Exclusive: Kantata’s Expertise Insights answers services firms’ business questions in plain English

Kantata Inc., a professional services automation software company, has launched Expertise Insights, a generative business intelligence tool, to its Expertise Engine platform. Users can pose business questions in plain English, such as where margin pressure is showing up, and the software provides interactive charts, calculations, or executive summaries.

Kantata claims that getting answers from a company's own data through a business intelligence analyst or services engagement can take a week, but Expertise Insights aims to reduce that wait time.

Sarah Edwards, Kantata's chief product and strategy officer, emphasizes that an insight's value in professional services depends on how quickly it can be acted upon. Reports often arrive after the moment has passed, she explains. The software runs on Amazon Web Services' Amazon Quick and includes a semantic layer that translates database field names using firm-specific terminology. Kantata ships the product with four pre-made dashboards, covering finance, delivery, time, and resourcing.

Users can create custom analyses on demand using the Ask Insights feature. A complete board deck can be assembled in minutes, and saved work can be accessed via Bookmarks and Pinboards to avoid creating additional copies of a master dashboard. The software can also link capacity, margin, delivery risk, and financial performance, piecing together relationships that might require several reports in the past.

Kantata claims that artificial intelligence in professional services should make a firm's collective expertise available at the moment a decision is needed.

Life sciences consultancy Lumanity Inc. is among the customers already using Expertise Insights. Andy Newbill, its senior manager of professional services automation, recently completed a complex report using calculated fields in an hour, a task that would have taken hours before. Newbill particularly appreciates the ability to describe what he needs in natural language and have the system help him build it.

Kantata announced Expertise Insights at the Technology & Services World conference in Las Vegas and made it available on the same day. The company's previous launch, Agent Studio, came a month ago, enabling firms to build custom AI agents by describing them in plain language.