Kantata Introduces Expertise Insights: The Real-Time Intelligence Engine Driving Professional Services

Next-generation generative BI solution puts natural-language analytics in hands of services firms, empowering them to quickly move from business questions to answers and action

IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Professional services organizations have the data they need to run a better business. But most of them can’t access it without a BI analyst, a services engagement, or a week of waiting. Kantata, a leading provider of Professional Services Automation (PSA) solutions, today unveiled Expertise Insights, which promises to change this. Built specifically for professional services, Expertise Insights combines contextualized business data with natural-language interaction and generative AI, giving services teams a simple way to ask questions, uncover insights, and act on what their data is telling them in real time. The news was announced during Technology & Services World in Las Vegas.

“In professional services, the value of an insight depends on how quickly you can act on it. And all too often, by the time a report arrives, the moment has passed,” said Sarah Edwards, Chief Product Strategy Officer, Kantata. “Expertise Insights removes this constraint, allowing services leaders to move from a business question to a fully built, interactive dashboard that gives them the answers they need to move forward in an informed way with the speed their business demands."

Andy Newbill, Senior Manager, Professional Services Automation at Lumanity, agrees.

“Professional services firms need to make decisions quickly, but critical business insights are often locked behind complex reporting processes and limited access to analytics expertise,” he said. “The ability to ask questions in natural language and get meaningful, actionable answers changes how firms can use their data to manage performance, optimize resources, and drive growth. Expertise Insights makes that intelligence more accessible, helping teams spend less time finding answers and more time acting on them.”

Built for Professional Services, Not Bolted On

Generic BI tools can surface data and generic AI can generate answers. But neither inherently understands how a professional services business operates, or what terms, metrics, and relationships matter to a particular firm.

Built on Amazon Quick and delivered as part of Kantata’s Expertise Engine™, Expertise Insights is trained on professional services data that is contextualized for each business. Through a semantic layer that maps technical data fields to the language people actually use, including firm-specific terminology and concepts such as “chargeable utilization” versus “billable utilization,” the solution provides AI the understanding it needs to make data actionable.

With Expertise Insights, users can ask questions in plain English and instantly receive an interactive chart, calculation, or executive summary without writing SQL, navigating complex menus, or waiting for an analyst. And beyond these charts and slides, they can get a completed board deck in minutes. That means a leader can move from asking “where are we seeing margin pressure?” to understanding the projects, resources, or financial drivers behind it and use that insight to determine what action to take.

“Expertise Insights has made creating reports and dashboards so much easier, saving me a tremendous amount of time,” Newbill added. “What really stands out is being able to describe what I need in natural language and have the system help me build it. I recently created a complex report in an hour using calculated fields that would have taken hours. That’s a real shift in how quickly I can get from a question to the insight I need.”

From Dashboards to Answers

Expertise Insights includes four out-of-the-box dashboards covering the core dimensions of professional services performance:

• Finance: margin, revenue/revenue per head, and cost leakage trends
• Delivery: project health across overall status, schedule, scope, budget, and client health
• Time: utilization and timesheet compliance
• Resourcing: available skills, capacity, and demand

Using Ask Insights capabilities within the solution, users can go beyond these predefined dashboards to generate new analysis on demand. And they can surface signals they may not have known to look for and determine what needs attention.

Personalization is built in, too. Bookmarks and Pinboards functionality lets users save filtered views and one-off analyses without creating duplicate versions of master dashboards, addressing the dashboard sprawl that has long made traditional BI hard to manage.

Connecting the Dots

As enterprise AI evolves from passive reporting to autonomous execution, industry analysts confirm that context is the primary barrier to adoption. In the 2026 Gartner® “Agentic Analytics Fails Without Context and Decision Intelligence,”* research, analysts note: “As decision complexity increases, traditional BI plateaus because dashboards alone are insufficient. Decision intelligence reframes analytics around decisions, while agentic analytics leverages rich context through semantic layers and multiagent systems to enable better decisions.”

Expertise Insights directly delivers on this paradigm shift.

Instead of looking separately at utilization, project performance, and financial results, Expertise Insights can link capacity, margin, delivery risk, and financial performance to reveal relationships that might otherwise require multiple reports, or a highly experienced operator who knows where to look.

“The promise of AI in professional services isn't about generating more reports or putting a chatbot on top of existing data,” said Vikas Nehru, Chief Technology Officer, Kantata. “It's about making the organization's collective expertise available at the moment a decision needs to be made. That requires clean data, context, and AI that understands how the business works. Expertise Insights brings those pieces together so leaders can understand what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what to do next.”

Availability

Expertise Insights is available and in use by customers today. Click here to learn more about the solution and how it can help you bring the right information, in the right context, to the people making decisions.

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.

*Gartner, Agentic Analytics Fails Without Context and Decision Intelligence, 15 May 2026. GARTNER is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.