Kantata launches AI business intelligence for services

Kantata has launched Expertise Insights, a business intelligence product for professional services firms. The system is available to customers now.

The product lets users ask questions in natural language and receive dashboards, charts, calculations and summaries based on their business data. Kantata said it built the tool specifically for professional services organisations, where access to operational and financial data often depends on analysts or specialist reporting teams.

Expertise Insights sits within Kantata's broader Expertise Engine and is built on Amazon QuickSight. It uses a semantic layer that maps technical data fields to the language used inside firms, including business-specific terms and distinctions such as chargeable utilisation and billable utilisation.

Kantata is targeting a long-standing problem in professional services software: finance, delivery, time and resourcing data may be available, but often remains difficult to query quickly. In many firms, managers rely on standard reports or manual analysis, which can slow decision-making when project margins, staffing levels or delivery risks change.

Sarah Edwards, Chief Product Strategy Officer at Kantata, said timing is critical in services businesses. "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," Edwards said.

"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," she added.

Focus on services

Kantata argues that general-purpose business intelligence tools do not always reflect how professional services firms operate. Rather than simply surfacing raw data, the new system is intended to interpret terms, metrics and relationships specific to consulting, agency and other services-led businesses.

That approach reflects a broader shift in enterprise software, as suppliers try to combine generative AI with domain-specific data models rather than rely on generic chat interfaces. In practice, the usefulness of these systems often depends on whether they understand the structure of the underlying business data and the terminology used by the organisation.

Expertise Insights includes four prebuilt dashboards covering finance, delivery, time and resourcing. These track metrics including margin, revenue per head, cost leakage, project health, utilisation, timesheet compliance, skills availability, capacity and demand.

Users can also move beyond those preset views through a feature called Ask Insights, which generates analysis on demand. Kantata said this can help firms identify patterns or operational signals that may not be visible in standard reports.

The company has also included tools called Bookmarks and Pinboards, which let users save filtered views and one-off analyses without creating duplicate versions of central dashboards. The aim is to reduce the spread of multiple dashboard versions, a common issue in business intelligence deployments.

Customer view

Andy Newbill, Senior Manager of Professional Services Automation at Lumanity, said the product addresses common reporting bottlenecks for services teams. "Professional services firms need to make decisions quickly, but critical business insights are often locked behind complex reporting processes and limited access to analytics expertise," Newbill said.

"The ability to ask questions in natural language and get meaningful, actionable answers changes how firms can use their data to manage performance, optimise resources and drive growth. Expertise Insights makes that intelligence more accessible, helping teams spend less time finding answers and more time acting on them," he added.

Newbill also described time savings from using the system for report creation. "Expertise Insights has made creating reports and dashboards so much easier, saving me a tremendous amount of time," he said.

"What really stands out is being able to describe what I need in natural language and have the system help me build it. I recently created a complex report in an hour using calculated fields that would have taken hours. That's a real shift in how quickly I can get from a question to the insight I need," Newbill said.

AI and context

Kantata linked the launch to a wider debate about the limits of AI in analytics without industry context. It cited Gartner research on agentic analytics and decision intelligence, which argues that dashboards alone are often not enough as business decisions become more complex.

Vikas Nehru, Chief Technology Officer at Kantata, said the issue is not simply adding a chatbot to existing reports. "The promise of AI in professional services isn't about generating more reports or putting a chatbot on top of existing data," Nehru said.

"It's about making the organisation'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," he added.