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How Kantata is Helping Businesses Unleash the Power of Professional Services
Powerful currents are reshaping the professional services industry. Only the best providers of Professional Services Automation (PSA) software are able to equip their clients with the solutions and expertise they need to stay ahead of the curve. The vendors that lead the charge into a new era of PSA will have the specialized focus and domain expertise to understand the evolving needs of professional services organizations, as well as the scale to turn those needs into ground-breaking solutions.
That’s why Kimble and Mavenlink have joined forces to form Kantata, the #1 provider of PSA solutions according to SoftwareReviews’ Professional Services Automation Emotional Footprint Grid. In this blog, which accompanies our new report “Unleash the Power of Professional Services with Purpose-Built Software,” learn more about why users say Kantata is uniquely able to drive transformational outcomes for their business, as well as how adopting the Kantata Professional Services Cloud can unleash the power of your professional services workforce.
How Does SoftwareReviews Determine Its Emotional Footprint Grid Champion?
SoftwareReviews evaluates 27 aspects of the customer relationship using a net promoter methodology. These ratings include provocative, detailed questions on the experience of working with the vendor, creating a powerful indicator of overall user sentiment for their Emotional Footprint rating.
Kantata was placed at the very top of the list of 13 PSA providers SoftwareReviews evaluated, earning Emotional Footprint Champion status with a 9.3 overall Customer Experience Score. Kantata also led the category with a +93 Net Emotional Footprint score, showing incredible performance across all aspects of the customer relationship.
What Are Customers Saying About Kantata?
Through SoftwareReviews’ evaluation, Kantata was shown to empower users and administrators, who are delighted with the support they receive. According to SoftwareReviews user review data,100% of users agree that:
- Kantata is critical to their success
- Kantata enables them to increase their performance
- They love using Kantata
As a purpose-built industry cloud designed for specific needs of professional services organizations, Kantata’s unique breadth and singular focus on the professional services industry puts it at the vanguard of innovation in the PSA category. From the introduction of Talent Network capabilities that transform how services businesses work with their external workforce, to ground-breaking innovations on the Salesforce platform that bring information in Sales Cloud, Revenue Cloud, Tableau, Slack, and so much more, Kantata is leading the way and unlocking transformative opportunities for its clients.
SoftwareReviews’ results confirm Kantata’s role as a leader in the PSA category, with high marks for continuous improvement of their products, their capacity to help clients innovate, and ultimately their ability to inspire clients to reach new heights. This has enabled Kantata to exceed customer expectations by delivering exceptional value through a unique and comprehensive portfolio of industry-focused products and capabilities across multiple platforms. With the Kantata Professional Services Cloud, a better, faster, more efficient way of doing business is possible today.
Unlocking Sustainable Growth and Long-Term Success With Kantata
The professional services industry is rapidly changing, and the technology needs of professional services organizations are changing just as quickly – leading professional services teams across the globe are working with Kantata to stay ahead of the curve. With Kantata, today’s businesses can give their teams the clarity, control, and confidence they need to make true, lasting success in the constantly evolving professional services industry possible. What could adopting the Kantata Cloud mean for your professional services organization?
Learn more about what’s possible with Kantata in our new report, “Unleash the Power of Professional Services with Purpose-Built Software,” which highlights key insights derived from the SoftwareReviews’ Professional Services Automation Emotional Footprint Report.
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The Impact of Shifting Talent Pools on a Changing Labor Market
On the latest episode of Kantata’s Professional Services Pursuit Podcast, our hosts Brent Trimble and Banoo Behboodi discuss how the professional services talent pool is shifting, both in terms of what employees expect from the organizations they work for and the values they want to see when applying to work at a new company. This episode highlights recent research by McKinsey & Company, which reveals more and more individuals are leaning towards contract work or running their own business as opposed to taking a more traditional career path. This blog is a snapshot of some of the key themes of the episode, focusing on the three main drivers behind the shifting labor market. You can listen to the entire 30-minute episode or read the transcript here.
Why is the Talent Pool Shifting?
In reference to what McKinsey calls the “The Great Attrition,” co-host Brent Trimble lays out a few reasons behind the current state of the labor market and why businesses are experiencing such a high degree of change. One reason is that individuals in the workforce are reshuffling — they’re not only leaving their current position, they’re leaving their current industry entirely and starting a brand new career path. The second reason behind the shifting labor pool is the gravitational pull of temporary, contract, or consultant-like work, which is pulling people away from full-time employee roles
- More Flexibility
When it comes to how employees think about flexibility, co-host Banoo Behboodi says, “ultimately they’re doing what they’re doing because they’re looking for either more flexibility, more meaningful work, compensation or a healthier work-life balance…we seem to have stepped into a completely revolutionized way of looking at what workplace flexibility means.” Working remotely has become the norm, with talent spread across locations, time zones, and even countries. Employees want flexible schedules and options outside of the traditional expectations of commuting to an office and reporting Monday through Friday, nine to five. - Healthy Work-Life Balance
Core to the change in the labor market is a fundamental shift in how people approach a healthy work-life balance. People want to be able to both work and take care of responsibilities at home without the fear of burn out. Brent refers to this evolution as people “reassessing the demands of life…re-evaluating and maybe looking at all this time that traditionally they would have spent either commuting or on business travel and now saying, let’s fill this with something else.” Being able to work not just remotely, but work for yourself or on a contract-basis gives individuals some time back that they did not have before. They are looking for jobs that allow them to have a healthy and balanced life outside of the “office.” - Opportunities for Career Advancement
In today’s market, individuals expect the opportunity to learn, evolve, and advance within an organization. Banoo points out that “one of the top motivators is career development and advancement and what companies are doing for them from that perspective…There should be paths for individuals that are comfortable being individual contributors to also make career advancements.” In McKinsey’s research, 41% of individuals being surveyed chose to leave their job due to lack of career advancement opportunities. You have to be willing and eager to invest in your employees if you would like to attract and retain top talent.
