Certinia’s Winter ’26 release turns AI into an operational lever for services-centric organizations, tightening the loop between sales, delivery, finance, and customer success in ways executives will feel in weekly reviews and quarter-close war rooms. For technology leaders, this is less a feature drop than a blueprint for how agentic AI will sit inside ERP and PSA workflows over the next 12 to 24 months.
Winter ’26’s AI Project Assistant Agent continuously scans core project health signals and surfaces risks before they show up as write-downs. Project managers get a prioritized feed of exceptions instead of trawling through status reports, which shortens the cycle from issue detection to corrective action.
On the sales-to-delivery front, top-down estimation and the new Role Multiplier capability remove the spreadsheet gymnastics from quoting multi-role projects by automatically distributing hours across similar resources. That reduces error-prone manual hour allocation and helps sales, delivery, and finance align on realistic delivery plans before a deal ever reaches your approval queue.
Customer Success Moving to Proactive Mode
Customer Success Cloud gains AI-generated account summaries that pull live from delivery and finance data, giving CSMs a single, dynamic view of project progress, open risks, billing status, and stakeholder engagement. When combined with dynamic playbooks that trigger the next best action as conditions change, CSMs can manage larger books of business without sacrificing expansion and renewal performance.
For CFOs and controllers, Winter ’26 continues Certinia’s focus on faster quoting, revenue recognition, and billing, with automation designed to compress period close and reduce reconciliation effort. In a professional services automation market projected to grow at roughly mid-teens compound rates through 2033, driven by demand for integrated project, resource, and billing capabilities, these kinds of incremental automation gains compound into materially lower SG&A over time.
How to Evaluate and Integrate Agentic PSA
For CIOs, enterprise architects, and services leaders, Certinia’s Winter ’26 release lands squarely in the agentic AI and hyperautomation wave reshaping ERP-adjacent platforms. When assessing Certinia or competitors, executives should weigh:
- Depth of workflow-native AI agents versus generic copilots, especially in time, project, and revenue processes.
- Quality and openness of ERP and CRM integration, particularly with SAP, Salesforce, and other core systems.
- Data model consistency across PSA, finance, and customer success, which determines how reliable AI-driven summaries and forecasts can become.
- Governance, auditability, and controls embedded around AI recommendations and automated actions.
Best practices from leading PSA adopters include normalizing project, resource, and contract data before introducing AI agents, and phasing rollouts by use case (for example, project health alerts first, then dynamic CS playbooks, then finance automation). Organizations that synchronized PSA with their ERP and CRM stacks and invested early in data hygiene report faster time to value and fewer surprises when AI-generated insights begin influencing commercial decisions.
What This Means for ERP Insiders
Agentic AI becomes table stakes. The rise of embedded project and CS agents in Certinia’s Winter ’26 release signals that ERP-adjacent platforms will soon be judged on how much work they take off humans’ plates. For ERP vendors and SIs, ignoring agent-based automation now invites rapid competitive displacement.
Embedded PSA-ERP alignment intensifies. Certinia’s Salesforce-native, cross-cloud design underscores a broader convergence of PSA, CRM, and ERP around shared data and UX. For enterprise architects and GSIs, integration blueprints must assume tightly coupled project, finance, and success workflows rather than loosely connected satellite tools.
Data foundations decide AI payoff. Winter ’26’s AI summaries and agents highlight that clean, structured project and financial data are prerequisites to meaningful automation. For transformation leaders, investments in data modeling, governance, and standardized processes will increasingly determine AI ROI across ERP modernization programs.
