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Revolutionizing Professional Services: Certinia's AI-Driven Innovations

• Evan Kirstel

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Imagine a world where AI not only supports but revolutionizes the professional services industry. That's exactly what you'll uncover with Raju Malhotra from Certinia, as he shares how their cutting-edge technologies are transforming sectors like technology and consulting. Together with giants such as PwC and Siemens, Certinia is at the forefront of reshaping service delivery by integrating generative AI and AI agents. Our engaging conversation explores the significant enhancements in customer success management and the promising shift from traditional manual processes to sophisticated AI-driven solutions, tackling the challenges organizations face in adapting to this new era.

Discover the innovative spirit of Certinia as we highlight their strategies for optimizing human capital monetization through SaaS and services. Raju reveals exciting trends on the horizon, including the rise of semi-autonomous and autonomous project management agents, showcasing Certinia's dedication to staying ahead in the AI landscape. With a nod to the upcoming AgentForce WorldTours within the Salesforce ecosystem, we provide insights into how such events offer invaluable customer engagement opportunities. Prepare to be inspired by the future of professional services where AI continues to lead the way in delivering success and innovation across diverse verticals.

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Speaker 1:

Hey everybody, today we're diving into the ever-changing world of professional services with an expert and innovator in the field from Certinia Raju. How are you?

Speaker 2:

I am doing great how are you, evan, doing well?

Speaker 1:

thank you Really intrigued for this discussion. Maybe before that introduce yourself, you're really interesting background with companies like Salesforce, microsoft, many others, and who is Certinia?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so Certinia was formerly known as a financial force. We are one of the top ISVs native ISVs on the Salesforce platform and we are in the professional services business, as you said, and maybe I think the best way to describe Cetenia is to describe the kind of customers we serve and how we help them. So we help customers who are in the professional services organizations and they could be the pure play professional services like PwC, kpmg, or they could be part of a technology company you know salesforce itself cisco, phillips, siemens, etc. And and we really help them on, uh, manage, sell, manage and deliver their services projects fascinating, so you know it's a multi trillion dollar landscape.

Speaker 1:

how do you see yourself in the industry fitting Maybe describe what you see as your role being in the professional services industry, I guess and the highest growing part of global economy.

Speaker 2:

So it is really, I think, something that has come far over the last couple of decades, in fact. So Certinia has been a leader in professional services automation, really, when it comes to resource management, resource optimization, when you have monetizable resources, consulting teams, certinia is a leader in that business.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic. Well, let's dive into some of the hot topics and buzzwords that are rolling around these days. Agentic is a hot topic, and you were an early player in Salesforce's AgentForce network. Maybe unpack what that means exactly and your role therein.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So we were fortunate to be one of the early partners for the AgentForce partner network that Salesforce announced right before Dreamforce, and we've been working with Salesforce for a while and basically what that means is we have a bi-directional communication and collaboration with the Salesforce engineering product platform teams where, on one hand, we get an early preview of what the agent force direction is, what the capabilities are, we get to play with them, we get to build some agents and apply that to the use cases for our customers and, on the other hand, we also give feedback to Salesforce on the direction going forward, as the AI space, as you know, is evolving very fast.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's a great place to be. I hope Mark Benioff is listening to this. He follows me on X, so maybe he'll catch it. But maybe let's zoom out the big picture. How do you see Gen AI and AI agents in the case of Salesforce really change the way professional services are delivered? What's going to be the big impact over the next number of years?

Speaker 2:

So I think this is probably cliche to say at this stage, but huge impact, big impact, exponential. I think what we're focused on is really, you know, the AI. I think we had our roots in predictive AI, so that's the machine learning, heuristic based models, and we have that throughout our application today. We've had it for years and we have that throughout our application today. We've had it for years and now, for last year or so, we've actually invested in the generative AI use cases. And you know very simply, you know we think about generative AI as part of any type of content which is complex and we make it simple for our customers Summarize notes, summarize large sales contracts, help prepare a salesperson, a service delivery person, customer success agent, really up to date with the information right before they meet their customer. So that's really a gen AI use cases.