How to Adapt to the Changing Labor Market?
Nearly all industries are feeling the impact of the shifting labor market. While the task of adapting to new expectations and shifting values may seem daunting, Brent provides three suggestions for where to start.
- Sharpen your traditional employee value proposition and provide career development options.
- Build a non-traditional value proposition — flexibility, personal relationships between employees, positive and engaging culture, and different forms of career progression — and make it more personal.
- Broaden your talent sourcing approach, looking at people with non-traditional backgrounds.
Want to Learn More?
If you’re interested in learning more, you can listen to the entire 30-minute episode or read the transcript at this link. Subscribe to the The Professional Services Pursuit Podcast for expert advice, trends, and best practices surrounding professional services.
- More Flexibility
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Professional Services 2026: When AI Becomes A Billable Team Member
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Looking Ahead: 7 Trends & Predictions for Professional Services in 2026
The calendar may say 2026, but the shift in the professional services industry has been happening for some time.
Across consulting, agencies, and technology services firms, leaders are feeling the pressure from every direction. Clients are more outcome-driven. Talent is harder to scale. Delivery models are evolving faster than org charts can keep up. And while data is abundant, clarity often feels scarce.
What’s becoming clear is this: The firms that thrive in 2026 will not be the ones that worked harder in 2025. They will be the ones that re-thought how value is created, measured, and delivered.
Based on industry research, customer conversations, and insights from leaders across the industry, here are our top seven trends and predictions shaping professional services in the year ahead…and beyond:
1. Human + AI Hybrid Teams Become the Default Operating Model
Whether or not to use AI in professional services is no longer a question. Firms now need to go a layer deeper and ask themselves, “where does AI belong and how intentionally is it used?”
In 2026, high-performing firms will treat AI as an operational partner, not a simple productivity tool. AI agents and human team members will work together to create a faster, more efficient, and more effective delivery lifecycle. Administrative work, forecasting, scenario modeling, and pattern recognition will increasingly shift to AI. Human expertise moves up the value chain toward decision-making, creative problem solving, and client trust.
This hybrid model reshapes capacity planning, utilization strategies, and even changes how teams are staffed.
Firms that succeed will design workflows with AI embedded from the start, not layered on after inefficiencies appear. Firms that struggle will be the ones still asking individual teams to experiment in isolation without a shared operating vision.
2. Outcomes Replace Hours as the Primary Measure of Value
Time-based billing is no longer the gold standard.
Clients are increasingly focused on business outcomes, not effort expended. Being on time and on budget isn’t enough if the work doesn’t move the needle. As recently highlighted by Kantata’s Chief Product Strategy Officer, Sarah Edwards, in Forbes, projects can hit every internal metric and still leave clients dissatisfied.
“Organizations that nail outcomes become irreplaceable strategic partners. They command premium pricing because they’re not selling hours or deliverables; they’re selling business transformation.”
-Sarah Edwards, “Your Projects Are On Time And On Budget—So Why Are Clients Unhappy?”
In 2026, leading firms will define success in terms of impact, not hours. That means clearer success criteria, tighter alignment between delivery and client goals, and pricing models that reflect confidence in results.
This shift also demands better visibility. You cannot price or deliver to outcomes if you can’t reliably measure performance across teams, projects, and portfolios. Benchmarking evolves from an annual exercise into an ongoing discipline that informs decisions in real time.
Firms that cling to hours as the primary value metric will find themselves in conflict with client expectations — putting them at risk of being replaced by firms that focus on outcomes and impact.
3. Trusted Data Becomes a Strategic Advantage
It doesn’t matter how much data you have if you can’t trust it.
Too many firms operate with fragmented data, where disconnected systems function on their own and create chaos rather than cohesion. And while AI can help organize this information, it can only use what it is given to work with.
As delivery models grow more complex, leaders need confidence that the information in front of them reflects reality. Decisions about hiring, pricing, and investments can’t wait for reconciliation cycles or manual validation.
While 88% of services leaders say they trust AI outputs enough to use them in operational decisions, 89% are still spending a significant amount of time verifying those outputs.
– Kantata’s 2025 State of the Professional Services Industry Report
In 2026, data is no longer a scattered, back-office concern. This year, it’s moving front and center. And firms with trusted, connected data will move faster and with more conviction. They will be able to plan with confidence, forecast accurately, and course-correct early — and they’ll achieve this with the help of AI.
Those without that trust will hesitate. And hesitation is expensive in a market that rewards speed and accuracy.
Understand where the services industry is today — and where it’s headed in the year to come with Kantata’s 2025 State of the Professional Services Industry report.
4. Resource Management Becomes a Strategic Discipline, Not an Operational Task
Talent scarcity has evolved. Rather than chasing utilization targets in isolation, firms are increasingly focused on deploying the right expertise at the right moment. Resource management in 2026 is less about filling seats and more about optimizing impact.
