Dreamforce 25 - Certinia sets out to meet customers where they are to improve success; the customers respond
October 15, 2025
- Summary:
- Certinia in its various incarnations across the years has been a long-standing fixture at Dreamforce. This year is no exception.
A year ago, at Dreamforce 2024 Certinia was just starting out on its agentic AI journey. I caught up with the company’s CEO DJ Paoni at Dreamforce 2025, where Certinia as usual is hosting a packed few days of sessions and networking events as one of Salesforce's longest-standing partners.
Paoni is clearly very proud that Certinia has now built 44 agents - two in the AppExchange - and is beginning to see early adoption for Resource Management and Customer Success agents. At the Certinia One Journey, One Team event, Simon Creasey, VP Customer Success & Lifetime Value, Worldwide for HPE, and Jocelyn Zanasi SVP, Customer Success from Salesforce EMEA, took the time to share their experiences of using Certinia.
Customer success across silos
Creasey's firm went live with Certinia CS Cloud recently because:
We wanted to invest in a new Customer Success platform as in the old existing system, our success plans were missing or were not as elaborate as I would like. The customer success teams in the field that were working with the professional services and financial teams were doing it in PowerPoint and Excel as the Customer Success platform had become a silo. So, we decided not to renew and to select another platform. As HPE had already made a heavy investment in Salesforce, it made sense to create a common platform that could view case data natively and so we chose Certinia.
We started with evaluating our methodology and process because a good tool won’t fix a bad process and so we got all the artifacts and playbooks in place. It then took us just five months to get 600 users up and running using Certinia PS. We identified key Customer Success Managers to become the champions of change management for the new system. These leaders went through the plans with their staff, and adoption was smooth because users could see the system would make them more productive.”
As a result, Creasey can see improvements in the quality of customer success plans because the system enables staff to track what is important to the customer. The system also means that he can do business reviews with the CEO in Certinia, presenting live dashboards. Having implemented Certinia in its as-a-Service business, HPE is now thinking about how to apply it to the traditional product business.
Customer success for consumption pricing
Zanasi, as might be expected of a Salesforce executive, is more advanced in contemplating the role of AI in customer success. She wanted to use Certinia to support the evolution of Salesforce’s business from a subscription model to a consumption model for customers. She explains:
We need more information to help staff and customers pivot into the consumption model. We need to create a customer health score, to know what product usage looks like and what product debt looks like. We need telemetry and data to share with consumption-based customers, to create a brilliant feedback loop.
We are tracking signals from log-in forward. We are monitoring the accreditation level of users, how engaged they are, are they attending events they are invited to. We have to know the health and satisfaction of hundreds of customers and look at deviations in real time.
With the new agentic enterprise, customers have to trust us sufficiently to come with us on this journey. Customer success management is how we build and maintain foundational trust with customers, because we can see problems coming and tell them about it in advance. In this way we create the transparency and trust necessary for a lifetime engagement.”
The KPIs Zanasi uses are considered in terms of lead measures such as touchpoints around a release and lag measures around customer retention. She is excited about the impact of agentic AI and is “piloting everything with Agentforce.” One thing she is exploring is the ability to create a small language model (SLM) for each and every customer using data from the Certinia and Salesforce platforms. She is then overlaying an agent onto the SLM so that Slack bot can be asked about each customer. In this way she is she says, “removing time vampires.”
One thing she is very clear about, however, is that:
These problems do not have technical solutions, the challenge is for teams to be adaptive and that needs change management.
The partner experience
Paoni sees SI partners as an important element for the company’s growth, explaining that:
We have done a lot with our partner academy to get the right enablement providing roadmaps of what agents can do. A partner such as Diabsolut which implements internally, takes the journey and then becomes the evangelist is how we like to work.
Naeem Khalid, VP Customer Success, Diabsolut, agrees, adding:
We are part of Certinia’s early adoption program for new capability. We have not launched agents internally yet and so, similarly, with customers we have no go-live yet. We use PS and CS Cloud ourselves and most of our work with customers is integrating PS and CS cloud to enable score health tracking for customers and projects, making data more accessible. We don’t have to build custom code to enable this.
Because we use the product, we can share our experience with clients and Certinia spends time with us to listen to our feedback. They share their roadmap, so that if something is not on it, we can go and build a feature.
My take
While the spotlight at Dreamforce 2025 is firmly on Agentforce 360 as an exciting development, the solid growth and development for many continues more quietly on core existing functionality. Certinia is a good example of a vendor capably enabling both early adopters for agentic AI and more mainstream customers.
