Certinia at Dreamforce | Mike Piehl, Platinum River INNOVATIONS

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More from Certinia at Dreamforce

Mike Piehl

CEO

Platinum River INNOVATIONS

play_circle_outline Platinum River Innovations: Salesforce Professional Services and Certinia Partnership for Presale-to-Delivery Continuity and Knowledge Graph

play_circle_outline 12-Month AI Transformation: Dramatic Cost Cuts, Higher Margins, More Projects

play_circle_outline Labor demand paradox: per-project hours down but overall job demand up

play_circle_outline Fixed-Bid Contracts to Underwrite AI Productivity, Not True Outcome-Based Deals

play_circle_outline Integration of Cloudforce/Claude/Anthropic with Salesforce and governance needs

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Mike Piehl, Platinum River INNOVATIONS

Mike Piehl

CEO Platinum River INNOVATIONS

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Scott Hebner

>> Hello everyone, welcome back to The Cube's continuing coverage of everything professional services here at Salesforce Dreamforce 2026. And I'm here with Mike Peel, who is the CEO of Platinum River Innovations. And, uh, welcome to the show.

Mike Piehl

>> Thank you very much, Scott. Pleasure to be here.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah, so why don't we start off just for our audience, tell us a little bit about what you guys all do and your partnership with Ctenia.

Mike Piehl

>> Yeah.

Scott Hebner

>> And what's all happening here at Juneforce?

Mike Piehl

>> Yeah, so we are a Salesforce implementation professional services organization, and we focus on business outcomes and consulting in and around the Salesforce ecosystem, primarily back to financial services firms with a specific focus in insurance and wealth management. So, you know, we've been in the business for— most of our consultants have had experience in the industry and as consultants. Going back 20, 25 years. And so a lot of deep industry expertise. We brought Certinia into our business about a year ago to go through and start to have continuity from the sales process with meeting transcripts, building the knowledge graph around the clients through the project management layer so that there's consistent understanding by the delivery teams about what happened during the presale cycle. So that's, that's where we started. The relationship has expanded from there and we've seen a large amount of positive impact to our business as a result.

Scott Hebner

>> So my understanding is that you're bringing together the agent force, obviously the Sortinia platform, others such as Cursor and others. So you're kind of bringing this all together.

Mike Piehl

>> That's correct. So we really started our AI transformation about 12 months ago. The first piece is we changed our contracting model with our clients because we need to make like headspace with how we work with our clients first. Then we brought in our tools. We've made a couple of modifications to the tool mix that we're using, but everything across the board is, let's go through, leverage the AI capabilities to understand what the requirements are from conversation first. So we've taken a lot of that documentation time out and then generate requirements, generate the code, deploy the code, test, make sure that things are of quality, and then move forward. And what we've seen as a result of that migration is a reduction of cost internally, which means our margins went up. Also means that we can do projects now that we wouldn't have been able to do in the past because the client price would have been prohibitive. So we've had a number of projects that we've done where it's about 80 to 90% of what the cost would have been 2 years ago. So a huge impact. The last thing that we've done in our kind of our AI transformation journey is we've we've been changing all of our internal incentive models because the traditional proserve model is all hourly. And if you think about having AI provide more productivity, the hour count falls and we need to find a way to be able to continue to add more value to our clients, but still be protected as that decrease of the hour count comes down.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah, you've been talking quite a bit about the notion that the economics of Salesforce Consulting It's sort of radically shifting, right?

Mike Piehl

>> Yeah.

Scott Hebner

>> So from the perspective of a client, what is materially different than it was in the past?

Mike Piehl

>> Yeah, so like I said, the price is one, so the price is coming down. The client value that they can get goes up. We also have faster speed to market. So one of the things that we've done from a methodology perspective is that we've gone through and said, before, you know, after we sign contracts, we're ready to go, during the project kickoff meeting, we're then immediately going to follow that with a custom-built prototype based on their requirements. Again, prior to some of these tools coming in, we would not have been able to do that. We would have gone through a more traditional approach of sign a contract, wait 4 to 6 weeks to staff, show up for kickoff meeting, go through a 3 to 4 week discovery process, build cycle for a couple of months, UAT, go live. Usability risk is one of the largest risks in projects. When the client can't see what's happening until the end of the project, if there's any change, creates a large change order and the release date has to move. Being able to mitigate that risk at the beginning by doing a prototype has been hugely impactful for our clients.

Scott Hebner

>> So in the end, it's the time to value, the time to completion is sped up, and at the same time higher quality and lower price.

Mike Piehl

>> Yeah, and with a lot of our clients, we're also seeing while the initial price for the scope that they thought is coming down, they'll go through and say, okay, now we're getting so much value, we want to add in more services. right? So in some cases we've got requests to come in and do on-site training, where in the past that client would have said, "Maybe virtual was okay." You know, get into some adoption services and what are we doing after the launch. In some cases we've also gone through and seen a continuation, a better continuation from project into managed services. And so we've seen that all of those things happen as well because the budget now can get more value for everybody.

