Kantata debuts Agent Studio to build AI agents by plain language

Kantata's pitch lands in a professional services automation market it says is filling with narrow agents, each scoped to a single job such as resourcing or risk reporting. The company argues that every new one becomes another silo to maintain, and its counter is a single agent that carries context across the whole platform — the Expertise Agent it launched in June. Agent Studio is the build layer on top of that, working through conversation inside the Kantata Expertise Engine rather than through forms or code.

The vendor's argument is less about automation than about differentiation. Chief Executive Michael Speranza said any vendor can give a firm a tool to build AI agents, but that automating processes alone is a race to the bottom. Chief Technology Officer Vikas Nehru put the case on governance, calling an agent that improvises a liability where the same deliverable must hold up in front of a client every time. Basware Oyj's chief customer officer, Mark Johnston, framed the same point from the buyer side: he wants his services team with customers rather than doing documentation, figuring out resourcing and entering billable time.

The wider backdrop, which Kantata cites, is Forrester Research Inc. vice president and principal analyst Ted Schadler's writing 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. Whether Agent Studio delivers on that may hinge on whether practice leads and delivery directors actually adopt it, and on whether the promised governance checks hold up once agents run inside live client workflows. Kantata launched in 2022 after the December 2021 merger of Mavenlink and Kimble Applications, a deal Accel-KKR led, and says more than 1,500 organizations now run its software; the company says Agent Studio is available now and in use by customers.