This requires better visibility into the skills and availability your resources bring to the table. It also requires leaders to think beyond short-term staffing decisions and plan capacity against long-term growth strategies.
As Kantata’s Director of Customer & Market Insights, Charles Gustine, recently shared with Resource Management Institute, firms that treat resourcing as a strategic lever will unlock higher margins, stronger employee engagement, and more consistent client outcomes.
Those that do not will continue reacting instead of leading.
“The next year will demand a new kind of resource management. AI is starting to take its place as a working member of your team rather than an experiment or side project. Delivery models are tilting toward outcome accountability. Data trust will determine which firms accelerate and which stall. These changes are already influencing how leaders evaluate talent, structure projects, and make day-to-day decisions.”
-Charles Gustine, “The Top 3 2026 Resource Management Predictions You Can’t Ignore”
5. Benchmarking Becomes Continuous and Contextual
Annual comparisons tell you where you were, not where you are going. That’s why future-forward firms are shifting toward continuous benchmarking that reflects current performance, peer context, and strategic goals.
This allows leaders to ask better questions. Are we improving fast enough? Where are we ahead of the market? Where are inefficiencies compounding risk?
“Our new reality demands a new measurement mindset that reflects how professional services businesses actually create value. That means moving from counting inputs to understanding outcomes, and from lagging indicators (“what happened?”) to living systems (“what’s emerging, and what should we do about it?”).”
-Sarah Edwards, “Benchmarking as a Way of Life: Measuring Services Like It’s 2030”
In the year ahead, benchmarking will be embedded into operational rhythms, not reserved for board decks. It becomes a way of life that informs daily decisions across delivery, finance, and leadership teams.
6. Expertise Becomes the Product, Not Just the Service
Clients are no longer just buying deliverables; they’re buying judgment, foresight, and confidence. They’re buying expertise.
That’s why firms that can scale expertise without diluting quality will stand apart. This means codifying knowledge, enabling teams with better insights, and using technology to amplify human judgment rather than replace it. AI plays a large role here, but can only be effective when paired with intentional design and governance.
By clearly articulating and operationalizing their expertise, services organizations can command stronger differentiation and pricing power — setting them up for sustainable success as the industry continues to shift.
7. Leadership Shifts from Control to Enablement
As delivery becomes more dynamic and distributed, leadership models must evolve. Command-and-control approaches slow decision-making and stifle innovation. The leaders who succeed in 2026 and beyond will focus on enablement.
“Today, delivery is dynamic. Teams are fluid. Projects evolve mid-flight. AI agents are quietly doing their share of the work. And the best consultants aren’t just billing time — they’re building IP.”
-Sarah Edwards, “Benchmarking as a Way of Life: Measuring Services Like It’s 2030”
They will invest in systems that provide clarity instead of oversight. They will empower teams with trusted data instead of manual approvals. And they will align incentives around outcomes instead of activity.
This is not about letting go. It is about leading differently.
The Future Starts Now
The future of professional services is not arriving all at once. It is already unfolding across firms that are willing to rethink long-standing assumptions.
Hybrid teams, outcome-based value, trusted data, strategic resourcing, and continuous benchmarking are not trends to watch from the sidelines: These are the capabilities services organizations need to build now.
As you plan for the years ahead, the most important question may not be what tools you adopt, but how intentionally you redesign the way your firm operates.
For a deeper look at where the industry stands today and what leaders are prioritizing next, explore Kantata’s State of the Professional Services Industry Report and related research. The insights within are designed to help you move forward with clarity, confidence, and purpose.
Because the firms that define the next era of professional services will be the ones that act before the future forces their hand.
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The Future Is Semantic, Not Agentic: Why Knowledge Graphs Will Win the Race
The AI world is currently obsessed with “Agentic AI.” We hear constant buzz about autonomous agents that can open tickets, schedule meetings, and send emails. They promise to act.
But in the $20 trillion professional services industry, action without deep context is chaos.
The true transformation isn’t about how many tickets an AI can open; it’s about how intelligently that AI understands the relationship between a client’s request, the firm’s best historical response, and the resource budget. This capability is not “agentic;” it is semantic.
The Agentic Blind Spot: Why Action Without Context Fails
Traditional automation and simple RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems suffer from a fatal flaw: they are syntactically accurate but semantically shallow.
In other words, while these systems are excellent at recognizing the specific words or “keywords” you use (the syntax), they lack a true understanding of what those words actually mean in the specialized context of your business (the semantics). They see the data, but they don’t understand the relationship between the pieces.
When a services firm is tasked with creating a $1 million proposal, the AI needs to know:
- Not just that “Senior Consultant Jane Doe” has a Skill called “Cloud Migration” (syntactic).
- But that Jane Doe (Person) worked on the “ABZ Project” (Project) for the “Finance Domain” (Client Context) which resulted in 30% higher margins (Outcome) using the “Tier 1 Architecture Framework” (Methodology).
If your AI only connects keywords, it misses the entire story — the context, the consequence, and the expertise.
The Foundation: Knowledge Graphs Unlock the Path Forward
This is where the Expertise Engine that Kantata recently announced fundamentally shifts the paradigm. We believe the future of service intelligence is rooted in a proprietary Knowledge Graph (KG) — the architectural backbone that provides semantic mastery over the entire services domain.
