Why Kantata Is Building a New Expertise Engine for Professional Services

Yesterday, Kantata’s CEO Michael Speranza wrote about the crossroads the professional services industry is facing. The old ways of scaling services have run their course. In the age of AI agents, headcount can’t be the growth engine anymore. Clients won’t settle for “hours delivered” when what they need are outcomes that move their business forward.

Today, at Kantata Converge, I’ll be unveiling what comes next: the Kantata Expertise Engine, a bold redefinition of what Professional Services Automation must become in the AI-native era.

PSA Has to Do More

Traditional professional services automation (PSA) tools were built to optimize the back office: track time, manage resources, generate invoices. Helpful, yes. Transformative, no. At best, they automated the status quo.

But today’s services leaders need more than automation of yesterday’s model. They need a platform that powers tomorrow’s growth, that connects everything a firm knows and has achieved, and turns it into a living, compounding advantage.

What PSA Must Do for the Leaders of Tomorrow

The leaders of the next decade (heck, even the next two years) will not win by adding headcount. They will win by putting their expertise to work, every project, every deliverable, every conversation, every insight, across their entire business. PSA must evolve to:

• Scale the repeatable, specialize in the invaluable: Automate low-margin, commoditized work, while amplifying human creativity, relationships, and deep domain expertise.
• Prove impact, not just effort: Pricing and positioning will shift from hours worked to outcomes delivered, requiring PSA to link delivery directly to client value.
• Blend people and AI agents: The future of services is hybrid delivery. PSA must orchestrate both seamlessly, measuring value in outcomes, not in who (or what) performed the task.
• Continuously learn and improve: Every project, task, decision, and conversation must feed back into a platform that surfaces what works, predicts risks, and guides the next best action.
• Make every consultant your best consultant: With AI-powered expertise woven into daily workflows, the knowledge of your most seasoned people becomes accessible to everyone. New team members can act with the same confidence, decisiveness, and quality as your veterans — raising the baseline of delivery across the entire firm.

Any system that can do that isn’t just a back-office tool. It’s the operating system for a new era of services.

Why Only PSA Can Do This

Unlike static knowledge management systems that store files and templates in isolation, PSA sits inside the living flow of work. Services aren’t static — they’re not a collection of files or a library of slides. They are living, dynamic experiences where expertise is applied in the flow of work.

Think about it:

• Knowing that a “risk log” exists isn’t valuable on its own. What matters is when that risk was flagged — early in the project or right before go-live?
• A deliverable template is just a file — until you know how it was used: Did it save hours of rework? Did it land well with the client?
• A project milestone means little unless you can see the effort it took — the hours burned, the scope shifts, the team dynamics that shaped the outcome.

Because PSA is embedded in the way projects are staffed, delivered, and measured, it is uniquely positioned to capture these dynamics and turn them into institutional expertise. And with the Kantata Expertise Engine, PSA finally fulfills that destiny.

How the Kantata Expertise Engine Makes This Real

The Kantata Expertise Engine transforms every action your firm takes into institutional expertise, so that every new engagement starts stronger, smarter, and more predictable than the last.

Powered by this foundation, Kantata is introducing Accelerators — practical, high-impact solutions that make expertise actionable:

• Sales Accelerator: Automatically turns past successes into winning proposals, complete with AI-driven scoping, pricing, and case studies.
• Staffing Accelerator: Instantly assembles the best-fit team of people and AI agents, factoring in skills, experience, and even employee goals and sentiment.
• Delivery Accelerator: Guides project execution in real time, predicting risks, surfacing collective insight and proven playbooks, and equipping every consultant to deliver with the confidence and quality of your best.
• Forecast Accelerator: Provides smarter revenue, margin, and effort forecasts — based not just on hours, but on real delivery patterns and outcomes.

Together, these accelerators will create a continuous learning flywheel: every proposal, every project, every client interaction strengthens the next, paving the way for your best proposal, your best margin, your best client outcome, and your best consultant every time.

A Bold New Future for PSA

Kantata has always believed that PSA should be more than a system of record. Today, we’re making it the system of expertise.

With the Kantata Expertise Engine at the core, PSA evolves from tracking what you did into guiding what you should do, helping firms go beyond running their businesses, instead setting them up to transform them for the AI-native future.

Be sure to attend tomorrow’s sessions at Kantata Converge to see the first preview of this vision in action.

Register for Kantata Converge 2025 today!