Certinia enhances AI features across its services delivery software

Certinia Inc., the developer of services delivery software based on the Salesforce Inc. platform, today released a series of new and updated features aimed at improving service delivery, project management and customer success through expanded artificial intelligence capabilities and operational automation.

The company, which was previously called FinancialForce Inc., said its Spring ’25 release focuses on helping services organizations manage resources, estimate projects, track customer engagement and streamline administrative processes.

Two generative artificial intelligence features are now available to early adopters. The GenAI Resource Summary provides a consolidated view of candidate profiles, highlighting relevant skills and past experience to support faster and more accurate staffing decisions. The GenAI Customer Account Summary provides customer success managers with a snapshot of relevant client data, including sentiment indicators, risks and suggested next actions, to help teams stay aligned with customer expectations, Certinia said.

Skill suggestions

Spring ’25 also introduces AI-based skill suggestions derived from an organization’s existing resource pool and assignment history. This assists managers in identifying relevant skills, even when historical data is limited. A new Resource Request Staffer supports bulk management of up to 1,000 requests, including matching, assigning, shortlisting and holding candidates — improving scalability and reducing staffing time.

“I get information about resources and why they were the best match chosen,” said Christian Finn, product strategy director at Certinia. “I can select any or all of them and put them on a shortlist hold or assign them as I choose. This creates good throughput in the resource management function and help customers with a lot of projects and a lot of resources scale quickly.”

A smart rescheduling tool also debuts in this release, enabling project managers to evaluate the budget and margin impacts of schedule changes in real time, allowing more informed adjustments to resource allocations or budget planning.

“Things change, people get sick,” said Raju Malhotra, chief product and technology officer. “How to help resource and project managers reschedule based on that is something that we are focused on as part of AI. Skill suggestions can help the resource manager staff people with the right scale.”

More accurate estimates

New features support selling services products, including AI and digital workers. Estimators can use the Estimate Financial Summary to review projected monthly revenue and costs, identify potential margin issues, and improve cash flow forecasting before launching a project. Certinia has also added support for custom pricing models through configurable pricing calculations, supplementing traditional fixed-price and time-and-materials billing options.

“Traditionally, we’ve had the resource management or resource estimations as part of our product,” Malhotra said. “We’re adding digital workers, AI and intellectual property to help as part of services estimation.”

A new portfolio object groups related projects — such as those being performed for the same customer or overseen by the same project manager — and consolidates status and progress updates into a single view. This feature, accessible through the Delivery Tracker, eliminates the need for manual roll-ups and gives project leaders a streamlined overview of their project groups, Certinia said.

Automated timesheets

A new “Suggest My Timesheet” function uses scheduled assignments and tasks to pre-fill timesheets, reducing the effort required for manual entry. Associated user interface improvements are intended to make time tracking more efficient and less error-prone.

“Ninety percent of the work, if not more, is done for you,” Malhotra said. “You have to review the timesheet to stay compliant, but then hit send, and there it goes.”

Spring ’25 adds new features that help customer success managers monitor client progress from the early stages of a customer engagement. Teams can now track objective key performance indicators, which are quantifiable metrics used to track progress towards specific objectives, from the opportunity phase to post-sale delivery.

Enhanced resource pooling capabilities now allow automatic assignment based on regional availability, skills and capacity to enable more efficient scaling of customer support. CSMs can see dashboards and time-tracking views that show how time is spent across clients and activities.

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