Scott Hebner

>> Right, and so when, you know, most people when they're watching anything to do with AI, they're reading about it. There's all this discussion about it taking jobs, fewer people, you know, all the fears that are sort of surrounding this. You've been out talking about this notion of the labor demand paradox, where I think what you're saying is that it's actually generating more jobs, more need, more—

Mike Piehl

>> Correct.

Scott Hebner

>> —labor for humans. Correct.

Mike Piehl

>> So what we're seeing in practice is that the labor demand on an individual project is coming down. Which normally would mean you need fewer people. However, because the overall price points are coming down as well and the value delivery is going up, it actually means that we have more client demand as a result. So more projects coming in, and the net effect is we need more people.

Scott Hebner

>> So how does that change the nature of the bids upfront? I mean, I think what you're saying is that they start to save money, they're speeding time to market, they start thinking, well, we can actually do this, we should do that, and It kind of changes the nature of the project.

Mike Piehl

>> Well, like I said, we started this journey with changing our client contracting because we need to make space in order for the rest of the transformation to kick in. In this case, one of the big changes that we did is we moved to fixed bid, which my consulting career, 20-some-odd years, we would have run from a fixed bid project like the plague because it means we pick up the risk of anything going bump. Now, as we start thinking about the AI tools coming in and the productivity enhancements, it means that we have space to go through and make adjustments, experiment with different tools, and that's on us. So we're underwriting that risk, not having the client take on that risk. And so that was one of the big adjustments we made at the beginning.

Scott Hebner

>> So what's your view of outcome-based bids? Is that the same kind of— Yeah.

Mike Piehl

>> So we went through this as we were looking at the adjustment, like true outcome-based. Frankly, I feel like there's few clients that actually sign up for that, right? So example, right? Salesforce, we're doing a Salesforce or a sales cycle project, and the objective of the project is to grow sales by 10% for a multi, multi, multi-million dollar firm. The likelihood that they would go through and say, it's okay, after the project is done, we will pay you based on if we hit that 10% growth and we'll give you a cut, means that you're basically taking on almost like an equity partner because there'd have to be reporting requirements into the future for whatever the payment terms are. And quite frankly, if you actually were work that thought all the way out, we just don't think that there's going to be many clients that will want to go through and set like true outcome-based stuff. So going to fixed bid is a good way to say we're going to get you the outcome that we said we would, but it's going to be based on what's going on in the project, not necessarily your business outcome. But as soon as we get to things like we want to take a, you know, have the consultancy take a cut of profit or sales or whatnot, 2, 3, 4 years in the future, That's the spot where it's the contractual relationship is just completely different if you're going to do that.

Scott Hebner

>> Do you think as things become more certain because of AI, and one of the themes that Certinia has is this notion of be certain, right? Yeah. And what's happening with the evolution of their capabilities, the more certain you become, the more comfortable people will become with outcome-based, do you think? Or— Well, I still—

Mike Piehl

>> No, so that's a great question. I think that the fixed bid notion will become much like that will become accepted. And like when we— and there's friction in the marketplace on the labor right now. As we look at, you know, fixed and how we incent our employees or W-2s, we have everything alignment. But as soon as we need to bring in a 1099, they're still hourly based. And so there, there's some natural friction between the two models, right? If we have somebody coming in that gets paid by the hour, they're less likely to use the tools because it makes them faster. It impacts their direct pay unless we can get them on multiple projects. So that has— we've seen an adoption issue with most of our 1099 resources as a result. But longer term, true outcome-based, I don't think it's necessarily the, you know, what's going on with the AI tools. I think it's more of a legal issue. Because again, if you're going to go through and say, we're going to do a project, you're a $100 million sales firm and you're going to grow by 10% and we want a percentage of that, Right. You know, for the next 3 or 4 years, like that's a different legal bar than, you know, whatever the project cost would be, fixed bid for the outcome that they're going to get that they asked for at the beginning.

Scott Hebner

>> But the growing confidence that you have in the ability to deliver is what's leading you to the fixed bids. Yes. I got your point about the outcome-based. That is correct.

Mike Piehl

>> So we take all that uncertainty away. That's really also helped to have us convert new clients and drive good outcomes for our clients. Right.

Scott Hebner

>> So the efficiency is definitely growing. You're speeding time to value, time to completion. You're bringing overall cost down in most cases. Yeah. And you're becoming more certain in your ability—

Mike Piehl

>> 100%— to do all this correctly. Yeah. And the certainty issue or topic is top to bottom in the organization, right? So we can go in and pricing, look at a fixed bid scenario and say, yes, we're going to do that. We know what our margins are going to be. We're going to go through and get that done. But we also see certainty down, like, in the project teams too. So being able to go into Certinia and ask a question like, hey, was anything discussed in the scoping meeting that's out of scope? And have the agent right away come back and say, yeah, this is out of scope. Or, hey, I don't remember talking about this in the kickoff meeting. Where was this? Where did this happen during the presale process? And then have Certinia go in and bring them directly to where that is, drives certainty in the project team as well.

