The Salesforce-based ERP and professional services software provider has integrated generative AI to streamline the estimation process and ‘de-risk’ new projects. Credit: GaudiLab / Shutterstock 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. Related content news SAP, IBM Consulting partner to offer genAI-based services The partnership will see both companies offer generative AI-based services to enterprises via RISE with SAP offering. By Anirban Ghoshal May 09, 2024 3 mins Generative AI IBM SAP feature Essential skills and traits of chief AI officers CAIOs require a multidimensional skill set to drive innovation, establish and lead an AI-ready culture, and create tangible organizational results leveraging a complex and rapidly evolving technology. By David Weldon May 09, 2024 9 mins Artificial Intelligence IT Leadership interview Strong CIO-CISO relations fuel success at Ally CIO Sathish Muthukrishnan and CISO Donna Hart have forged a partnership steeped in Ally’s culture of radical candor that keeps the financial services firm secure and innovative. By Dan Roberts May 09, 2024 12 mins CIO CSO and CISO IT Leadership case study How being cloud smart fosters growth at Saab Fuelled by global turbulence and increasing defense budgets, Swedish defense group Saab is meeting high demand by integrating efforts to become more software-driven, and central to managing it all is CIO Annette Eriksson. By Karin Lindström May 09, 2024 5 mins CIO Aerospace and Defense Industry Cloud Architecture PODCASTS VIDEOS RESOURCES EVENTS SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe