Certinia brings AI into professional services workflows

SHARE Coverage from SiliconANGLE's livestreaming video studio UPDATED 16:55 EST / NOVEMBER 04 2026

Certinia Inc. is bringing AI into the software firms use to sell projects, assign staff, deliver work and bill clients.

AI’s ability to instantaneously draw from a deep well of information and provide guidance in practically any field of expertise has changed the paradigm for professional services. For Certinia Inc., whose business facilitates 7.1 billion professional services operations per month, AI represents a significant opportunity for its clients.

“I think the only industry that’s probably been more disrupted by AI than the technology industry has probably been the services industry,” Robert Cesafsky, chief operating officer of Certinia, told theCUBE. “Whether you are a software company, a hardware company, a tax and accounting firm [or] management consulting … all of these industries are being directly targeted or impacted by AI. Whatever your strategy is, you need to be able to have the right tools. You need to be able to have control of that services business, and that’s what Certinia provides.”

This feature is part of SiliconANGLE Media’s exploration of the architectural shifts powering continuous, production-grade AI. Be sure to check out theCUBE’s coverage of the Certinia at Dreamforce event. (* Disclosure below.)

Certinia launched in 2009 as FinancialForce.com Inc., a cloud-based accounting and enterprise resource planning provider built natively on the Salesforce Inc. platform. It rebranded in 2023 as it broadened from accounting and ERP to managing services businesses.

Certinia’s Salesforce-native platform connects a wide range of processes spanning sales, project delivery, financial management and customer success. The company’s approach helps clients transform cost centers into profit centers by improving visibility into customer activities, optimizing resource deployment and maintaining connectivity throughout the customer lifecycle.

“We can take away all the administrative tasks and outsource that to AI in order to help them deliver faster time outcomes, but it also helps them deliver a lower cost to serve that project,” said Mimi Spier, chief marketing officer of Certinia, in an interview with theCUBE. “We can identify expansion opportunities, [and] at-risk customers where we need to optimize renewals. Everything we’re doing is ultimately affecting the bottom line.”

Certinia’s long-time relationship with Salesforce is a key element in the company’s overall strategy. Certinia is featured under the AI agents and tools category for Salesforce’s AgentExchange and has provided AI-powered sales and delivery for Salesforce’s consulting partner network.

“We have a deep partnership with Salesforce,” said Raju Malhotra, chief product and technology officer of Certinia. “I spend personally a lot of time with the Salesforce executives on business and engineering, and we collaborate. We bring our customer use cases, they tell us about what’s coming up from a capability perspective and we work very well together. They’re led by a founder [chief executive officer] who’s very much in tune with the market, and they want to stay ahead.”

Certinia has sought to stay ahead in its own right by introducing Veda, an enterprise-grade intelligent operations engine that functions as the company’s suite of AI specialist agents and intelligent actions. The solution delivers rules-bound, trusted and ROI-focused autonomous workflows, combining Certinia’s years of institutional memory with advanced AI reasoning. Certinia’s goal with Veda is to provide customers with enough flexibility so that agents integrated into existing business workflows can drive immediate and measurable value.

“We’ve infused Veda throughout the experience for users to be more productive,” Malhotra said. “We have package agents, which are Veda agents. We launched Veda with 10 packages. Now we have 24, and we will finish the year with more than 40 package agents. Those agents are very much persona based, and they help our customers.”

Veda is not simply a layer of generic automation; it represents a key shift in how AI is being used in the enterprise. Certinia’s focus on serving the professional services market motivated the company to ground its AI offering in operational reality, where context, coordination and control matter as much as speed, according to Scott Hebner, principal AI analyst at theCUBE Research.

“Certinia’s recent announcement of Veda is more profound than it may appear on the surface,” he said. “Veda is notable not simply because it introduces a new suite of AI agents and intelligent workflow-based actions, but because it offers a glimpse into what the future of enterprise AI is likely to look like: AI that works alongside humans in consequential workflows, helps people make better decisions and earns trust by being grounded in business context, governance and real operational outcomes.”

Since the launch of Veda in April, Certinia has taken several actions to enhance its AI capabilities. In July, the firm acquired Moonnox, an AI-native services delivery platform purpose-built for the professional services sector.

This acquisition added a contextual layer to Veda through knowledge graphs, persistent project memory and services-specific agents. The combined platform can now connect a new client request with approved scope, staffing requirements and financial impact, then recommend governed actions for professional review, according to Hebner.

“Certinia provides the deep, structured foundation of professional services, customer success and financial management; Moonnox brings the missing half: capturing the unstructured reality — the emails, chats, and calls — where delivery actually happens,” he explained. “Together, they fuse everything a services business knows with everything their teams do, moving Veda beyond orchestration toward context-aware, AI-native services delivery.”

The context graph can also draw on structured records such as timecard entries and utilization figures. Moonnox helps bring that information into the graph for client-facing teams managing projects, according to Cesafsky.

“That’s been where Moonnox has really showed up for us over the last couple of months,” he said. “It’s those capabilities to help the client-facing services [and] delivery teams run and operate their projects. [Moonnox] is effectively an intake machine for a lot of that structured data to bring that into the context graph as well.”

In September, Certinia unveiled its System of Action for services businesses. The offering significantly expanded the Veda AI suite with new agents and more than doubled the Veda Intelligent Actions library from 64 to 135.

Certinia’s System of Action uses a three-tier architecture to bring AI agents into services workflows. The first tier brings together structured records and unstructured project data. The second draws on more than 17 years of Certinia’s experience in services to inform decisions. The third lets agents act within existing workflows.

“We want to accelerate the delivery for our customers,” Malhotra said. “Our customers are solving some specific problems in the professional services world. We don’t want to just give you a project plan. If you choose to execute that project plan with some agents, we’ll give you that. If you want to really think about agentic capabilities to help you in making money, in expanding your time [and] in terms of delivery, we will help you with that.”

For professional services firms, adopting AI agents means deciding which parts of project delivery to delegate to them.

“We view professional services as a leading indicator of where enterprise AI is heading because it combines knowledge-intensive work, dynamic context, collaborative decisions, measurable economics and human accountability,” Hebner said. “If Certinia executes well, Veda could become an important blueprint for translating digital labor into economic outcomes.”

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Certinia Signal interview series. Neither Certinia, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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