This architectural approach — connecting disconnected dots into a unified map of context — is gaining significant industry-wide traction. As Dharmesh Shah, CTO of HubSpot, recently articulated in his piece on Context Graphs, the next generation of AI value comes from the intersection of “The Model” and “The Graph.”
At Kantata, we are doing exactly that. The Knowledge Graph gives the system a true “digital brain,” defining the relationships that general LLMs simply cannot infer:
- Defining the Domain: The KG maps every entity in your business: from Resources (nodes) to Skills, Projects, Client Industries, SOW Clauses, and Financial Outcomes (edges). This creates a unified map of your entire firm’s expertise.
- Unlocking Tacit Knowledge: Using specialized NLP, the Engine ingests messy, unstructured content (emails, meeting notes, project docs) and automatically extracts, tags, and connects these entities. It transforms a consultant’s implicit know-how into explicit, queryable relationships.
- Deep Traversals: Only a KG allows the system to perform “deep link analysis” — for example, instantly answering: “What is the lowest-risk engagement team we can build for a new FinTech client using only resources who delivered >95% margin on a project with similar regulatory compliance issues?”
Semantic Supremacy: Why This is Better for Services
In professional services, the ultimate goal of AI is not simple automation; it is precision in prediction, pricing, and people deployment.
AI Focus Shallow Agentic Systems (RAG/Keyword) Semantic Mastery (Knowledge Graph) Talent Matching Matches skill to a keyword Predicts project success based on the relationship between skill, project type, and past outcome. Risk Mitigation Flags a keyword (“Risk”) Identifies a dependency failure by tracing the relationship between a sub-task and a critical SOW clause. Proposal Generation Inserts boilerplate text found in a document Synthesizes complex pricing justifications by linking the proposed hours to the proven history of success in the client’s industry. Conclusion: From Action to Intelligence
Agentic systems (the “doers”) are only as smart as the knowledge they can access. The current industry trend focuses on building faster legs for an AI that is fundamentally uninformed.
The Kantata Expertise Engine reverses this. By prioritizing the construction of a “digital brain” first, and establishing semantic mastery over the entire services domain, we ensure that every action our AI agents take is rooted in the collective, measurable wisdom of your organization.
It’s time to stop chasing fleeting agentic features. It’s time to invest in the semantic foundation that will define competitive differentiation for the next decade.
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Kantata Awarded Built In’s 2026 Best Places to Work Recognition
Irvine, Calif, Jan. 14, 2026 — Kantata, a leading provider of AI-driven Professional Services Automation (PSA) solutions, today announced it has been recognized by Built In as one of the Best Places to Work in 2026. The annual awards honor employers across the U.S. whose benefits and compensation set the standard for today’s workforce.
Now in its eighth year, Built In’s Best Places to Work program celebrates the companies shaping the future of work. In a rapidly evolving AI-first job market, recognition as a Best Place to Work helps employers stand out as
trusted brands when candidates turn to tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews to research where to work next.“Earning a Best Place to Work award not only signals to candidates that you invest in your people, it’s a lever to strengthen how AI search tools understand and represent your company’s story,” said Maria Christopoulos Katris, Founder & CEO of Built In.
Kantata was honored on Built-In’s “Best Places to Work in Los Angeles in 2026” list. The awards reflect Built In’s data-driven approach, evaluating companies based on compensation, benefits, and company-wide culture programs.
“This recognition means a lot to us because it reflects the culture we’ve intentionally built, one rooted in trust, care, and high performance,” said Gina Hartigan, Chief People Officer at Kantata. “Our team shows up every day to do meaningful work for our customers and for each other, and we’re proud to create an environment where people feel supported, challenged, and empowered to grow.”
To learn more about the 2026 Best Places to Work program and view all winners, visit: https://employers.builtin.com/best-places-to-work/.
About Kantata
Kantata takes professional services automation to a new level, giving people-powered businesses the clarity, control, and confidence they need to optimize resource planning and elevate operational performance. Our purpose-built cloud software is helping over 1,500 professional services organizations in more than 100 countries focus and optimize their most important asset: their people. With Kantata, PS firms gain access to the information and tools they need to win more business, ensure the right people are always available at the right time, and delight clients with project delivery and outcomes. To learn more, visit http://www.kantata.com.
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For more media information, contact:
Lisa Hendrickson/LCH Communications for Kantata
516-643-1642
lisa@lchcommunications.com -
Kantata Survey Reveals that 87% of Professional Services Teams Plan to Manage AI Agents as Part of Their Workforce
New industry research shows AI agents are moving from experimentation to operational necessity as firms face worsening resource constraints and rising client expectations
London and Irvine, Calif, Jan. 8, 2026 – Eighty seven percent (87%) of professional services organizations plan to use AI Agents as part of their workforce, according to the annual State of the Professional Services Industry Report, sponsored by Kantata, a leading provider of Professional Services Automation (PSA) solutions. Nearly nine in ten (89%) professional services leaders also agree that future revenue growth will depend more on how effectively they scale AI than on how they scale headcount, underscoring a fundamental shift in how firms expect to grow.
For professional services firms, resourcing is now a challenge that spans both human capacity and AI capability. More than 66% of professional services organizations report turning down work due to resourcing constraints, while the share of leaders citing skill availability as a barrier has climbed to 68%, up from 45% in the previous year, signaling that talent shortages are intensifying rather than easing.