Scott Hebner

>> So from this, let's shift a little bit to the technology under the covers. One thing that's been fascinating, having covered so many of these technology transformations over the decades, is everything's moving at warp speed. I mean, like big-time warp speed compared to cloud and client-server and, you know, e-business, all the transformations that occurred before. What do you think is the next phase here to actually drive even more certainty in your ability to do quicker, you know, all the same objectives?

Mike Piehl

>> Yeah, great question. So as we look forward, as we move through the rest of this year and into next year, there's a couple things we're going to be doing. We're going to continue to build out our agent customization inside of Certinia and the surrounding technology platforms that we're using. We're also using some MPC servers to connect them so we can go through and take requirements and converse, pre-sale conversation, turn that directly into user stories and then generate the code for that prototype straight through. So that is a thing that we will be perfecting throughout the end of the year. We're doing it now on projects, but there's a little bit of manual work that has to happen. As we look at next year, I'm really excited for the Certinia roadmap, product roadmap. While we are using it right now primarily for that presale process into project management, our backend where we're managing our, like our PSA capabilities and our invoicing and whatnot, That's very disconnected. And so I'm really excited as they bring the Veda product mix in with REST to get that connected so we can get full view across the full stack. That's a spot as we get into the financials where it's pretty manual yet.

Scott Hebner

>> And the more you integrate with their agents and their intelligent actions as well as Salesforce, which is becoming increasingly headless, right? That's correct. I would imagine that the ability to drive trust and AI governance becomes even more important. Yeah. What are you doing in that space?

Mike Piehl

>> Yeah, so on the governance side, we've done, we've led a couple of the Salesforce AI workshops with clients, and that has been really, really good. One of the things that we found is that a lot of our clients have got enterprise cloud accounts, and they have an enterprise Salesforce agreement. Pretty natural that then asks the question, how do we use these two big investments together? And the Cloudforce announcement from a couple weeks ago was a big thing. And so we're continuing to expand our relationship with Anthropic so that we can be able to provide not just Salesforce AI capabilities, but also AI capabilities to our clients on the cloud side as well. As we look a little bit further, what's one thing that's coming out in practice during those AI workshops, the use cases that we can get to, especially when we're looking at things that we traditionally couldn't do, like being able to go in and get a list of your top 10 accounts in a market, ask how to cross an upsell based on their prior purchase history, and then draft a copy that could be used for an email or for a phone call or a strategy to get them to go and do that cross and upsell. That sort of engagement or effort would've taken weeks in the past. And now, you know, turning on Salesforce Coworker, I've seen that go through and inside of about 5 minutes, wow, take somebody from, I just got my hands on the keyboard and asking, What are my accounts? To get to that outcome where they're getting actionable things on the backend. As we continue to move forward, one of the other things that we're seeing is that there's some discrepancy about when do you use which tool. So if we bring Salesforce into Claude, it means that somebody can go into a chat interface and then start to interact with their content from Salesforce, which is valuable. You can do things there that you can't do in other places like, give me lookalikes. I want to mix— I want to merge data from Salesforce and from other systems into one Agentic Response, right? So we have those capabilities on the cloud side, but it's still a text interface. On the Salesforce side, as we think about especially B2B sales, more complex things that are happening, there we'll see people want to be on the account page. We'll see people want to be on the opportunity, look at the products, maybe look at— see, like, do we have a claims fraud issue? And so they want to be on the claims record. Because they're processing the work there and having the AI capabilities where they're working. That's a thing that we're starting to see a little bit more. So we'll ask the first question. It'd be really great if we had an AI feature that did this. And we said, great, where are the users at the time that they want to do the function? Right. Client— what we've seen the clients do is, well, really, Claude's the new thing, so we want it there. But once we start drilling into where is the work happening, it's on the Salesforce side. And so from a governance standpoint, thinking about where to put which agent when to maximize the flow of work is important. And that's one of the things that we're doing on the governance side that is a pretty big difference from the other things that are going on. Because Salesforce has the trust layer, there's a lot of other things in the governance space we could talk about, but quite frankly, those items have been commoditized in the industry at this point because of the investments that Salesforce has been making.

Mike Piehl

>> So Cloudforce is a, pretty big deal.

Scott Hebner

>> Yes, I mean, it's still brand new, right? Yeah, yeah. But yes, we have—

Mike Piehl

>> You're in the leading edge of it, right?

