By Ty Alibhai, Managing Consultant, VFP Consulting
As a Certinia Premier Partner, we’ve had early visibility into VEDA. Here’s our honest read on who it’s built for, what it delivers, and how to know if your organization is ready.
At VFP, we’ve spent years helping services businesses get more out of Certinia, and a significant part of that work lately has been preparing clients for what’s coming next in AI. So when Certinia launched VEDA, its new purpose-built AI solution for professional and customer services, we paid close attention.
Not because it’s a shiny new product. But, for the right clients, at the right level of maturity, it represents a genuine operational shift: one we’ve already been building toward with the work we do.
What VEDA actually is
VEDA’s Certinia AI solution is built natively on Salesforce and designed specifically for the services lifecycle, from estimate to invoice. It is not a generic AI assistant bolted onto an existing platform. It draws on 15 years of services-industry data to power agents and generative AI that understand how services businesses operate.
Spring 26 ships with 14 generative AI features across PS Cloud and CS Cloud, including project summaries, success plan generation, resource profiles, and client-facing deliverable summaries. Two agentic AI assistants launch with it: a Project Assistant that handles natural-language queries about milestones, tasks, and time entries, and a Staffing Assistant that can split assignments, find replacements, and create resource requests conversationally.
It’s covered by a single add-on SKU — one license covers all generative AI, both agents, and all future AI features. That matters from a procurement and scalability standpoint.
Certinia is the only standalone vendor recognized by IDC as a leader in both AI-enabled PSA and AI-enabled PSA with ERP/FM Cloud. That depth of domain specificity is what separates VEDA from generic AI tools in this space.
The numbers behind the business case
We know our clients want evidence, not promises. Here’s what deployments are showing for organizations that meet the readiness bar:
- +1% total margin lift
- 20 hrs returned to project managers per month
- +12% billing utilization improvement
- 3–8% reduction in customer churn
For services businesses operating on tight margins, a 1% total margin lift is not incremental; it compounds across every engagement. Twenty hours per project manager per month, multiplied across a delivery team, is a meaningful return to strategic work. And a 3–8% reduction in churn speaks directly to the long-term health of a client base.
Our honest view on readiness
We’ve written before about the “training tax,” the hidden cost of layering AI on top of disorganized data. VEDA does not escape that reality. It amplifies good operational hygiene. It does not substitute for it.
From our experience working with Certinia clients, here is what separates organizations that will see immediate value from those that need to prepare first.
Signs your organization is likely ready:
- You are using Certinia’s RAID log consistently for project risk tracking
- Resource requests include role, region, practice, and skills metadata
- You are current on Certinia platform updates (Spring 26 is required)
- You have an existing Salesforce Agentforce entitlement and a Flex credits budget
- Project data lives inside Certinia, not external spreadsheets
If some of these aren’t yet true, that’s not a blocker; it’s a roadmap. We’ve helped clients address each of these gaps as part of a broader upgrade and AI-readiness program, and VEDA’s business case often becomes the internal justification to finally fix long-standing technical debt.
- Project data in external systems → consolidation project before AI activation
- Direct resource bookings without metadata → process standardization first
- Behind on platform versions → upgrade cycle, often fundable by the AI ROI case
What the Agentforce shelfware problem means for clients
According to Certinia, approximately 91% of organizations that have purchased Agentforce are not using it effectively. That’s a striking number. Many organizations acquired Agentforce as part of a broader Salesforce commitment, but without a clear use case for consumption, it sits unused.
VEDA changes that equation for service businesses. Because it is built on Agentforce and designed around the workflows project managers, resource leads, and delivery teams already live in, it gives Agentforce a concrete, operational home. For our clients who have already made that Salesforce investment, VEDA is the activation layer they’ve been waiting for.
What this means for VFP clients specifically
If you are a Certinia customer and want to understand how VEDA fits into your current environment, the conversation starts with an honest assessment of your data maturity and platform health. That’s something we’ve been doing with clients for years, and now there’s a compelling reason to make it a priority.
VFP Consulting is a Certinia Premier Partner and 2x Certinia Partner of the Year for North America. We help services businesses architect, implement, and optimize their Certinia solution across the full Quote-to-Cash lifecycle.
To start an AI readiness conversation, reach out to our team https://vfp-consulting.com/request-a-consultation-2/
