Industry Recognitions Validate Certinia's Approach to AI-Enabled Future of Services

The first quarter of 2025 brought some meaningful external validation for Certinia and the value we’re driving for professional services organizations. Our Professional Services (PS) Cloud received the 2026 Tech Innovation Cubed Award for Most Innovative Collaboration Solution — and that came on the heels of our leadership positions in two recent IDC MarketScape Vendor Assessments for Worldwide AI-Enabled PSA Applications and Worldwide AI-Enabled PSA ERP Applications. Together, they reflect something real happening in this market.

Collaboration Isn't a Chat Tool Problem

When most people hear "collaboration," they may picture Slack or Zoom. But that's only the surface layer. In a modern professional services environment, the harder problem is data fragmentation: teams running off different sources of truth, which creates gaps between what sales promised, what delivery is executing, and what finance is seeing.

The Tech Innovation CUBEd Award highlighted that the future of services is grounded in a unified infrastructure — one that orchestrates people, work, and digital agents from a single version of the truth. But unification alone isn't the differentiator. What the judges validated is that Certinia pairs that architectural foundation with governed, trustworthy AI, giving organizations the confidence to move AI out of pilot mode and into the workflows where it actually impacts margins, staffing, and client outcomes.

Recognition Across Analysts and Customers Alike

This quarter, Constellation Research named us to three of their 2026 ShortLists. These are analyst-curated portfolios that help leadership teams skip months of preliminary research and move straight to evaluating the industry’s leading technology partners:

• Services-Centric Cloud ERP — financials and PSA on a single platform
• Enterprise Cloud Finance — a real backbone for accounting, finance, and treasury
• Customer Success Software — post-sale engagement as a driver of NRR, not an afterthought

We also earned a spot on G2's 2026 Best Software Awards for Project Management Products. We’re especially proud of this because G2 rankings aren't decided by a panel of judges – they're based entirely on verified reviews from people who use Certinia day-to-day. Out of thousands of products in this category on G2, only the top 50 make the list.

What’s the common thread woven throughout all of these recognitions? The market is done bolting disparate point modules together. The next era of services won’t be defined by the use of AI alone, but by how we orchestrate it; moving beyond fragmented tools toward a singular, intelligent system that intuitively knows when to drive the workflow and when to empower the expert.

AI ROI Requires More Than a Pilot

Digital labor isn't coming. It's already here. Think about this: we're probably the last generation that will manage entirely human workforces. Agents are already capable of compressing hours of manual work into minutes. But none of that matters if the AI can't be trusted.

Trust means predictability. It means agents that operate within defined permissions and privacy guardrails, that behave the way your best employees would. "Predictably delightful" sounds like a slogan, but it's actually the benchmark; consistent, reliable outcomes that don't require someone to babysit the process.

The window for experimenting with AI has closed. The question now is whether your pilots are in production and whether you can actually measure the ROI.

I went deeper on all of this — the awards, the shift to hybrid delivery teams, and where AI in services is headed — in a recent conversation with Scott Hebner, principal analyst for AI at theCUBE Research.

Watch the full interview on theCUBE!