Kantata Launches Agent Studio for Custom AI in Services Firms

Professional services firms can now build custom AI agents

Kantata has released Agent Studio, a conversational platform that allows professional services organizations to create AI agents based on their own delivery standards and expertise. The tool operates within Kantata's Expertise Engine and requires no coding or AI specialists to build and deploy agents.

According to details first reported by VMblog, Agent Studio addresses a growing challenge in the professional services sector: how to scale institutional knowledge without adding headcount or complexity. Users describe the task they want an agent to handle in plain language, and the system builds the agent through dialogue, automatically validating inputs and outputs before publication.

Why it matters

Most AI agent platforms force firms to choose between buying pre-built agents for narrow use cases or hiring developers to build custom ones. Agent Studio targets the people who actually define delivery standards—practice leads and PMO owners—and lets them encode their expertise directly. This shifts AI from a cost-reduction tool to a mechanism for scaling what differentiates a firm in the market.

How it works in practice

Agent Studio extends Kantata's Expertise Agent, which the company launched in June as what it calls a "superagent" with context across the entire platform. Rather than deploying multiple specialized agents for resourcing, risk assessment, and status reporting, firms work with a single agent that understands relationships across their data and workflows.

Once an agent is published, it can be triggered manually or automatically through workflows using a single command. The platform eliminates what Kantata calls the "prompt tax"—the cycle of drafting, correcting, and reformatting that consumes time when teams repeatedly explain tasks to AI tools.

Basware, which provides invoice lifecycle management solutions, is using the platform to reduce administrative overhead for its professional services team. Mark Johnston, Basware's Chief Customer Officer, said the company is building agents to handle documentation, resourcing, and time entry so practitioners can focus on client-facing work.

Expertise as competitive advantage

Kantata CEO Michael Speranza framed the release around a specific thesis: in professional services, AI itself isn't the differentiator—expertise is. The company positions Agent Studio as a way to capture the judgment of a firm's most experienced practitioners and make it available across every project and client engagement.

This approach aligns with recent analysis from Forrester VP Ted Schadler, who argues that sustainable business advantage requires organizations to capture proprietary knowledge and deploy it through AI models and agents.

Kantata CTO Vikas Nehru emphasized the governance aspect: agents that improvise create risk in businesses where deliverables must meet consistent standards. By encoding standards once and executing them through a governed agent, the platform makes consistency a platform property rather than a staffing variable.

The release comes as professional services software vendors race to add AI capabilities, often by offering multiple specialized agents. Kantata's bet is that firms will prefer a unified approach that lets them define agents around their own processes rather than adapting to vendor-built tools.

These details were first reported by VMblog.