Scott Hebner

>> That's correct. We have multiple clients that have asked us for how to get CloudForce turned on and active discussions with getting engagements going with them.

Mike Piehl

>> So in terms of promise of value, a couple years out, let's say a year from now since everything's moving so quickly, what are you going to be able to do with CloudForce that maybe you're not comfortable with or are able to do today?

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah, so I think there's going to be kind of two pieces of that. And I think that the time to market on that is probably in Q4 this year, calendar Q4. We have clients that have gone through and have built out skills in Claude. And so being able to take that and allow those skills and the agents, the building Claude to work in Salesforce data, that'll happen in Q4. We'll have multiple of those that'll happen. We'll also have implementations the other way around where the user wants to be in Salesforce because that's where they're doing their job, but they've already put an investment on the cloud side, and so being able to connect that as well to trigger integrations and workflows and other things to other systems, and that, that'll also be Q4 this year.

Mike Piehl

>> Yeah, and that starts to create more certainty, correct, which makes you more confident, right? So the, the whole idea of a fixed bid, um, methodology, you believe it to— that to be durable It's not, it's not a near-term opportunity. You think it's going to be a durable model going forward in time?

Scott Hebner

>> We'll meet our clients where they are, but I mean, I'll tell you, with probably 95% of the time, as soon as we, you know, ask, would you rather be time and materials or fixed bid, the CFO portion of the decision-making process will say fixed. Yeah, it's the only— the 5% of the time is only when somebody has had a personal experience when they were a kid working in like Home renovations. It's a true story. I had this, this conversation about 6 months ago. The guy was a kid, he was working in home renovations. He said every time we opened up a wall, we'd find something. So fixed means that they just add all that stuff in, right? But which, if you do that in practice, you price yourself out of the market, right? So like the market controls and keeps that, that risk down. But that 5% is really only if somebody's had a bad experience in the past and really would just rather be just traditional T&M.

Mike Piehl

>> And then on the back end, if you exceed expectations as you've been doing, then they just create more demand to do more projects. Correct, that's 100% correct. And you get additional fixed bid. Yes. So it almost becomes like a cycle of value for you and the client. Correct.

Scott Hebner

>> One of the things we've seen with the fixed bid cycles too is that we end up with multiple smaller bites of the apple. Used to be fixed bid was like a monolithic approach, right? Let's do one big release, put everything into it, and then see what happens. We've gone through and said, okay, again, focus on speed to market because there's value. As soon as your feature's in prod, you get value from it. And so the faster that happens, economically, your outcomes will be better. And so we've gone through and said, how do we still stay true to kind of that initial agile principle of speed? And so we'll go through and say, let's do MVP. And then if somebody comes through and says, hey, we need a little bit more, that's fine. It's a change order, but it's a scope change, right? The client is initiating the change. And so there's, it's expected that there may be a price and a duration impact. Yeah, but client's in control and they have clear line of sight to where all their money's going. And so we've had a lot lower friction with our clients there in the fixed bid model than the ones that came over with us from T&M.

Mike Piehl

>> Yeah, you know, I've argued for a long time that if you wanted to kind of get a sense of where AI is going in the enterprise, you watch professional services. I think it's one, clearly one of the industries that's sort of leading the charge here, right? And you guys, more than a lot of other industries, are talking a lot about the economic value. You've made that transition where it's not just about technology anymore. It's really about, I mean, this whole conversation has largely been about economic value and how things are changing. So with that kind of context, what excites you the most as you look forward for your business in the long run? I guess in today's world, 2 or 3 years from now, Where do you envision this all heading?

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah, so I mean, if you keep pulling on the thread that we've started here with moving to fixed bid and making all the adjustments we have, our larger competitors have so much organizational inertia about how they run, how they built their business, they're not able to make the pivot. And so from, again, if you think about this, like being able to generate code and take a task that would've taken, I don't know, 2 weeks of one person's time down to maybe a couple hours, where that ends up displacing high labor, low value work. A lot of our larger competitors, that's how they're built. They typically will do that, that work offshore somewhere to have an economic model that comes down. But at the end of the day, going and paying, having the client being charged anywhere from $150 to $75 an hour for offshore labor, and then to turn around and have that be done now with AI where you can get that same job done and maybe $20 to $30. Yeah, like, so we're going to see a big flip. And so we're expecting that the market, our market share, will end up expanding rapidly in the next couple of years.

Mike Piehl

>> That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, it's really exciting. It's a great example of where this is all heading, which is the notion of digital labor, digital transformation at the intelligence level, right? Which fundamentally changes economics. Yeah, it's a, it's, it's an exciting time for sure.

Scott Hebner

>> Yes, and we're also seeing just the overall value to the client grow, right? Right. So being able to do things in 6 months that would have taken 2 years. And so the clients that are coming in and latching into, into these capabilities, their outcomes are changing faster than they would have expected as well.