As firms turn to AI agents to fill these gaps, execution is emerging as the primary constraint: managing and integrating AI agents into delivery workflows is cited as the top resource and project management challenge professional services teams are facing. Reflecting this shift, 90% of leaders say their systems will need to attribute work, costs, and value across both humans and AI agents in the near future, exposing limitations in traditional workforce and financial models.
“The State of the Professional Services Industry report reveals a sector at an inflection point,” said Micheal Speranza, CEO of Kantata. “The conditions that defined success in professional services for decades no longer apply. Artificial intelligence isn’t just knocking on the door of service delivery anymore; it’s already inside, rearranging the furniture. It’s reshaping how work gets done, how value is created, and how firms compete.”
AI is already making an impact. Among organizations using AI to optimize essential processes, the results suggest tangible performance gains:
- 54% report more efficient project execution
- 53% report improved proposal quality and win rates
- 52% report improved forecast accuracy or utilization
Those gains are becoming increasingly critical as commercial pressures intensify. Client expectations continue to rise across multiple dimensions, with 72% of respondents citing higher expectations for quality of work, 51% for speed of delivery, and 47% for transparency. At the same time, profitability remains under strain: 70% of respondents say margin pressure is a top concern, outpacing a focus on topline growth (62%). Despite advances in tooling and analytics, execution gaps persist, with more than half of firms (54%) reporting that at least 10% of their projects miss budget goals.
As reliance on AI increases, confidence in the data that underpins service delivery is deteriorating. Just 12% of professional services leaders say they fully trust the data in their systems, down from 24% last year, with respondents citing limited transparency from AI outputs, siloed data, and duplication issues as key contributors. While 88% of respondents say they trust AI outputs enough to use them in operational decisions, nearly the same share (89%) say they spend a significant amount of time verifying those outputs.
“This moment isn’t about technology alone — it’s about leadership,” added Speranza. “Every services firm can see the same forces at work. The difference will come down to the choices leaders make now: whether they use AI to optimize around the edges, or to fundamentally raise the bar on how their firm delivers value, proves expertise, and competes.”
These findings are based on a Kantata-sponsored survey of 200 professional services leaders conducted by Censuswide to gain a better understanding of where the industry is now — and where it is headed in the year to come.
For additional insights and survey findings, download a full copy of Kantata’s State of the Professional Services Industry Report at: https://www.kantata.com/resource/2025-state-of-professional-services.
About Kantata
Kantata takes professional services automation to a new level, giving people-powered businesses the clarity, control, and confidence they need to optimize resource planning and elevate operational performance. Our purpose-built cloud software is helping over 1,500 professional services organizations in more than 100 countries focus and optimize their most important asset: their people. With Kantata, PS firms gain access to the information and tools they need to win more business, ensure the right people are always available at the right time, and delight clients with project delivery and outcomes. To learn more, visit www.kantata.com.
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For more media information, contact:
Lisa Hendrickson/LCH Communications for Kantata
516-643-1642
lisa@lchcommunications.com -
Kantata Recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape for Worldwide AI-Enabled PSA Applications
Irvine, Calif and London, Jan. 6, 2025 – Kantata today announced that it was recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Professional Services Automation Applications (PSA) 2025–2026 Vendor Assessment (Doc #US50655623, December 2025). Kantata delivers AI-driven PSA software purpose-built for professional services organizations and supports more than 1,500 customers across over 100 countries.
The IDC MarketScape evaluated 12 vendors in the worldwide AI-enabled PSA applications market and positioned Kantata in the Leaders Category. The assessment provides a comprehensive evaluation of vendors’ current capabilities and long-term strategies, helping professional services organizations identify solutions that can support increasingly complex, project-centric operations.
“We’re honored to be recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape for AI-enabled PSA,” said Michael Speranza, CEO of Kantata. “We believe the recognition reflects both the breadth and maturity of our PSA platform today and the mission guiding us forward — to transform how professional services firms sell and deliver their work by applying AI in ways that go beyond efficiency to fundamentally change how services organizations compete and grow.”
According to the IDC MarketScape, “Kantata’s AI strategy is straightforward and easy to understand. It is focused on transforming professional services by integrating AI to automate tasks, provide actionable insights, and improve project outcomes.”
“As AI becomes embedded in enterprise applications, professional services organizations are rethinking how PSA systems can help them operate more efficiently and deliver better outcomes across the project lifecycle,” said Mickey North Rizza, Group VP, Enterprise Software at IDC. “Kantata is recognized in this IDC MarketScape for its clear AI strategy, positive customer feedback around implementation and post–go-live support, and a product customers see as foundational to their future professional services operations.”
At the core of Kantata’s AI strategy is the recently-announced Kantata Expertise Engine, which captures the expertise embedded in every project, decision and interaction, curates that knowledge, and surfaces it when teams need it most. Built around a domain-specific language model trained on a proprietary services ontology, the Expertise Engine powers a new generation of AI-driven Accelerators that reimagine the PSA user experience through the lens of what AI uniquely enables — ensuring firms are continuously learning from every engagement and applying that knowledge to deliver better outcomes over time.
About Kantata
Kantata takes professional services automation to a new level, giving people-powered businesses the clarity, control, and confidence they need to optimize resource planning and elevate operational performance. Our purpose-built cloud software is helping over 1,500 professional services organizations in more than 100 countries focus and optimize their most important asset: their people. With Kantata, PS firms gain access to the information and tools they need to win more business, ensure the right people are always available at the right time, and delight clients with project delivery and outcomes. To learn more, visit www.kantata.com.
