Kantata launches Expertise Insights for plain-English business queries

The company's pitch centers on the time services firms need to get answers from their own data. Kantata says a request often has to go through a business intelligence analyst or a services engagement, and the wait can reach a week. Sarah Edwards, Kantata's chief product and strategy officer, said the value of an insight in professional services depends on how quickly a firm can act on it; reports often arrive after the moment has passed, she said.

Expertise Insights runs on Amazon Web Services Inc.'s Amazon Quick. Kantata has added a semantic layer on top that translates database field names into the vocabulary staff at a particular firm use every day, including distinctions such as 'chargeable utilization' versus 'billable utilization.'

The product ships with four ready-made dashboards. Finance teams get margin, revenue per head and cost leakage trends in one; the others cover delivery, time and resourcing. On the delivery dashboard, project health is broken out by schedule, scope, budget and client health.

Users who need analysis the stock dashboards do not show can use Ask Insights. 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 creating another copy of a master dashboard, an approach Kantata is pitching as a cure for dashboard sprawl.

The software can also link capacity, margin, delivery risk and financial performance, relationships that might otherwise require 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 customers already running the product. Andy Newbill, its senior manager of professional services automation, recently assembled a complex report using calculated fields in an hour, a job he estimated would have taken hours before. He said the most striking part 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 the product is available now. Its previous launch, Agent Studio, came a month ago and lets firms build custom AI agents by describing them in plain language.

Editor's Summary

Kantata has added generative business intelligence to its Expertise Engine with Expertise Insights, which runs on Amazon Quick and uses a semantic layer for firm-specific terms. The product includes four dashboards, on-demand analysis and saved views, and Lumanity is an early customer. Kantata announced it at Technology & Services World in Las Vegas and made it available now.