Speaker 2:

And now, with the agent AI, the focus that we have is really on getting some of the tasks done by that our customers care about. So, for example, we have in our product a customer success cloud and we serve, we help the CSM team, the customer success managers, and we really have designed a CSM agent that works in concert with the human customer success teams to help and support customers when the human agent may not have enough bandwidth or time or be fast enough to respond to some of the customer queries. So really how we can make the agents work side by side with our human customer success agents is really one of the use cases we have, and we have a few other use cases that we are designing and really thinking about really augmenting the human potential using agents.

Speaker 1:

Wow, that's exciting. So what are some of the biggest challenges your customers have when moving to professional services automation? Maybe these are customers who don't have AI expertise or experience, just a CRM system, and you know the tools that are commonplace. You know how do you help them get into this world.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So first of all, I think it's a very deceptively simple problem because many services organizations grow, you know, as their business grows, as their technology overall SaaS business or the services business grows, and they have their roots in spreadsheets. They're somewhat of the manual processes. So what they end up doing is they would hire resource managers whose job is to staff, you know, consultants, based on the skills that consultants have, based on the projects that they're bidding on, they're selling, et cetera, and then using CRM, using some other cloud software, I think they kind of try to scale. So very soon, especially if you look at the mid-market or enterprise or the large companies, this becomes a exponentially difficult problem to manage manually. So for a company like PwC, when you have hundreds of thousands of resources across the globe, or Siemens that actually has similar kind of issues in a very international global environment and you're working with customers who have very specific needs, they need some consulting resources. There are some fixed type of time-bound requirements and that becomes very hard to support just manually using the processes that might have worked a few years ago. So that's where Certinia comes in. It actually on very firsthand, it actually helps you get that service project through a sales perspective.

Speaker 2:

We have a product call services estimation that works with your sales CRM. It really tells you this is the kind of resources you have or becoming available. These are the things you can actually bid on. This is how much you should bid on. This is your prediction about win rate based on this type of proposal. That's the services estimation.

Speaker 2:

And then we have the professional services cloud that helps you deliver, once you win that project, to actually manage those resources, staff schedule optimize and when schedules change, someone is no longer available, they don't work at your company, they're probably not feeling well or something. We help you schedule and staff in a very dynamic way, quickly. And then, lastly, we also launched a product called CS Cloud, which is Customer Success Cloud. That helps you really go from a transactional project delivery to more of an ongoing customer relationship, really building long-term customer relationships through the services project delivery. So really, I think this is where Centenia helps us. As your business becomes more complex, we help you automate it and we help you bring the power of AI, power of overall technology, to your fore and connect very well with your systems that you have.

Speaker 1:

Amazing proposition. You mentioned PwC. I was just reading that you recently teamed up with PwC on a partnership. That's super exciting. I just had a briefing a few weeks ago at PwC's Boston office and they're going all in on AI, right down to the individual contributor level. I mean they are full steam ahead. But when it comes to that partnership, what can customers look forward to? What will that involve? What can customers look forward to?

Speaker 2:

What will that involve? Yeah, so PwC is a fantastic partner for Certinia. We are fortunate to have them as partner and we work with them for a long time now and basically PwC has developed the core competencies and expertise in solving the kind of problems I just mentioned and really work to scale the Certinia impact in implementing, driving the adoption of Certinia usage for the other professional services organizations and they're also a customer, so they know this firsthand, the type of value Certinia brings to their own business and they can actually help bring it to many of their customers.

