Certinia recently made headlines by announcing that it is aiming for 100% agent coverage within its professional services automation SaaS platform. Critical to this ambition is its System of Action enabling the platform to execute work autonomously. 

Many workflows in professional services require hand offs between agents and the humans working with them in a variety of processes. This hand off process can introduce a few bumps in the road. So, I attended one of Certinia’s Dreamforce sessions last week to see how customers are experiencing its System of Action.

Raju Malhotra, Certinia’s Chief Product and Technology Officer, has explained that for the System of Action, deterministic reasoning is layered on top of the LLM, creating a closed loop where every outcome refines future judgment instead of adding more uncertainty.

Agentic action is delivered through three modalities working together - Veda agents that operate within Certinia or Salesforce Agentforce, agentic workflows built directly into the software experience so there is no legacy, human-only path left behind, and Veda Intelligent Actions (VIAs) that extend the same capabilities into whatever tools a team already uses through Model Context Protocol (MCP), including Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and others.

As ever, Certinia is making full use of Salesforce’s underlying platform including its AIforce (Headless 360) capabilities. However, I am discovering that one of the challenges that enterprises are facing as they deploy agentic AI in a services environment is managing handoffs as work moves between systems and/or humans. This is often a point where the agentic system can create friction, so I asked Malhotra how Certinia’s System of Action was managing this. His pitch: 

Frictionless handoffs come down to two things: context and judgment. When a deal moves from sales to delivery, or a project moves between a person and an agent, the full record travels with it. The next person or agent inherits the same picture. Our sales-to-delivery agent reads everything on file, from the signed estimate down to promises made in a meeting that never made it into the statement of work. It carries that context forward automatically, so nobody starts a project by piecing together what already happened. 

The other half is judgment. We built our staffing agent to explain itself. Ask it to fill an urgent training request and it might say the match isn't there today, then offer to loosen a filter and walk through the trade-off between two remaining candidates on skills and availability, so a person makes the final call with full information in front of them. The same principle scales to agent-to-agent handoffs: a project-setup agent can pass a staffing request to a staffing agent, which works through it in the background, and a person still reviews and approves before anything ships. That's what keeps a handoff frictionless. The record and the reasoning move together, no matter who or what picks up the next step."

When it comes to customer adoption Malhotra reports that:

Certinia already has thousands of active Veda users in production, and that number is growing every week as more customers move from piloting Veda to running it at scale. Siemens is running thousands of projects through the platform. Diabsolut has seen a 70% reduction in documentation time. And across our project management customers, we are seeing close to an extra half week of productivity reclaimed per person; time that goes back into client-facing work rather than administrative overhead.

At Certinia’s event, customer Simon Cornwell, CIO, Civica, a tech company that provides software and services to the public sector, explained that as a company it has multiple bespoke systems in place reinforcing the fragmentation of the business and its data, as teams use different sources of truth. To address this, he said that they are building "a center of gravity around Certinia, deploying it as the system of execution". 

Addressing the hand off issue, his view is that: 

Hand off is one of the biggest delays between the Sales and the Professional Services teams. You need a smooth flow of information which Certinia is providing. Teams can now start up quicker, deliver quicker so there is faster time to value for the customer and faster time to revenue for us.

Certinia provides actionable information for me as a CIO, using structured and unstructured data including zoom calls that can be pulled in to estimate the cost of a solution. With the estimate we can create a Statement of Work that can be delivered directly to the customer.

Another Certinia customer, Tyler Philpot, VP Solution Architecture, for Thunder, a Salesforce consulting and implementation partner, says: 

Project estimates go through several iterations to decide what is in and out of scope. We need to deliver quickly and so we need the right context to ensure we do not get scope creep. This is especially important because of the shift away from time and materials pricing. If we go fixed fee, we want to be confident of the KPIs. We do not want to go twice as fast and earn half as much revenue. We need to build the right solution the first time. Certinia helps by generating project status updates in real-time.

Meanwhile Wendy Smith, Senior IT Director, Business Applications, for Dayforce Human Capital Management platform added that she was looking for increased retention during the onboarding process, commenting:

Certinia provides that seamless hand off, which is so important for making that first impression with a customer.

Clearly these are still all early results for Certinia’s System of Action. However, customers are evidently pleased with their experience so far, which bodes well for the future since, because this is an agentic foundation, the System of Action should become more capable the more it is used.