Kantata, a leading provider of Professional Services Automation (PSA) solutions, today unveiled Expertise Insights, combining 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.
“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."
According to Kantata, 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, said the vendor.
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.
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, the company said.
“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.”
Expertise Insights is available and in use by customers now.
For more information about this news, visit www.kantata.com.