Certinia says it is on a path to move Professional Services Automation (PSA) beyond automation into autonomous operation. Its Winter Release, out today, advances along that path -- but what does this mean for the existing human workers in its customers' Professional Services Organizations (PSOs)? The emphasis is on human-agent collaboration rather than replacement, says the vendor, and this perspective is echoed by customers. Beth Roach, VP of Professional Services Strategy and Operations for Informatica, which has just completed its acquisition by Salesforce, speaks as an early adopter of the features rolling out in this new release. She says the focus is on freeing up staff from repetitive tasks so they can spend more time applying their experience and critical thinking:
How do we take our staff, identify what they need to critically think about and where they need to focus on the art of their job, versus what items that can be made much more streamlined and more productive using the AI technology and augment their role so that they can do more? Not take away their responsibilities, but what can they provide the critical thinking tools that they own and their art and mastery of their job to, with the AI tools?
Ultimately, the goal is to use AI to improve Informatica's products and earn more revenue rather than staying focused on productivity alone. But the current capabilities have the most impact on productivity. She explains:
We'd love to start using some of the tools for revenue gains, but I think right now we're really focused on operationally what we can do to increase productivity. And that's really what hits home for us in some of the stuff that we're seeing in this release.
Today's release brings a new project assistant agent, which proactively identifies data anomalies affecting projects in the PSA app, such as missing time cards, overdue project items, or milestones approaching critical status. This joins the staffing agent and Customer Success Agent announced in the Summer release, the vanguard of a total of 44 agents the vendor has identified for development. Other AI features now available in early release include AI-powered customer account summaries in CS Cloud that give Customer Success Managers (CSMs) an instant overview of an account, including CS activities, key stakeholders, executive summaries and strategic insights. Also in CS Cloud, a new dynamic playbooks feature uses AI to analyze business policies, best practices and customer-specific account data to dynamically create the tasks within a new playbook. For example, a dip in a customer's health score immediately triggers a tailored playbook. A final AI feature is a prompt configuration builder that lets users pick the data elements and custom fields that will appear in AI-generated project summaries. Automated summaries are also useful to project managers using PS Cloud, says Chloe Stephenson, Product Strategy Director:
I'm going to ask the agent, what do I need to pay attention on the project? Where are those areas of risk? And the agent is going to do what AI does best -- look at all the underlying project data and tell me where the problems are. This is going to save me a ton of time on complex and data-heavy projects.
If a project is at risk, it can then call on the staffing agent to help identify a new resource. Raju Malhotra, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Certinia, says that the ultimate goal is for agents to orchestrate actions behind the scenes without users having to invoke each one individually:
I think as we get into more of the agentic agents in the background, it would become it very easy for users to just ask questions, get the work done, without worrying about directing it to a specific agent.
Another notable new feature in CS Cloud is a native integration to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, extending Certinia's Salesforce-native capabilities. This gives CS teams direct access to the same branded prebuilt templates, segmentations, do not send rules and other tools that marketing colleagues are using. Without leaving CS Cloud, they can create personalized automated Marketing Cloud campaigns to drive adoption and retention -- for example a webinar introducing new product features -- and track campaign metrics such as delivery rate, open rates, click-through rates and views.
New features in PS Cloud include automations to simplify the process of scoping large estimates, and the ability for authorized users to make direct, auditable changes to time cards before they are billed, reducing the time spent making necessary adjustments. In resource scheduling, resource managers can now take direct staffing actions, such as assigning held requests, within the Work Planner. Services credits can now be ring-fenced to specific business units, and service teams can choose to see when invoices have been paid before they allocate work.
The new concept of a service credit deliverable has a specified number of allocations associated to it, and once invoked it can add the required milestones, tasks and resource requests automatically onto the relevant projects. Fixed-price services credit bundles can also be created. New capabilities in FM Cloud include more granular filtering of source records, such as projects, contracts and sales orders, used in revenue recognition, better automation of contract cancelations for accounting purposes, and an updated UX for cash management that allows for more process flexibility when applying cash.
Certinia's path toward autonomous PSA is a sensible direction of travel, even if today's release is more about human-agent collaboration than letting the machines run the show. The new project assistant agent makes three of the 44 agents the vendor has identified -- plenty of road ahead. What's more interesting is the orchestration underneath. Stephenson's demo showed a user moving seamlessly between agents without consciously invoking each one. That only works because Certinia's platform already connects PS, CS and financial data in a single environment -- the Frictionless Enterprise principle in action. Agents can only automate what's already connected; they can't magic insights from siloed systems. For services organizations tempted by AI promises, Roach's pragmatic take is that productivity gains first, revenue impact later. The foundations have to be in place before the agents can deliver.