Mike Piehl

>> It's exciting. It is, it is. All right, Mike, well, I appreciate you taking the time. Yeah, I have to leave it, leave it there.

Scott Hebner

>> Thank you very much.

Mike Piehl

>> All right, well, thank you for watching. We'll be back shortly with more interviews, more coverage here at Dreamforce, what's happening with professional services. We'll talk to you soon.

Mike Piehl, Platinum River INNOVATIONS

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Scott Hebner

>> Hello everyone, welcome back to The Cube's continuing coverage of everything professional services here at Salesforce Dreamforce 2026. And I'm here with Mike Peel, who is the CEO of Platinum River Innovations. And, uh, welcome to the show.

Mike Piehl

>> Thank you very much, Scott. Pleasure to be here.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah, so why don't we start off just for our audience, tell us a little bit about what you guys all do and your partnership with Ctenia.

Mike Piehl

>> Yeah.

Scott Hebner

>> And what's all happening here at Juneforce?

Mike Piehl

>> Yeah, so we are a Salesforce implementation professional services organization, and we focus on business outcomes and consulting in and around the Salesforce ecosystem, primarily back to financial services firms with a specific focus in insurance and wealth management. So, you know, we've been in the business for— most of our consultants have had experience in the industry and as consultants. Going back 20, 25 years. And so a lot of deep industry expertise. We brought Certinia into our business about a year ago to go through and start to have continuity from the sales process with meeting transcripts, building the knowledge graph around the clients through the project management layer so that there's consistent understanding by the delivery teams about what happened during the presale cycle. So that's, that's where we started. The relationship has expanded from there and we've seen a large amount of positive impact to our business as a result.

Scott Hebner

>> So my understanding is that you're bringing together the agent force, obviously the Sortinia platform, others such as Cursor and others. So you're kind of bringing this all together.

Mike Piehl

>> That's correct. So we really started our AI transformation about 12 months ago. The first piece is we changed our contracting model with our clients because we need to make like headspace with how we work with our clients first. Then we brought in our tools. We've made a couple of modifications to the tool mix that we're using, but everything across the board is, let's go through, leverage the AI capabilities to understand what the requirements are from conversation first. So we've taken a lot of that documentation time out and then generate requirements, generate the code, deploy the code, test, make sure that things are of quality, and then move forward. And what we've seen as a result of that migration is a reduction of cost internally, which means our margins went up. Also means that we can do projects now that we wouldn't have been able to do in the past because the client price would have been prohibitive. So we've had a number of projects that we've done where it's about 80 to 90% of what the cost would have been 2 years ago. So a huge impact. The last thing that we've done in our kind of our AI transformation journey is we've we've been changing all of our internal incentive models because the traditional proserve model is all hourly. And if you think about having AI provide more productivity, the hour count falls and we need to find a way to be able to continue to add more value to our clients, but still be protected as that decrease of the hour count comes down.

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah, you've been talking quite a bit about the notion that the economics of Salesforce Consulting It's sort of radically shifting, right?

Mike Piehl

>> Yeah.

Scott Hebner

>> So from the perspective of a client, what is materially different than it was in the past?

Mike Piehl

>> Yeah, so like I said, the price is one, so the price is coming down. The client value that they can get goes up. We also have faster speed to market. So one of the things that we've done from a methodology perspective is that we've gone through and said, before, you know, after we sign contracts, we're ready to go, during the project kickoff meeting, we're then immediately going to follow that with a custom-built prototype based on their requirements. Again, prior to some of these tools coming in, we would not have been able to do that. We would have gone through a more traditional approach of sign a contract, wait 4 to 6 weeks to staff, show up for kickoff meeting, go through a 3 to 4 week discovery process, build cycle for a couple of months, UAT, go live. Usability risk is one of the largest risks in projects. When the client can't see what's happening until the end of the project, if there's any change, creates a large change order and the release date has to move. Being able to mitigate that risk at the beginning by doing a prototype has been hugely impactful for our clients.

Scott Hebner

>> So in the end, it's the time to value, the time to completion is sped up, and at the same time higher quality and lower price.

Mike Piehl

>> Yeah, and with a lot of our clients, we're also seeing while the initial price for the scope that they thought is coming down, they'll go through and say, okay, now we're getting so much value, we want to add in more services. right? So in some cases we've got requests to come in and do on-site training, where in the past that client would have said, "Maybe virtual was okay." You know, get into some adoption services and what are we doing after the launch. In some cases we've also gone through and seen a continuation, a better continuation from project into managed services. And so we've seen that all of those things happen as well because the budget now can get more value for everybody.

Scott Hebner

>> Right, and so when, you know, most people when they're watching anything to do with AI, they're reading about it. There's all this discussion about it taking jobs, fewer people, you know, all the fears that are sort of surrounding this. You've been out talking about this notion of the labor demand paradox, where I think what you're saying is that it's actually generating more jobs, more need, more—

Mike Piehl

>> Correct.