About IDC MarketScape
IDC MarketScape vendor assessment model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of technology and service suppliers in a given market. The research utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that result in a single graphical illustration of each supplier’s position within a given market. IDC MarketScape provides a clear framework in which the product and service offerings, capabilities and strategies, and current and future market success factors of technology suppliers can be meaningfully compared. The framework also provides technology buyers with a 360-degree assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and prospective suppliers.
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For more media information, contact:
Lisa Hendrickson
LCH Communications for Kantata
516-643-1642
lisa@lchcommunications.com -
Kantata Partners with Avalara to Deliver Integrated E-Invoicing Solution
Enables professional services organizations to optimize payment and cash collection, and streamline global invoicing compliance within Kantata PSA
LONDON and IRVINE, Dec. 9, 2025 – Kantata, a leading provider of professional services automation (PSA) software, today announced it is partnering with Avalara, the agentic tax and compliance leader, to deliver an integrated e-invoicing solution for professional services organizations. This partnership will allow organizations to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and address compliance with global e-invoicing mandates.
More than 60 countries worldwide have announced or already have mandates for e- invoicing, a number that could more than double by 2030. Additionally, a growing number of countries have introduced other digital reporting requirements, including live reporting of invoice data and e-reporting of international sales and purchases. As the number of mandates for e-invoicing and other digital reporting requirements increases, it will become more challenging and expensive for professional services organizations to address compliance without the centralized approach that this new solution offers.
“E-invoicing has become a global mandate, not a local checkbox, and businesses need scalable technology to keep up,” said Meg Higgins, SVP of Global Partners at Avalara. “Avalara’s AI-first vision turns compliance into a strategic advantage, reducing complexity and risk so businesses can scale with confidence. We’re proud to partner with Kantata, the first PSA vendor to offer Avalara-powered e-invoicing, to deliver next-generation capabilities to customers worldwide.”
With Kantata’s expanded partnership with Avalara, Kantata SX customers can:
- Quickly support e-invoicing models by country or region. Kantata SX will connect to Avalara’s global API to fulfill e-invoicing mandates, including digital signatures, QR codes, and tax authority clearance and approvals.
- Easily access e-invoice exchange networks and government platforms. Organizations can connect to national and international networks, like Peppol, as well as government e-invoicing platforms directly from within Kantata SX.
To learn more about Avalara’s E-Invoicing and Live Reporting capabilities, click here.
“As regulatory complexity accelerates, professional services organizations need more than point solutions — they need partners who anticipate what’s next,” said Lucy Butterton, VP of Product Management at Kantata. “As the first PSA solution to collaborate with Avalara on e-invoicing, we’re delivering advanced compliance capabilities that combine Kantata’s specialist PSA functionality with Avalara’s agentic tax and compliance expertise, empowering our customers to confidently navigate complex e-invoicing regulations.”
Kantata’s expansion into e-invoicing brings a critical compliance capability into the operational systems utilized by professional services firms to manage projects, resources, and financials. As global e-invoicing and digital reporting requirements increase, firms must ensure accuracy across international transactions while maintaining clear visibility into revenue, margins and cash flow. By partnering with Avalara on e-invoicing, Kantata is enabling customers to manage e-invoicing requirements within the same platform they use to coordinate delivery and forecast performance, reducing manual processes and helping organizations keep pace with rapidly evolving compliance standards.
Kantata has been an Avalara Certified partner since 2019. Certified partners pass a series of criteria developed by Avalara to ensure the connector’s performance and reliability, thereby helping mutual customers benefit from a seamless experience with Avalara’s tax compliance solutions.
About Kantata
Kantata takes professional services automation to a new level, giving people-powered businesses the clarity, control, and confidence they need to optimize resource planning and elevate operational performance. Our purpose-built cloud software is helping over 1,500 professional services organizations in more than 100 countries focus and optimize their most important asset: their people. With Kantata, PS firms gain access to the information and tools they need to win more business, ensure the right people are always available at the right time, and delight clients with project delivery and outcomes. To learn more, visit Kantata.com.About Avalara
Avalara is the agentic tax and compliance leader. For more than two decades, Avalara has developed one of the most expansive libraries of tax content and integrations in the industry, supporting over 43,000 businesses and government entities across more than 75 countries. The company’s purpose-built AI agents automate end-to-end compliance processes with greater precision, from tax calculations and return filings to exemption certificate management and beyond. For more information, visit Avalara.com.Read the full release on BusinessWire.
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For more media information, contact:
Lisa Hendrickson, LCH Communications for Kantata
516-643-1642
lisa@lchcommunications.com -
When Expertise Becomes Infrastructure: The Era of the Enterprise Expertise Graph
In the relentless pursuit of efficiency and innovation, enterprises have spent years collecting data – in data warehouses, CRMs, project management tools, and countless documents. Yet, a fundamental challenge persists: understanding how expertise truly moves, compounds, and drives success within the organization.
The next evolution of enterprise intelligence isn’t just about collecting more data; it’s about making that data truly intelligent, contextual, and actionable. Welcome to the era of the Enterprise Expertise Graph.
Beyond the Static Document: A Living System of Expertise
Forget dusty internal wikis or siloed spreadsheets. By 2026, forward-thinking technology vendors will make it possible for services firms to build Enterprise Expertise Graphs as a matter of course.
