8 insights from the ‘Certinia at Dreamforce’ event: AI resets the economics of professional services
SiliconANGLE Cheryl Knight
AI is pushing consulting firms off hourly billing and onto fixed bids. That shifts risk to vendors and makes trust, not just automation, the real fight.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Cheryl Knight — read the original for the full story.
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AI is changing how professional services get sold, delivered and paid for. At Certinia’s Dreamforce event, the big theme was blunt: if software cuts the labor in a project, the old bill-by-the-hour model starts to look expensive, slow and awkward. Firms are already reacting by quoting fixed bids, shortening delivery timelines and taking on risk they used to hand to clients.
Platinum River Innovations is a clear example. Mike Piehl said the Salesforce implementation firm rewrote its contracts before it rolled out AI, moving away from time-and-materials pricing so it could own the delivery risk itself. Requirements, code generation and testing now run through AI, which lowers internal cost and raises margins, while also making some projects possible that clients couldn’t previously afford.
Certinia is making a broader bet on this shift. The company has folded its Veda AI suite into its core applications, positioning the result as a System of Action across the services lifecycle, from selling projects to resourcing, billing and delivery. Prasad Sulur and Robert Cesafsky argued that scattered tools only produce small gains; the bigger prize is eliminating whole workflows instead of nibbling around the edges.
The platform itself is also getting wider and more agentic. Since April, Certinia says it has expanded from 10 packaged agents and 64 Veda Intelligent Actions to 24 agents and 135 actions, with more than 300 planned by year-end. Raju Malhotra’s point was that the company wants to make every action a human user can take available to an agent, but grounded in enough context to stay useful and avoid drifting off into hallucination territory.
And that word — context — kept coming up. Thunder said it keeps pre-sales commitments, scope changes and Slack discussions in a continuously updated knowledge graph, because better context means better answers from agents. Civica, meanwhile, said it is consolidating messy post-acquisition systems onto Salesforce and Certinia so estimating, delivery and revenue recognition run from a single source of truth. For a company serving about 100 million citizens, trust and governance are not side issues; they are the buying criteria.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
The industry is finally admitting that AI is not a cheap assistant, it’s a pricing model grenade. Once firms start absorbing delivery risk, all the old theater around hourly billing looks a bit like charging by the printout. The real winners will be the ones that can prove trust, not just ship prompts with better branding.
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