Scott Hebner

>> —labor for humans. Correct.

Mike Piehl

>> So what we're seeing in practice is that the labor demand on an individual project is coming down. Which normally would mean you need fewer people. However, because the overall price points are coming down as well and the value delivery is going up, it actually means that we have more client demand as a result. So more projects coming in, and the net effect is we need more people.

Scott Hebner

>> So how does that change the nature of the bids upfront? I mean, I think what you're saying is that they start to save money, they're speeding time to market, they start thinking, well, we can actually do this, we should do that, and It kind of changes the nature of the project.

Mike Piehl

>> Well, like I said, we started this journey with changing our client contracting because we need to make space in order for the rest of the transformation to kick in. In this case, one of the big changes that we did is we moved to fixed bid, which my consulting career, 20-some-odd years, we would have run from a fixed bid project like the plague because it means we pick up the risk of anything going bump. Now, as we start thinking about the AI tools coming in and the productivity enhancements, it means that we have space to go through and make adjustments, experiment with different tools, and that's on us. So we're underwriting that risk, not having the client take on that risk. And so that was one of the big adjustments we made at the beginning.

Scott Hebner

>> So what's your view of outcome-based bids? Is that the same kind of— Yeah.

Mike Piehl

>> So we went through this as we were looking at the adjustment, like true outcome-based. Frankly, I feel like there's few clients that actually sign up for that, right? So example, right? Salesforce, we're doing a Salesforce or a sales cycle project, and the objective of the project is to grow sales by 10% for a multi, multi, multi-million dollar firm. The likelihood that they would go through and say, it's okay, after the project is done, we will pay you based on if we hit that 10% growth and we'll give you a cut, means that you're basically taking on almost like an equity partner because there'd have to be reporting requirements into the future for whatever the payment terms are. And quite frankly, if you actually were work that thought all the way out, we just don't think that there's going to be many clients that will want to go through and set like true outcome-based stuff. So going to fixed bid is a good way to say we're going to get you the outcome that we said we would, but it's going to be based on what's going on in the project, not necessarily your business outcome. But as soon as we get to things like we want to take a, you know, have the consultancy take a cut of profit or sales or whatnot, 2, 3, 4 years in the future, That's the spot where it's the contractual relationship is just completely different if you're going to do that.

Scott Hebner

>> Do you think as things become more certain because of AI, and one of the themes that Certinia has is this notion of be certain, right? Yeah. And what's happening with the evolution of their capabilities, the more certain you become, the more comfortable people will become with outcome-based, do you think? Or— Well, I still—

Mike Piehl

>> No, so that's a great question. I think that the fixed bid notion will become much like that will become accepted. And like when we— and there's friction in the marketplace on the labor right now. As we look at, you know, fixed and how we incent our employees or W-2s, we have everything alignment. But as soon as we need to bring in a 1099, they're still hourly based. And so there, there's some natural friction between the two models, right? If we have somebody coming in that gets paid by the hour, they're less likely to use the tools because it makes them faster. It impacts their direct pay unless we can get them on multiple projects. So that has— we've seen an adoption issue with most of our 1099 resources as a result. But longer term, true outcome-based, I don't think it's necessarily the, you know, what's going on with the AI tools. I think it's more of a legal issue. Because again, if you're going to go through and say, we're going to do a project, you're a $100 million sales firm and you're going to grow by 10% and we want a percentage of that, Right. You know, for the next 3 or 4 years, like that's a different legal bar than, you know, whatever the project cost would be, fixed bid for the outcome that they're going to get that they asked for at the beginning.

Scott Hebner

>> But the growing confidence that you have in the ability to deliver is what's leading you to the fixed bids. Yes. I got your point about the outcome-based. That is correct.

Mike Piehl

>> So we take all that uncertainty away. That's really also helped to have us convert new clients and drive good outcomes for our clients. Right.

Scott Hebner

>> So the efficiency is definitely growing. You're speeding time to value, time to completion. You're bringing overall cost down in most cases. Yeah. And you're becoming more certain in your ability—

Mike Piehl

>> 100%— to do all this correctly. Yeah. And the certainty issue or topic is top to bottom in the organization, right? So we can go in and pricing, look at a fixed bid scenario and say, yes, we're going to do that. We know what our margins are going to be. We're going to go through and get that done. But we also see certainty down, like, in the project teams too. So being able to go into Certinia and ask a question like, hey, was anything discussed in the scoping meeting that's out of scope? And have the agent right away come back and say, yeah, this is out of scope. Or, hey, I don't remember talking about this in the kickoff meeting. Where was this? Where did this happen during the presale process? And then have Certinia go in and bring them directly to where that is, drives certainty in the project team as well.