Think of an Expertise Graph as a living map of how your organization actually works: a system that connects your people, your projects, your outcomes, and the knowledge generated along the way.
This isn’t a theoretical concept; it’s the infrastructure for a smarter, more agile business. These next-generation knowledge graphs will go beyond static documentation, constantly learning and evolving from every:
- Proposal won: What combination of skills, pricing, and project scope led to victory?
- Engagement delivered: Which resources excelled on specific project types, and why?
- Result achieved: How did particular decisions or technical approaches influence the ultimate outcome and client satisfaction?
- Challenge overcome: Where did the team pivot, and what new knowledge was gained?
Over time, the graph becomes a compressed history of how your firm succeeds — not just what you did, but how and why it worked.
The “Why Now?”: Unlocking Exponential Value
Why does this shift to an Expertise Graph matter so much right now?
- Scaling Expertise, Not Just Headcount: The traditional model of relying on a few scarce experts doesn’t scale. An Expertise Graph allows the collective wisdom of your entire organization to be leveraged by every employee, accelerating learning and elevating overall performance.
- AI’s True Potential: AI’s power isn’t in generating generic answers, but in providing context-aware, deeply relevant insights. An Expertise Graph provides the rich, connected context that allows AI to surface:
- The optimal combination of skills for a new project.
- Historical precedents for tackling a novel client problem.
- The “who knows what” instantly, bridging knowledge gaps.
- Proactive risk identification based on past project patterns.
- Future-Proofing Your Business: In a volatile market, the ability to adapt, learn, and rapidly deploy the right expertise to the right problem is paramount. The Expertise Graph becomes your organizational immune system, constantly evolving to meet new challenges.
From Information Overload to Intelligent Action
Imagine a consultant facing a complex client integration, an engineer debugging a tricky system, or a sales leader crafting a custom proposal. Instead of sifting through fragmented systems, the Enterprise Expertise Graph (often integrated into an AI-powered co-pilot) can instantly surface the right expert, the relevant past project, the crucial document, or the critical lesson learned.
This isn’t just about saving time; it’s about making expertise a quantifiable, compounding asset. It’s about empowering every individual to tap into the collective genius of the entire organization, driving smarter decisions and unprecedented levels of success.
The era of the Enterprise Expertise Graph isn’t coming; for leading organizations, it’s already here, transforming how knowledge powers progress.
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Provus and Kantata Announce Strategic Partnership to Solve Revenue Leakage in Professional Services
Integrated solution connects sales estimation to project execution, empowering services organizations to deliver faster, with greater accuracy and margin control
San Jose and Irvine, California— November 17, 2025 — Provus, a leading provider of AI-powered services estimation, pricing, and quoting solutions, today announced a strategic partnership with Kantata, a provider of professional services automation (PSA) software. This partnership addresses a critical challenge in the professional services industry: margin erosion caused by disconnected systems, manual processes, and delayed project execution.
Designed to close the gap between sales and delivery teams, the Provus and Kantata integration eliminates costly, manual handoffs across CRM, CPQ, and PSA systems and enables organizations to move from quote to execution with full operational control. Once a quote is approved in Provus, detailed project structures including work breakdowns, resourcing, and budget constraints are automatically generated and transferred into Kantata. Project data from Kantata also flows back into Provus, powering continuous improvement of future estimates and pricing accuracy.
“Margin leakage starts the moment a deal is signed and only accelerates with every handoff,” said Stawan Kadepurkar, CEO of Provus. “Our partnership with Kantata eliminates that friction by connecting quoting directly to project execution giving organizations a smarter way to deliver with full margin visibility.”The Provus and Kantata integration has the potential to deliver measurable financial impact for services organizations, helping improve pricing accuracy and margin control, increase operating profit with better resource utilization, and accelerate cash flow by streamlining billing and reducing Days Sales Outstanding.
“This partnership bridges a critical gap that has long challenged services organizations,” said Vikas Nehru, CTO of Kantata. “By combining Provus’s AI-driven quoting precision with our professional services automation platform, we’re giving teams the ability to move from estimation to delivery without losing time, margin, or momentum. It’s a smarter, faster way to operate and a necessary step forward for firms looking to scale profitably.”
This joint offering is designed for high-growth PSOs, consulting divisions, and enterprise delivery teams. Learn more about the Provus and Kantata partnership at https://www.provusinc.com/kantata/
About ProvusProvus is the AI quoting platform that helps services companies quote faster, price smarter, and deliver with confidence. By replacing manual processes with AI-native quoting, Provus connects sales, delivery, operations, and finance teams in a single space that turns complex services into profitable projects every time. Trusted by enterprise customers including Thoughtworks, Trace3, and GlobalLogic, Provus has helped services organizations reduce quote cycle times by 70% while achieving 100% quote accuracy and improved margin control. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in San Jose, Calif., the company is backed by Norwest, Accel, and Storm Ventures. Learn more at provusinc.com.
About KantataKantata takes professional services automation to a new level, giving people-powered businesses the clarity, control, and confidence they need to optimize resource planning and elevate operational performance. Our purpose-built cloud software is helping over 1,500 professional services organizations in more than 100 countries focus and optimize their most important asset: their people. With Kantata, PS firms gain access to the information and tools they need to win more business, ensure the right people are always available at the right time, and delight clients with project delivery and outcomes. To learn more, visit www.kantata.com.
Read the full release on Business Wire.
