Certinia uses AI to accelerate finance functions for service companies

“We think it’s going to be a real game-changer for us, competitively,” said Brown, one of Certinia’s longer-serving senior executives, who previously worked at Microsoft on its Dynamics ERP and CRM systems.

Certinia got an early look at Salesforce’s generative AI effort, Einstein GPT, and has been testing it to automate customer success plan drafting based on data held within Salesforce Data Cloud. But it has also built similar functionality using AWS SageMaker instead of Einstein GPT, said Brown.

“Salesforce has not released its generative AI capabilities to ISVs, but we’re working very closely with both the Einstein GPT and the Data Cloud teams,” he said. “We’re pretty excited about it.”

Much has been made of generative AI’s capacity for content creation, but for more general business tasks, its power is in “expertise mining,” or learning from humans how to perform a task. “Generative AI tends to help people who aren’t the experts,” Brown said.

The only certainty is change

Certinia was previously known as FinancialForce, and adopted its new name in May 2023 to promote the “certainty” it claims to offer customers regarding their financial records. Over the following six months, though, there was much uncertainty as Certinia changed ownership, replaced its CEO, and swapped out top executives in sales, finance, operations, and HR.

The company is now majority owned by a Haveli Investments, a two-year-old private equity firm whose only other publicized investments have been in gaming developers. It bought into Certinia in July in a deal that reportedly valued the company at almost $1 billion. Smaller stakes are owned by investment fund General Atlantic and by Salesforce, which has been an investor since the company’s creation.