Kantata Unveils Agent Studio: AI Agents That Go Beyond Automation to Compound Professional Services Expertise

Conversational capability within Kantata Expertise Engine™ lets professional services firms describe their delivery standards in plain language and get a custom agent that runs them every time

IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Kantata, a leading provider of Professional Services Automation (PSA) solutions, today introduced Agent Studio, a fundamentally different approach to building custom AI agents that enables professional services firms to turn their expertise into agents that work like their best people at scale. A conversational environment within the Kantata Expertise Engine™, Agent Studio allows services firms to turn their delivery standards into governed custom agents, giving every project, every team, and every client the insights and outcomes their most experienced practitioners would deliver.

The move comes at a critical time in the professional services industry.

As Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Ted Schadler notes in Turn Your Proprietary Knowledge Into AI Advantage, “The only path to sustainable business advantage lies in capturing and putting your organization’s unique and proprietary knowledge, expertise, and capabilities to work through AI models, apps, and agents.”

And Basware, a leading provider of Invoice Lifecycle Management solutions, is using Kantata to do just this.

“I want our professional services team spending time with customers — not doing documentation, figuring out resourcing, and entering their billable time,” said Mark Johnston, Chief Customer Officer, Basware. “With Kantata, we can create AI agents to do this work in the context of our business and processes and focus our people on delivering expertise that moves the needle for our customers in a scalable way.”

When More Equals Less

PSA software is fast moving toward a world of specialized AI agents: one agent for resourcing, another for risk, another for status, another for estimating. And vendors are selling them by the dozen with the promise of greater efficiency and productivity. The problem is that every new agent means another silo and another development project to build and maintain it.

Kantata takes a different approach, providing a superagent that has context across the entire platform, including the data, the relationships between it, and how work gets done. With Agent Studio, firms can put that context to work without waiting for a vendor to build a new agent for every use case.

“When it comes to professional services, AI isn't the differentiator — expertise is. AI is just what lets firms unlock, scale, and defend it,” said Michael Speranza, Chief Executive Officer, Kantata. “Any vendor can give a firm a tool to build AI agents. But if all you're doing is automating processes, you're just racing to the bottom and simply reducing costs, rather than developing differentiation. Agent Studio is designed to help firms compound their expertise in a simple, repeatable way, and use it to transform the way they operate.”

From Plain Language to a Working Agent

Agent Studio extends the value of Kantata’s Expertise Agent, the professional services industry’s first AI superagent, which the company launched in June. And it gives professional services firms a fundamentally different and hassle-free way to put their expertise to work.

With Agent Studio, a user simply describes the job they want an agent to handle in plain language. The Expertise Agent builds the agent through dialogue and refines it the same way. Every build and edit is automatically validated to ensure its inputs and outputs are structured correctly before it is published. No forms, no logic trees, or code required. Once published, the agent can be triggered by a person or automatically by a workflow using a single command.

With Agent Studio, the people who define how a firm delivers work — practice leads, delivery directors, and Project Management Office owners — can build agents around their own standards without needing a developer or AI specialist:

• Write the standard down once — The format, escalation rules, level of detail, and required outputs for a recurring deliverable are captured in plain language and applied automatically, rather than reconstructed by whoever happens to be staffed that week.
• Eliminate the prompt tax — Work that a team re-explains to AI is reduced to a single command, removing the drafting, correcting, and reformatting cycle that quietly consumes the time automation was supposed to return.
• Give every client the benefit of their best people — A firm’s most experienced practitioners’ judgments are built into the agent, making that expertise available to every project, every team, and every client, every time.

“An agent that improvises is a liability in a business where the same deliverable has to hold up in front of a client every time,” said Vikas Nehru, Chief Technology Officer, Kantata. “By letting firms capture their standards once and execute them through a single governed agent, we make consistency a property of the platform rather than a matter of who happened to be staffed. That is a very different promise than adding another agent to the pile.”

Availability

Kantata Agent Studio is available and in use by customers today. Click here to learn more about the solution and the value it can deliver for your organization.

About Kantata

Kantata is a leading provider of Professional Services Automation (PSA) solutions that help professional services organizations and agencies ensure consistent excellence and profitability across projects. More than 1,500 organizations worldwide rely on Kantata to instantly assemble the ideal team, easily amplify institutional knowledge, and confidently forecast outcomes. Recognized as a Leader on G2’s PSA Software Grid® and Resource Management Software Grid®, and consistently ranked among the top project management software products in G2’s annual Best Software Awards, Kantata supports the full services lifecycle — from scoping and staffing to delivery and forecasting. For more information, visit www.kantata.com.