Certinia bakes AI into its latest professional services updates

Certinia has joined the growing ranks of enterprise software vendors turning to generative AI to enhance their offerings. The provider of ERP and professional services automation software based on the Salesforce platform today announced it has added AI-powered features aimed at simplifying common processes for midrange service firms to its latest update.

The Spring ’24 update, released today, contains numerous enhancements to Certinia’s core offerings. The aforementioned AI integration will fuel several new functionalities, including the ability to generate professional services estimates programmatically based on the company’s own data, as well as the ability to estimate the chances of closing a deal based on a given estimate.

The estimation process is notoriously complex — and lengthy — in the professional services sector. On average, it takes professional services firms more than a month from the beginning of the estimating process to actually send an estimate to a customer, said Chloe Stephenson, a senior product strategy manager at Certinia, in a press briefing held last week. One of the key reasons for that is that professional services companies need specialized information to make the most accurate estimates possible, forcing them in some cases to make trade-offs between accuracy and speed.

Certinia’s latest update takes aim at that issue with a “guided scoping” tool, essentially a wizard that guides users through pre-configured questions and runs those responses through existing company data to provide accurate estimates much more quickly.

“What this is going to do in the background is, depending on the answers to these scoping requirements, it’s going to automatically update our baseline implementation template in a standardized way,” Stephenson said.

Certinia’s new features should also allow for “de-risking” of new projects, by identifying potential pitfalls in a given deal, accurately rating the resources available to handle it, and helping services companies make smarter adjustments to those estimates. AI will also be applied in other areas, such as adding contextual commentary to financial reports, automating the recording and approval of vendor invoices, and quickly flagging areas of ongoing projects that are beginning to lag behind schedule.

Visualization is a key part of the new release, according to Certinia’s briefing. There, the company showed off a series of dashboards that enable users to perform tasks such as synchronize employee schedules in response to customer requests, track whether billable elements of a project have been sitting idle or not, and keep a running comparison of a project’s current revenue compared to earlier estimates.

The company’s core offerings are designed to provide tracking, metrics, and a host of other administrative functionality to companies too large to offer services like IT contracting or marketing projects on a purely ad hoc basis, but too small to contract with global systems integrators like PwC or Accenture, according to ISG research director Stephen Hurrell. Certinia has been largely successful at that, as building its platform on top of Salesforce offered several key advantages that have helped sharpen the company’s focus.

“They’ve done a good job utilizing the Salesforce capabilities,” Hurrell said. “Rather than building from scratch with a database, where you have to build all the administration capability, they can piggyback and leverage what Salesforce has built.”

The considerations for providing streamlined professional software to a services-based company are very different than those involved in a more product-based company, he noted. Resource allocation is a more complicated task for service providers, and order management and supply chains are less of an issue.

“If you’re selling one-time goods, then you’re taking an order and that order might have a complication, or maybe a fulfillment issue,” Hurrell said. “But that’s it, you know?”

The key advantage in Certinia’s newest release, he said, is mainly its use of AI to gain a deeper understanding of a given project and avoid risk.

“It’s very easy to lose money on projects,” Hurrell said. “So that ability to utilize data from past experiences to be able to indicate preemptively where issues may arise … is really attractive.”

Certinia’s Spring 2024 updates and capabilities are now live and generally available, with the exception of the company’s CS Cloud offering, which is currently available on an invite-only basis until later this year. No pricing changes are in place for existing licenses.