Certinia expands Veda AI for professional services

Certinia has launched what it calls a System of Action for services businesses and expanded its Veda AI suite with 14 new agents and a larger library of workflow actions.

The announcement focuses on software for professional services, customer success, and financial management teams. Certinia says it aims to cover the full services lifecycle with agent-based and human-led workflows by the end of the year.

The Austin-based company is trying to address a common problem in corporate AI rollouts: broad deployment without clear returns. It cited findings from its 2026 Global Service Dynamics Report, based on a survey of 1,000 services and IT leaders, showing that 98% had deployed AI in their organisation, but only 20% said it had exceeded expectations.

According to Certinia, that gap reflects the difficulty of applying AI across fragmented business processes. Better results come when sales, delivery, finance, and customer success operations are connected rather than managed as separate functions.

Broader rollout

The expansion marks the biggest change yet to Veda AI, Certinia's suite of AI tools for services businesses. It adds 14 prebuilt agents and increases the number of Veda Intelligent Actions, or VIAs, from 64 to 135.

The agents are designed to support work across selling, planning, project delivery, account management, and finance. Examples include tools for responding to requests for proposals, drafting statements of work, summarising calls, planning implementations, and building internal knowledge from client engagements.

Veda Intelligent Actions are smaller workflow functions that can be reused in day-to-day tasks. The expanded set includes tools for parsing CVs into skills profiles, recommending staff allocations, summarising account health, generating business review decks from live data, and handling financial tasks such as posting, cancelling, and reversing general ledger transactions.

Certinia is also introducing what it calls AI Your Way, a deployment model intended to let customers run Veda inside Certinia, through Salesforce Agentforce, or through a headless setup using Model Context Protocol in third-party tools such as Claude and Microsoft Copilot.

That approach reflects a wider shift in the software market as customers try to avoid being locked into a single AI framework while maintaining access to business-specific data and workflows. Certinia argues that services firms want flexibility over where AI runs, while still requiring outputs grounded in operational data already held in core systems.

Executive view

DJ Paoni, Chief Executive Officer, outlined the company's case for tying AI more closely to operational records and business processes.

"AI can only move the needle for our customers when it's grounded in real business context and judgment they can trust - a system that understands the business, reasons through it, and acts with little to no margin for error," said DJ Paoni, Chief Executive Officer, Certinia.

"That's what our System of Action delivers. Only Certinia can combine a trusted, unified data foundation with our breadth of services expertise and deep business reasoning to meet the accuracy standards services businesses require - and it's why our latest agentic capabilities help customers unlock stronger margins, faster time-to-outcome, and greater customer value," Paoni said.

Certinia says its System of Action rests on three elements: a shared data layer spanning services, customer success, finance, and CRM records; accumulated domain expertise from years of projects and resource decisions; and agents that carry out work inside those processes.

The pitch is aimed at businesses with project-based operations that need tighter links between front-office sales work and back-office delivery and finance. In those sectors, errors in staffing, billing, forecasting, and account management can quickly affect margins.

Industry backdrop

External industry research cited by Certinia points in the same direction. The company referenced IDC research arguing that organisations see better returns when management efficiency gains are tied to improvements in delivery quality, rather than when AI is deployed as a standalone tool in one department.

"Organisations that connect management efficiency gains to delivery quality improvements achieve the strongest overall ROI. The key design principle: AI must be integrated across the full life cycle, not deployed as isolated tools in individual functions," said Mickey North Rizza, Group Vice President, Enterprise Software and Agents, IDC.

Certinia plans to extend the offering further by year-end to more than 40 agents and more than 300 VIAs. At that point, it expects every professional services, customer success, and financial workflow in its platform to be executable either by an agentic function or by a human user.

That target matters because many software suppliers are moving from conversational assistants toward task execution inside business systems. The contest is increasingly focused not just on model access, but on who controls the data structures, process logic, and historical decision-making records that allow software to act with fewer errors.

For Certinia, which has long focused on services automation and financial management on the Salesforce ecosystem, the move is an attempt to position itself for that next stage. It says the expansion gives customers the choice to run tasks through agentic workflows or through staff, using the same underlying operational data.