At Dreamforce 2026, the System of Action Took Center Stage
Summary
- Certinia hosted four sessions at Fogo de Chão during Dreamforce 2026 covering AI data readiness, our agentic roadmap, real customer results, and post-sale organization design, all now available on demand.
- Post-sale experts Rod Cherkas and Melissa Langworthy outlined the difference between optimizing an existing process with AI and redesigning it, and why removing data silos makes AI's business impact measurable.
- Panelists from Bain & Company, Google Cloud, and Salesforce agreed that data readiness, not data volume, determines whether AI produces trustworthy results in professional services and customer success workflows.
- Chief Product and Technology Officer Raju Malhotra reported 24 agents and 135 intelligent actions live today, up from 10 agents and 64 actions in April 2026, with a target of 40+ agents and 300+ actions by year end.
- Customers Civica, Thunder, and Dayforce shared how a unified source of truth across sales, delivery, and customer success sped up time to revenue, protected margins on fixed-fee engagements, and improved retention from day one of implementation.
For the tenth year running, Certinia turned Fogo de Chão into the center of gravity for Dreamforce week, hosting four expert-led sessions on AI readiness, the agentic roadmap, real results from customers running Certinia today, and the future of post-sale work. Every session came back to one question. What happens once AI has enough context to run a services business?
Watch all four sessions on demand at certinia.com/dreamforce
Re-Engineering the Post-Sale Organization
AI activity and AI results are not the same thing. That was the core argument as Todd Kisaberth kicked off the week with Rod Cherkas, customer success expert and author of the new best-selling book "The Chief Customer Officer Playbook for the AI Era," and Melissa Langworthy, Director of AI & Data Solutions at ESG. The angle: If a team is doing the same tasks, just faster, that's optimization. If it's doing genuinely different tasks, that's a redesign, and redesign is where the real gains show up. Langworthy’s research found organizations that remove data silos between teams are roughly four times more likely to measure the real revenue impact of their customer success work. Cherkas offered an even simpler filter. Before adding AI to a task, ask whether the task needs to exist at all. One of his clients eliminated an entire sales-to-delivery handoff meeting this way, replacing it with an agent that pulls context straight from call transcripts. Their shared advice for anyone about to run a pilot: define the outcome first, as a specific user story, before choosing a tool.
Pro Tips
Before adopting any of these plays, start with the fundamentals these sessions kept returning to:
- Audit your data before you audit your AI tools. Bain's Greg Fiore pointed out that most so-called data readiness problems are data existence problems in disguise: information scattered across phones, inboxes, and chat threads with no shared structure. Fix the foundation before scaling a pilot on top of it.
- Define the outcome before you pick the tool. Melissa Langworthy's advice for any team about to launch an AI pilot is to write the outcome as a specific user story (who, what, why) rather than a vague goal like "use AI more." A clear user story gives a data team something concrete to build against.
- Look for tasks a team can eliminate entirely, beyond simply speeding them up. Rod Cherkas described a client that eliminated an entire sales-to-delivery handoff meeting by building an agent that pulled the needed context directly from call transcripts.
- Keep governance attached to the data, not the app. As Salesforce's Tyler Carlson noted, once agents work headless across Claude, Slack, and other tools, permissions and access controls need to travel with the data itself. Consistency across systems matters more than which interface a person happens to be using that day.
A Blueprint for 10x Growth
What does it take to get an organization's data ready for AI? Certinia CEO DJ Paoni put that question to a panel next, bringing together Bain's Greg Fiore, Google Cloud's Naveen Punjabi, and Salesforce's Tyler Carlson.
Fiore set the tone, arguing that most companies have a data existence problem, not a data readiness one, and that feeding AI messy data erodes trust fast. Punjabi made the case against betting an AI strategy on a single model, and Carlson tied that to the industry's headless shift, where governance has to travel with the data across Claude, Slack, and wherever else people work. The panel's advice was to pick two or three use cases you believe in, get the data right for those, and prove it before you scale.
The Agentic Roadmap: From Automation to Autonomy
Next, Raju Malhotra took the stage and ran through some key numbers around the Certinia platform: two million users. 1,400 customers. 18% growth in active users year over year. More than 800 million timecards logged. He framed the moment as a shift from fragmentation to automation to autonomy. He emphasized, automation makes existing processes faster, while autonomy does things you couldn't do before.