Speaker 1:

Wow, that's a great customer partner to have. As you know better than anyone, large enterprises can be really complicated. Lots of legacy we have a word for it technical debt, and how do you integrate into their CRMs and ERP systems and other platforms seamlessly and how much effort is involved in getting up and running as a new customer.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. So, evan, you're absolutely right. The enterprise businesses are very complex and the technology stacks are often heterogeneous, so we're not living in the world where you could be just on one stack or the second stack, et cetera. So that's the approach we take. We take a very open, connected, modern, api-based approach and we have connectivity to thousands of applications that our customers are using. So when you serve the kind of customers I mentioned in the enterprise, they have, you know, different CRMs. They have different human capital management systems. They have different financial systems. They have overall, you know, a very bespoke environment based on some things that they built in-house and they are actually using off the shelf, and we connect with most of their systems pretty much out of the box. And we are built on Salesforce technology, so we get the benefit of all the app exchange partners and the integrations that come natively available as part of that integration, and we ourselves are a native ISV OEM app on Salesforce itself. So using Certinia is like you're kind of using a sales cloud or service cloud.

Speaker 1:

And it's very hard to tell.

Speaker 2:

By the way, sometimes when you're at the sales cloud, when you're in Certinia, et cetera, because the experience is so seamless. Sometimes, when you're in the sales cloud, when you're in Certinia, et cetera, because the experience is so seamless and as a benefit of that Salesforce platform, we connect with thousands of other integrations partners in a very kind of connected way that helps us be able to support the enterprise needs.

Speaker 1:

Sounds very elegant. You probably work across many different industries, verticals what have you? Do you have any areas where you're particularly standing out or getting traction, where you're seeing a lot of interest? Or maybe you have some anecdotes about different industrial use cases?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think wherever we see professional services, wherever we see consulting resources, where we see need for monetization of that human capital, I think that's where Certinia can help. It's really there to help staff manage, really plan for your business, where your core business driver is how you help your customers with a solution, not just with the software as a service or SaaS technology, but SaaS plus services. That's where Certinia comes in and it's a very broad use case and we do see one really clear use case is within the technology companies, as I mentioned, obviously in the pure place of services companies. But we also have customers, you know, across accounting services, across marketing services, across different you know verticals, that you know where customers have the human capital and the services needs and we help them.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic. So what sort of trends are you looking at longer term, over the next? I'd say long term being two to three years? These days, can we see a fully agentic project manager managing customers and engagements and completely autonomous, or is that too much in the science fiction realm?

Speaker 2:

I don't think it's too much of a science fiction. I think that's actually something that we are experimenting even today, and just to give you an idea one of our beliefs is that it's like charity begins at home.

Speaker 2:

So even before we launch AI for the benefit of our customers, we are the early adopters of AI within our own product and engineering team and just a month and a half ago we ran basically internal AI workshop and we designed 44 agents that actually are designed for use cases for different types of resource managers, project managers and customer success managers, even financial kind of managers. So the idea is that how do we think ourselves ahead of the curve using agent force, using the technology that is available?

Speaker 2:

So, to answer your question, I think that's actually a very, very exciting prospect for us, for our customers, and absolutely I think you can see semi-autonomous and autonomous agents in the near future?

Speaker 1:

Wow, super exciting. So we're headed into the holiday season, but what are you excited about or looking forward to early next year? Any travel, any events, meetings within the Salesforce ecosystem or beyond? What do you have on your agenda?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so you know, Salesforce has effectively renamed the WorldTours as the AgentForce WorldTours, as you know, and those are kind of happening on a regional basis throughout different locations, and that's something we have participated in. Many of those. I think we participated in six agent force world tours just in last couple of months, since the Dreamforce and I think there are a few other coming up, and that's a great opportunity for us to meet with customers, new prospects. That's something very exciting. With the new year we also have just a kind of opportunity to have business reviews and connect back with some customers. In smaller events we have customer advisory board coming up.

Speaker 1:

So I think a number of those opportunities where we share.

Speaker 2:

I think our plans, learn from customers how they're using our technology and really kind of put it all together and think from a long-term perspective how we can best help them.

Speaker 1:

Wow, it's amazing work. Congratulations on all the success. I learned a lot, and onwards and upwards. I can't wait to see how this this rolls out over the next year.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. Thank you, All right thank you for joining.

Speaker 1:

Thanks everyone for listening, watching, sharing and take care. Happy holidays.