners can make it available natively.
  • Data quality and integration. Malhotra emphasized the critical importance of having high-quality, unified data from disparate systems. He noted that building effective agents requires a comprehensive view of data from various sources including CRM, financial systems, and other enterprise applications to properly manage services projects.
  • Orchestration build out. Agent orchestration is going to be critical as Salesforce agents work with Certinia agents and then connect to others. To scale, orchestration via Agent2Agent or Model Context Protocol (MCP) will be critical.
  • Enterprise readiness, namely security. "Security is a big construct," said Malhotra. "We really need to think about security in a much more specific and significant way so it's baked into the platform." He said that security efforts go beyond Salesforce and Certinia and need to be an ecosystem effort on every level of the stack.

Most of Malhotra's wish list applies to the broader agentic AI landscape as well as Agentforce. Here’s a look at what agentic AI needs to scale.

More on Agentforce:

Scaling AI features

Certinia also launched a set of AI enhancements with the latest platform release. Throughout Certinia's clouds, the company has rolled out features to enhance resource management, optimize budgets and plans and simplify tax planning.

Here's a look:

  • AI-generated success plans in CS Cloud. The company said generative AI additions can create customer success plans and objectives from sales opportunities and business challenges. The plans connect sales, services and success teams in one place.
  • AI-generated summaries in PS Cloud. Certinia said genAI additions will provide project overview summaries, and individual summaries for deliverables, financials, risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies.
  • Automated project staffing. The latest Certinia release now has the ability to automatically hold or assign a resource request to reduce the time to staff.
  • Enhanced KPI tracking dashboards in CS Cloud with the ability to post a Value Tracker on customer community portals.
  • Estimate Control in PS Cloud with the ability to accelerate deal closing and modify estimates at once with discounts and billing schedules.

Business Research Themes

Data to Decisions, Future of Work

Roles

Chief Information Officer

Tags

Certinia, AI agents, Artificial Intelligence (AI), salesforce