Kantata debuts Agent Studio for building custom AI agents in plain language
Professional services automation software company Kantata Inc. today unveiled Agent Studio, a tool that lets services firms build custom artificial intelligence agents by describing the job they want done in plain language.
The release goes after a problem Kantata says is building in the professional services automation market. Vendors are shipping narrow agents by the dozen, each scoped to a single job such as resourcing or risk reporting.
The company argues that every new one arrives as another silo to maintain. Kantata sells a single agent that it says carries context across the whole platform. That’s the Expertise Agent, which Kantata launched in June and calls the first AI superagent for professional services.
Agent Studio sits inside the Kantata Expertise Engine and works through conversation. A user describes the job, and the Expertise Agent assembles the new agent and refines it the same way, with every build and edit checked for correctly structured inputs and outputs before it is published.
Nobody has to fill in a form or write code. Once live, an agent can be triggered by a person or picked up automatically by a workflow on a single command.
The intended users are practice leads and delivery directors. Under Agent Studio a standard gets written down once, covering the format, the escalation rules and the outputs a recurring deliverable needs, then applied automatically rather than rebuilt by whoever happens to be staffed that week. Kantata calls the overhead it removes a “prompt tax,” the cycle of drafting and reformatting that a team repeats every time it re-explains the same job to an AI tool.
“When it comes to professional services, AI isn’t the differentiator — expertise is,” Chief Executive Michael Speranza said. “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.”
Chief Technology Officer Vikas Nehru put the case on governance grounds, calling an agent that improvises “a liability in a business where the same deliverable has to hold up in front of a client every time.”
Finnish invoice automation company Basware Oyj uses Kantata’s software in its own professional services operation. Mark Johnston, its chief customer officer, said he wants his services team with customers rather than “doing documentation, figuring out resourcing and entering their billable time,” and that Kantata lets the firm build agents to absorb that work.
The announcement cites Forrester Research Inc. on the wider point. Ted Schadler, a vice president and principal analyst at the firm, has written that the only durable route to business advantage now runs through putting a company’s own proprietary knowledge and expertise to work in AI models, apps and agents.
Agent Studio is available now and in use by customers, according to Kantata.
Kantata launched in 2022 following the December 2021 merger of Mavenlink and Kimble Applications, a deal Accel-KKR led, and the company says more than 1,500 organizations now run its software.
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