Most organizations are already investing in AI, automating customer success workflows, and provide enhanced visibility through intelligent project summaries and real-time progress tracking. These are among the conclusions of the company’s new product strategy and findings of a new PSO [Professional Services Organization) built on Certinia’s Salesforce Venture-native platform.
“Amid tight economic conditions, PSOs are increasingly viewed as strategic profit centres,” said Certinia’s CEO DJ Paoni. ‘This results in a change in the way professional services are viewed (66% see them as profit centres, up 3% from 2024) and not a cost centre. The number of elite firms (targeting organizations worth more than 40%) is set to double over the next year. But only a third of companies proactively collaborate across functions.”
This latest product update helps organizations automate customer success workflows with AI agents, reduce resource management time from hours to minutes, and provide enhanced visibility through intelligent project summaries and real-time progress tracking.
This is where AI comes in. Most profitable PSOs are already investing in AI. The top three tactics include hiring talent with AI skillsets, developing AI, and utilizing commercial software with AI capabilities, Paoni said. “What’s really exciting that we saw is the rise of AI. 83% say they are already using or plan to use it in their PSA software within the next 12 months.
‘This creates an incredible opportunity for Certinia, where the future is agentic,” Paoni stressed.
“The summer 25 release builds some powerful new capabilities,” he added. “This includes custom agents, and staffing agents (which are very, very cool, which help resource managers with staffing challenges. They use success agents to automatically generate tailored success plans, objectives, and briefings
“We believe the next wave of performance will come from a shared and intelligent platform,” Paoni said. “The AI is all on the Salesforce platform. That connectivity to the Salesforce platform is key to our differentiation.”
“Our vision is to empower the world’s best technology and services organizations to deliver technology value with certainty,’’ said Raju Malhotra, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Certinia. “Our vision is to empower the world’s best technology and services organizations to deliver technology value with certainty, to try to understand their needs and then build a solution for the long term.”
The Professional Services Cloud has been upgraded.
“With the professional services cloud, we stay competitive and differentiated in terms of the rank and depth of our solutions,” Malhotra stated. “Resource management is really the bread and butter. Often, the history is catastrophe planning and not demand planning.”
The Customer Success Cloud connects sales success teams and delivery teams.
“We have made tremendous progress in the last several years and quarters,” Malhotra stated. “The Financial Management Cloud has been the root of Certinia, back to when we were called FinancialForce. It’s about effectiveness and efficiency. It’s about driving automation. You will see a lot of stuff about AI innovation come very slowly.”
Certinia has deepened its enterprise presence.
“We think very deeply about the enterprise scale, which is often ignored – at a sale that customers demand,” Malhotra said. “One of the large GSIs went live with Certinia recently and they have over 100,000 users. That’s something that we are seeing more and more as we invest in the enterprise scale.”
The 2025 release adds some new features to the Professional Services Cloud.
“There is a focus for summer 2025 on services estimation, the glue that ties the services teams together with the sales teams. We have seen it increase, and our customers are using it more and more. We have seen a 40% increase in services estimation revenue, from last June to this June. That’s something that our customers are really demanding. We are also adding billing schedules to this.”
Other new elements include auto-assigned staffing, predefined ways that Certinia has set up in autoassigned ways.
“It makes things super easy,” Malhotra said.
‘We also set up portfolio management in the spring, which is very intuitive and shaved times off the time it takes,” he added.
“We also launched services forecasting in beta, making business teams operate their business at true P&L,” Malhotra said. “In the past we have forecasted at different levels, but this is our first attempt to make it really easy and for services leaders to run their P&L very effectively.
“The Customer Success cloud is about bringing together sales and success delivery teams,” Malhotra said. “One of the key aspects is pooling of CSMs. It allows a personalized experience for your customers through the automated management of pools.”
“The Financial Management Cloud is where the roots of Certinia are,” Malhotra indicated. “We are reimagining FMC, which means that there is a focus on an annual operating plan , In addition, if customers have both a Financial Management Cloud and the Professional Services cloud, we make it very transparent to be transparent about services credits. These were launched in the spring, and they are making things better and better.”
Other Financial Management Cloud enhancements include launching the staffing agent and the professional services agent to early adopter customers. There is also a lot of focus on Generative AI, to bring in all key information.
“There is an 11 step innovation within the Customer Service Cloud for early adopters,” Malhotra said. “Ai innovation was also motivated by being an early adopter of the Agentforce partner network, and we work very closely with them.
Malhotra also noted that they have been moving so quickly that the prototype for a number of months was very quick.
“We are moving so fast that the prototype to actual production takes a couple of months if that,” he said.
Christian Finn, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Certinia, noted that the company had just released their Smart Release Notes, It features at least 12 new features in the Summer 25 release of the Professional Services Cloud alone
“It can be handy for customers to get a bird’s eye view quickly about how things have changed,” Finn said “The Professional Services Cloud now uses Generative AI on top of our product release notes to help keep our customers up with the pace of innovation. I log in as a customer and it knows what version I’m on in production.”
“You can now translate two days of work into two minutes,” Malhotra said. “Work planners also now work five times faster,
“In terms of where we are headed after summer 25, we are very much focused on extending the teams, understanding the customers jobs to be done and then automating that using AI,” Malhotra concluded.