Since launching Veda with 10 agents and 64 intelligent actions in April 2026, that has grown to 24 agents and 135 actions, with a goal of 40-plus agents and 300-plus actions by year end. A live Demo Jam showed Veda capturing call context automatically, turning it into a status report, and letting someone log a timecard from inside Claude or Slack. The roadmap ahead includes proactive agents that flag churn risk before a customer notices a problem, and autonomous agents that start staffing a project the moment a deal closes.
The Future of Services Is Here
Mimi Spier closed out the week by hosting three customers already living inside the system of action: Civica, Thunder, and Dayforce; each mapping to one of Certinia's three pillars of win bigger, deliver smarter, and grow stronger.
Civica CIO Simon Cornwell described replacing a patchwork of systems built up through acquisitions with one source of truth on Salesforce and Certinia, which sped up handoffs and time to revenue. Thunder's Tyler Philpot talked about moving off time and materials pricing toward fixed-fee, outcome-based work, using Veda agents to build confidence into every estimate before a contract is signed. Dayforce's Wendy Smith made the case that retention starts on day one of an implementation, not after go-live: "Early visibility into project health and customer sentiment means catching a problem before the customer sees it as one.”
More From Dreamforce 2026
Fogo de Chão wasn't the only place Certinia showed up for Dreamforce 2026. Here are a few more moments from the show floor and beyond.
Bridging Claude and AgentExchange
Back at the Moscone Center, Matt Byrne, Certinia's Principal Product Solution Architect, packed one of AgentExchange Theater's biggest crowds into "Bridge Claude and AgentExchange with Salesforce MCP," presented with Salesforce's Mark Vogelgesang. The session walked attendees through exposing a managed package to external agents using Salesforce Hosted MCP, closing with a live demo connecting Claude directly to a customer's own org context and metadata.
This timely topic landed right in the middle of the buzz around Salesforce and Anthropic's Claudeforce announcement, and Matt came in with a number that got people's attention: Certinia already had more than 100 actions available through MCP prior to the Claudeforce announcement. The session was the #1 most bookmarked session of the week by Dreamforce attendees.
Tales from the Pedicab
Not every good conversation happened on a stage. Our branded pedicabs, which gave attendees free rides between Moscone Center and Fogo de Chão each afternoon, doubled as a rolling video studio for a new series called Tales from the Pedicab. We talked with customers and partners about AI-native services delivery and their experience with the system of action, while zipping through the streets of San Francisco. Expect these interviews to “roll out” across social channels over the coming weeks!
Certinia at Dreamforce featured on theCUBE
theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio, brought its coverage of Dreamforce to Certinia’s home base for the week for a parallel run of interviews throughout the week. They examined how professional services firms are trying to connect sales, delivery, finance, and customer success, and how Certinia ties those workflows together with shared data, AI, and automation, from the front office to the back office. Guests included Platinum River Innovations, Neocol, Hyland, Thunder, Civica, as well as a range of Certinia’s executive leaders; with every interview conducted by Scott Hebner, theCUBE Research's principal AI analyst. The coverage aired during the week of Dreamforce and remains available on demand: Watch Certinia at Dreamforce on theCUBE
Watch the Full Sessions
A system of action works because foundational context, compounding intelligence, and agentic action operate as one continuous mechanism. Data gets unified once, reasoning sharpens with every project that runs through it, and action follows without waiting for a person to interpret a suggestion first. That is the case Certinia spent the week making.
Finally, thank you to the customers, prospects, and partners who made the week so spectacular, including our Fogo de Chão sponsors: Accordion, Ladd Partners, Hubbl, Unaric, CLD Partners, ESG, Diabsolut, and VFP Consulting.
Want to go deeper on the System of Action? Join our live webinar on Wednesday, September 30 at 11:00 AM ET for a look at the largest Veda expansion to date, including the full library of 135 intelligent actions and real results like cutting proposal creation from eight hours to one.
And if you haven't yet, be sure to watch Certinia's Dreamforce 2026 sessions on demand at certinia.com/dreamforce!
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