Scott Hebner

>> So from this, let's shift a little bit to the technology under the covers. One thing that's been fascinating, having covered so many of these technology transformations over the decades, is everything's moving at warp speed. I mean, like big-time warp speed compared to cloud and client-server and, you know, e-business, all the transformations that occurred before. What do you think is the next phase here to actually drive even more certainty in your ability to do quicker, you know, all the same objectives?

Mike Piehl

>> Yeah, great question. So as we look forward, as we move through the rest of this year and into next year, there's a couple things we're going to be doing. We're going to continue to build out our agent customization inside of Certinia and the surrounding technology platforms that we're using. We're also using some MPC servers to connect them so we can go through and take requirements and converse, pre-sale conversation, turn that directly into user stories and then generate the code for that prototype straight through. So that is a thing that we will be perfecting throughout the end of the year. We're doing it now on projects, but there's a little bit of manual work that has to happen. As we look at next year, I'm really excited for the Certinia roadmap, product roadmap. While we are using it right now primarily for that presale process into project management, our backend where we're managing our, like our PSA capabilities and our invoicing and whatnot, That's very disconnected. And so I'm really excited as they bring the Veda product mix in with REST to get that connected so we can get full view across the full stack. That's a spot as we get into the financials where it's pretty manual yet.

Scott Hebner

>> And the more you integrate with their agents and their intelligent actions as well as Salesforce, which is becoming increasingly headless, right? That's correct. I would imagine that the ability to drive trust and AI governance becomes even more important. Yeah. What are you doing in that space?

Mike Piehl

>> Yeah, so on the governance side, we've done, we've led a couple of the Salesforce AI workshops with clients, and that has been really, really good. One of the things that we found is that a lot of our clients have got enterprise cloud accounts, and they have an enterprise Salesforce agreement. Pretty natural that then asks the question, how do we use these two big investments together? And the Cloudforce announcement from a couple weeks ago was a big thing. And so we're continuing to expand our relationship with Anthropic so that we can be able to provide not just Salesforce AI capabilities, but also AI capabilities to our clients on the cloud side as well. As we look a little bit further, what's one thing that's coming out in practice during those AI workshops, the use cases that we can get to, especially when we're looking at things that we traditionally couldn't do, like being able to go in and get a list of your top 10 accounts in a market, ask how to cross an upsell based on their prior purchase history, and then draft a copy that could be used for an email or for a phone call or a strategy to get them to go and do that cross and upsell. That sort of engagement or effort would've taken weeks in the past. And now, you know, turning on Salesforce Coworker, I've seen that go through and inside of about 5 minutes, wow, take somebody from, I just got my hands on the keyboard and asking, What are my accounts? To get to that outcome where they're getting actionable things on the backend. As we continue to move forward, one of the other things that we're seeing is that there's some discrepancy about when do you use which tool. So if we bring Salesforce into Claude, it means that somebody can go into a chat interface and then start to interact with their content from Salesforce, which is valuable. You can do things there that you can't do in other places like, give me lookalikes. I want to mix— I want to merge data from Salesforce and from other systems into one Agentic Response, right? So we have those capabilities on the cloud side, but it's still a text interface. On the Salesforce side, as we think about especially B2B sales, more complex things that are happening, there we'll see people want to be on the account page. We'll see people want to be on the opportunity, look at the products, maybe look at— see, like, do we have a claims fraud issue? And so they want to be on the claims record. Because they're processing the work there and having the AI capabilities where they're working. That's a thing that we're starting to see a little bit more. So we'll ask the first question. It'd be really great if we had an AI feature that did this. And we said, great, where are the users at the time that they want to do the function? Right. Client— what we've seen the clients do is, well, really, Claude's the new thing, so we want it there. But once we start drilling into where is the work happening, it's on the Salesforce side. And so from a governance standpoint, thinking about where to put which agent when to maximize the flow of work is important. And that's one of the things that we're doing on the governance side that is a pretty big difference from the other things that are going on. Because Salesforce has the trust layer, there's a lot of other things in the governance space we could talk about, but quite frankly, those items have been commoditized in the industry at this point because of the investments that Salesforce has been making.

Mike Piehl

>> So Cloudforce is a, pretty big deal.

Scott Hebner

>> Yes, I mean, it's still brand new, right? Yeah, yeah. But yes, we have—

Mike Piehl

>> You're in the leading edge of it, right?

Scott Hebner

>> That's correct. We have multiple clients that have asked us for how to get CloudForce turned on and active discussions with getting engagements going with them.

Mike Piehl

>> So in terms of promise of value, a couple years out, let's say a year from now since everything's moving so quickly, what are you going to be able to do with CloudForce that maybe you're not comfortable with or are able to do today?

