AI resets professional services economics as Certinia expands agentic platform at Dreamforce

Mike Piehl, chief executive officer of Platinum River Innovations LLC, said labor demand on an individual project is coming down, which normally would mean fewer people are needed. But because project price points are also falling and value delivery is rising, client demand is increasing. "So, more projects coming in, and the net effect is we need more people," Piehl said. His firm, a Salesforce implementation company, rewrote client contracts before bringing in AI tools, moving from time-and-materials to fixed-bid pricing so it absorbs delivery risk. Requirements, code generation and testing now run through AI, cutting internal cost, lifting margins and making projects viable that clients once could not afford.

Certinia has merged its Veda AI suite with its core applications into one system spanning the services lifecycle, from selling projects through resourcing, billing and delivery. Prasad Sulur, chief business officer, and Robert Cesafsky, chief operating officer, said scattered tools deliver 10% or 20% gains that enterprises never capture, so Certinia's goal is eliminating entire workflows. The company presents the result as a System of Action across professional services, customer success and financial management.

Raju Malhotra, chief product and technology officer at Certinia, said the platform's agentic surface has widened since April. Certinia has grown from 10 packaged agents and 64 Veda Intelligent Actions to 24 agents and 135 actions, with more than 300 planned by the end of the year. The aim is to expose everything a human user can do in the product agentically, grounded in foundational context and compounding intelligence.

Hyland Software Inc. built Hyland Premier Care around enhanced support, customer success and technical account management based on service tier, along with service credits customers can apply as needs arise. Carlos Gutierrez, vice president of customer operations at Hyland, said aligning data across professional services and customer success, and capturing risk signals through the lifecycle, spares customers from connecting those dots themselves.

Certinia also used Dreamforce to present a bolder brand with people at the center. Mimi Spier, chief marketing officer at Certinia, said buyers now research through large language models and many never reach a website, so credibility built with customers, partners and analysts drives brand authority.

Thunder Inc. manages projects in Certinia's professional services automation with Veda layered on top, holding pre-sales commitments, scope changes and Slack discussions in one continuously refreshed knowledge graph. Tyler Philpot, vice president of solution architecture at Thunder, said context engineering has become the discipline that matters: precise context yields better agent answers, while overly broad context invites hallucinations.

Civica UK Ltd. is consolidating the bespoke systems left by years of acquisitions, with trust as the deciding factor in its AI choices, according to the event coverage. The discussions at Dreamforce covered pricing models, agent architecture, knowledge graphs, context engineering and what the changes mean for consulting careers.