Why We Acquired Moonnox and How We’re Defining the Future of Professional Services

The professional services industry is undergoing its most profound structural shift in history, compounding across multiple fronts. We are entering the era of the hybrid workforce, where AI agents introduce ubiquitous labor models to enable firms to decouple revenue growth from headcount. Delivery velocity is exponentially accelerating, and as AI compresses six-month engagements into six-to-eight-week sprints, client expectations are permanently resetting. In turn, these dual forces are fracturing traditional billing models. As firms balance massive efficiency gains with the cost of AI, the billable hour is breaking down, forcing the industry to rethink how it monetizes value when time is no longer the primary currency.

For many organizations, this acceleration has triggered a deep, structural anxiety. The dominant narrative is a doomsday scenario where the industry completely autonomizes and entire service businesses go extinct. The stress of trying to survive a perceived "worker-less" future is palpable across the market.

We see it differently. The true promise of this era is about cutting through the overwhelming noise that currently drains the day. When AI takes over the repetitive, connective tissue of an engagement, it puts the services professional right back where they belong: at the center of the value equation. It’s about stripping away the friction so they are completely empowered to focus on the high-stakes decisions and human relationships that actually drive the business forward.

The microproductivity trap 

Feeling the pressure for velocity, it’s hard not to reach for the nearest AI tool. You may drop a meeting transcript into a general-purpose AI tool, ask it to draft a statement of work, and get back something that looks polished but falls short on substance. It lands maybe 30 to 50 percent of the way there. So you  spend the afternoon fixing it, and the net savings is an hour or two.

It feels like progress, but it doesn't change how the work fundamentally gets done. Over the life of a project you might save 10 to 20 percent of the effort on a few tasks. You don't transform the engagement, and you certainly don't build a business that can quote fixed fees with confidence.

The reason generic AI stalls here is simple: it doesn't know anything about your project. It has the transcript, but not the resourcing plan, the margin targets, the prior SOWs that worked, the phase the project is in, or what your firm has learned from a hundred engagements like it. Without that, it can only guess. And a confident guess that needs heavy rework is worse than no draft at all.

The value only shows up when AI can operate with 80+ percent accuracy. That's the threshold where an automated draft is time-saving, where you're editing rather than rewriting, and certainly not throwing it away to start over. Below that line, AI is a novelty. Above it, it changes the business model. Crossing that line is the whole game, and you can't cross it with context-blind tools.

The two halves of the solution

Getting above that threshold requires two things most firms have kept in separate worlds.

The first is the structured system of record: the Professional Services, Customer Success, Financial Management data that contextualizes the project. Native to Salesforce’s CRM platform, Certinia has been delivering this unified view for services organizations for 17+ years. It's the ground truth for your business.

The second is the unstructured context: the meetings, the emails, the Slack threads, the documents where the real story of an engagement lives. This is where requirements shift, risks surface, and scope quietly creeps. Most of it never makes it into your systems of record, which is why so much institutional knowledge walks out the door at the end of a project.

Neither half alone is enough. Structured data without the live context is a snapshot that may be slightly out of date. Unstructured data decoupled from the structured backbone is just noise; a pile of valuable data waiting to be put to use. 

But the moment you fuse them, something changes. 

Now the AI can read that a project is in its design phase, see which resources are staffed, pull the requirements from yesterday's call, compare them to the last SOW that won, and produce something that's genuinely usable. Now, you have the deep, trusted context to confidently act on. 

That fusion is the hard part. It's also the part almost no one has solved at scale — until now.

Why we acquired Moonnox

Earlier this week, we announced that we’ve acquired Moonnox. You can read more about that news here.

Moonnox has spent the last few years solving the exact problem I've described. Their platform captures unstructured delivery context from the tools your teams live in — the meetings, chats, and emails across tools like Salesforce, G-Suite,  M365, Jira, Confluence,and  Zoom  — and turns it into structured, usable outputs like SOWs, project plans, status reports, and sales-to-delivery handoffs. They've done it with real customers, in production today. For example, Spaulding Ridge, a global cloud advisory and implementation firm, used a Moonnox agent to cut the time to draft solution architecture documents by 4x, from approximately 80 hours down to 20.

Bringing Moonnox’s capabilities to Certinia closes the loop.  Our operational backbone supplies the ground truth.  Moonnox’s context-capture capabilities provide the real-time insight needed to act with speed and precision. Veda's agents reason across both and act. The result is that we can go after the billions of dollars in value trapped in the orchestration and documentation work sitting between winning a deal and delivering it — value firms can't reach by bolting a chatbot onto a broken process, and can't reach by simply working faster within a pricing model that doesn't reward speed.

And because Moonnox's agents are already in market, our customers don't have to wait for a roadmap. They can use them now, on their own or within the Certinia platform, where the combination is far more powerful than either piece alone.

The path is the advantage

Today more than half of a project manager's time goes to administrative friction — the documents, the status updates, the endless coordination. Give that time back, and it flows into the work only people can do: solving the hard problems, advising the client, shaping the outcome. 

The best consultants have always been capable of far more than their calendars allowed. Now, they’re finally able to unlock their full potential.

For our customers, the future of professional services won't be built on a bolted-together stack of generic tools; it will run on the foundation we’ve spent more than 17 years perfecting, and the context-aware intelligence Moonnox brings to make it unassailable.

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