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah, so I think there's going to be kind of two pieces of that. And I think that the time to market on that is probably in Q4 this year, calendar Q4. We have clients that have gone through and have built out skills in Claude. And so being able to take that and allow those skills and the agents, the building Claude to work in Salesforce data, that'll happen in Q4. We'll have multiple of those that'll happen. We'll also have implementations the other way around where the user wants to be in Salesforce because that's where they're doing their job, but they've already put an investment on the cloud side, and so being able to connect that as well to trigger integrations and workflows and other things to other systems, and that, that'll also be Q4 this year.

Mike Piehl

>> Yeah, and that starts to create more certainty, correct, which makes you more confident, right? So the, the whole idea of a fixed bid, um, methodology, you believe it to— that to be durable It's not, it's not a near-term opportunity. You think it's going to be a durable model going forward in time?

Scott Hebner

>> We'll meet our clients where they are, but I mean, I'll tell you, with probably 95% of the time, as soon as we, you know, ask, would you rather be time and materials or fixed bid, the CFO portion of the decision-making process will say fixed. Yeah, it's the only— the 5% of the time is only when somebody has had a personal experience when they were a kid working in like Home renovations. It's a true story. I had this, this conversation about 6 months ago. The guy was a kid, he was working in home renovations. He said every time we opened up a wall, we'd find something. So fixed means that they just add all that stuff in, right? But which, if you do that in practice, you price yourself out of the market, right? So like the market controls and keeps that, that risk down. But that 5% is really only if somebody's had a bad experience in the past and really would just rather be just traditional T&M.

Mike Piehl

>> And then on the back end, if you exceed expectations as you've been doing, then they just create more demand to do more projects. Correct, that's 100% correct. And you get additional fixed bid. Yes. So it almost becomes like a cycle of value for you and the client. Correct.

Scott Hebner

>> One of the things we've seen with the fixed bid cycles too is that we end up with multiple smaller bites of the apple. Used to be fixed bid was like a monolithic approach, right? Let's do one big release, put everything into it, and then see what happens. We've gone through and said, okay, again, focus on speed to market because there's value. As soon as your feature's in prod, you get value from it. And so the faster that happens, economically, your outcomes will be better. And so we've gone through and said, how do we still stay true to kind of that initial agile principle of speed? And so we'll go through and say, let's do MVP. And then if somebody comes through and says, hey, we need a little bit more, that's fine. It's a change order, but it's a scope change, right? The client is initiating the change. And so there's, it's expected that there may be a price and a duration impact. Yeah, but client's in control and they have clear line of sight to where all their money's going. And so we've had a lot lower friction with our clients there in the fixed bid model than the ones that came over with us from T&M.

Mike Piehl

>> Yeah, you know, I've argued for a long time that if you wanted to kind of get a sense of where AI is going in the enterprise, you watch professional services. I think it's one, clearly one of the industries that's sort of leading the charge here, right? And you guys, more than a lot of other industries, are talking a lot about the economic value. You've made that transition where it's not just about technology anymore. It's really about, I mean, this whole conversation has largely been about economic value and how things are changing. So with that kind of context, what excites you the most as you look forward for your business in the long run? I guess in today's world, 2 or 3 years from now, Where do you envision this all heading?

Scott Hebner

>> Yeah, so I mean, if you keep pulling on the thread that we've started here with moving to fixed bid and making all the adjustments we have, our larger competitors have so much organizational inertia about how they run, how they built their business, they're not able to make the pivot. And so from, again, if you think about this, like being able to generate code and take a task that would've taken, I don't know, 2 weeks of one person's time down to maybe a couple hours, where that ends up displacing high labor, low value work. A lot of our larger competitors, that's how they're built. They typically will do that, that work offshore somewhere to have an economic model that comes down. But at the end of the day, going and paying, having the client being charged anywhere from $150 to $75 an hour for offshore labor, and then to turn around and have that be done now with AI where you can get that same job done and maybe $20 to $30. Yeah, like, so we're going to see a big flip. And so we're expecting that the market, our market share, will end up expanding rapidly in the next couple of years.

Mike Piehl

>> That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, it's really exciting. It's a great example of where this is all heading, which is the notion of digital labor, digital transformation at the intelligence level, right? Which fundamentally changes economics. Yeah, it's a, it's, it's an exciting time for sure.

Scott Hebner

>> Yes, and we're also seeing just the overall value to the client grow, right? Right. So being able to do things in 6 months that would have taken 2 years. And so the clients that are coming in and latching into, into these capabilities, their outcomes are changing faster than they would have expected as well.

Mike Piehl

>> It's exciting. It is, it is. All right, Mike, well, I appreciate you taking the time. Yeah, I have to leave it, leave it there.

Scott Hebner

>> Thank you very much.

Mike Piehl

>> All right, well, thank you for watching. We'll be back shortly with more interviews, more coverage here at Dreamforce, what's happening with professional services. We'll talk to you soon.