Exclusive: Kantata’s Expertise Insights answers services firms’ business questions in plain English
Professional services automation software company Kantata Inc. today added generative business intelligence to its Expertise Engine platform with the launch of Expertise Insights.
Users ask about the business in plain English, as in where margin pressure is showing up, and the software answers with an interactive chart, a calculation or an executive summary.
Kantata’s pitch rests on how long it takes services firms to get answers out of their own data. The company says a request often has to go through a business intelligence analyst or a services engagement, and the wait can run to a week.
Sarah Edwards, Kantata’s chief product and strategy officer, said the value of an insight in professional services “depends on how quickly you can act on it.” Reports often show up after the moment has passed, she said.
Expertise Insights runs on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Amazon Quick. On top of it Kantata has added a semantic layer that translates database field names into the vocabulary staff at a particular firm use every day. Firm-specific terms are covered, down to distinctions such as “chargeable utilization” versus “billable utilization.”
Kantata ships the product with four ready-made dashboards. Finance teams get margin, revenue per head and cost leakage trends in one of them, and the rest are given over to delivery, time and resourcing. On the delivery dashboard, project health is broken out by schedule, scope, budget and client health.
Users who need something the stock dashboards don’t show can turn to Ask Insights for new analysis on demand. Kantata says a complete board deck can be assembled in minutes. Saved work goes into Bookmarks and Pinboards, so a filtered view or a one-off analysis can be kept without spawning another copy of a master dashboard. Kantata is pitching that as a cure for dashboard sprawl.
The software can also link capacity, margin, delivery risk and financial performance. Piecing those relationships together might otherwise take several reports, or a seasoned operator who knows where to look.
Vikas Nehru, Kantata’s chief technology officer, said artificial intelligence in professional services should make a firm’s “collective expertise available at the moment a decision needs to be made.” That requires clean data and context, he said, plus AI that understands how a business works.
Life sciences consultancy Lumanity Inc. is among the customers already running the product. Andy Newbill, its senior manager of professional services automation, recently put together a complex report using calculated fields in an hour, and by his estimate the job would have taken hours before. Most striking to him was the chance to describe what he needs “in natural language and have the system help me build it.”
Kantata announced Expertise Insights at the Technology & Services World conference in Las Vegas, and it is available now. The company’s previous launch, Agent Studio, came a month ago and lets firms build custom AI agents by describing them in plain language.
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