Media ContactsKantata:
Lisa Hendrickson, LCH Communications for Kantata
516-643-1642
lisa@lchcommunications.comProvus:
Christina Fankhanel, Attractful for Provus
480-392-3121
Christina@attractful.com -
Benchmarking as a Way of Life: Measuring Services Like It’s 2030
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from nearly three decades in professional services, it’s that our industry has a fascinating relationship with measurement. We love metrics. We live by them. But sometimes, we forget to ask if they’re still measuring what actually matters.
That’s the conversation I’ll be diving into at the Leaders in Consulting Summit 2025, alongside Connor Budden from Service Performance Insight (SPI) and Stephen Edward from PTS Global, in our mainstage session, “Measuring Services Like It’s 2030: Rethinking KPIs, Benchmarks & What Really Matters.”
Because the truth is many of the KPIs professional services firms still rely on were designed for a world that no longer exists.
Yesterday’s KPIs Can’t Power Tomorrow’s Business
Let’s be honest: the metrics that defined the professional services industry for the last twenty years — utilization, billable hours — were born in an era where work was linear, predictable, and almost entirely human.
But 2025 has made one thing painfully clear: that world is gone. Today, delivery is dynamic. Teams are fluid. Projects evolve mid-flight. AI agents are quietly doing their share of the work. And the best consultants aren’t just billing time — they’re building IP.
So when firms tell me they’re still defining success by how many hours their people work, I feel a pang of worry. It’s a little like measuring a Formula One car by how much fuel it burns. It tells you something, sure — but it’s not the thing that wins races.
The KPI Crossroads: From Counting Inputs to Understanding Outputs
Our new reality demands a new measurement mindset that reflects how professional services businesses actually create value.
That means moving from counting inputs to understanding outcomes, and from lagging indicators (“what happened?”) to living systems (“what’s emerging, and what should we do about it?”).
The smartest firms I talk to aren’t chasing more dashboards — they’re rethinking the DNA of performance measurement itself. They’re asking bigger questions:
- How fast does our organization learn?
- How consistently do we reuse what we know?
- How quickly can we redeploy capability when demand shifts?
- How effectively are humans and AI combining to deliver results?
- And increasingly: How balanced is our portfolio of services? What’s repeatable and low-margin, what’s high-value and differentiated, and are we evolving that mix fast enough?
These go beyond operational questions to existential ones. They tell you how adaptable your business is — and adaptability will be the currency of the leading professional services firm of 2030.
Evolving KPIs for the Expertise Era
What matters to services leaders is clearly changing — and if we believe the old credo “you measure what matters,” then what we measure has to change too.
When we talk to firms, the themes are remarkably consistent:
Outcomes vs Hours Tribal Knowledge Deliver More, Better “We need to shift from headcount growth – to scaled output.” “When someone leaves, we lose critical expertise.” “We have no way of modeling people vs. agent delivery.” “We can’t prove impact consistently.” “We’ve got 200 interpretations of what a proposal is.” “Delivery teams are set up for failure from the start.” “We don’t measure after… we just move on.” “We don’t draw from actual deliveries to inform scope.” “How do we measure and price for revenue growth?”
If these are the problems that matter, the next generation of KPIs won’t just be prettier charts of the same old numbers. They’ll look different — and they’ll behave differently. Here’s how I think the scorecard starts to evolve.1. Outcomes vs. Hours → Proving Impact, Not Just Effort
We’ll still care about utilization and revenue per head, but they’ll be joined by metrics that explicitly link work to value, for example:
- Outcome Reliability: % of engagements where the promised business outcome is achieved on time and on budget.
- Time to First Value: how long it takes from kickoff to the first measurable client benefit, not just “go-live.”
- Outcome Uplift per Client: improvement in key client KPIs (conversion, cycle time, cost-to-serve) across the relationship, not just per project.
These answer the question our existing KPIs dodge: “Did it actually work?”
2. Tribal Knowledge → Expertise that Survives Turnover
If losing one person means losing the playbook, you don’t have a sustainable business. Future KPIs will track how well expertise is captured, reused, and adapted in order to support the ongoing evolution of the business:
- Expertise Retention Index: the proportion of a departing expert’s methods, templates, and patterns that are captured and remain in active use.
- Knowledge Activation Ratio: % of live delivery that uses approved playbooks, assets, or frameworks rather than one-off inventions.
- Scope-from-Reality Rate: % of new proposals that are based on data from past deliveries (actual effort, risks, and outcomes) instead of guesswork.
These tell you whether your organization gets smarter with each engagement, or simply older.
3. Deliver More, Better → Designing the Right Mix of People and Agents
As AI agents take on real work, “more” and “better” stop being synonyms. We’ll need KPIs that describe the shape of delivery, not just its volume:
- Delivery Readiness Index: a pre-kickoff score that looks at whether the right skills, assets, and agents are in place before you start.
- People–to–Agent Mix Ratio: how much of delivery work is human vs. AI-assisted, and how that mix correlates with margin and client satisfaction.
- Revenue Quality: the share of revenue that is recurring, expansion-friendly, or tied to long-term value vs. one-off project bursts.
Taken together, these metrics move us past “Did we staff it?” toward “Did we staff it intelligently — and did that design actually pay off?”
4. Portfolio Balance → Evolving the Services Mix
Underneath all of this sits the portfolio view. In an AI-driven, fast-changing market, it’s no longer enough to have a long list of services; you need a balanced and evolving portfolio:
- Portfolio Mix Index: the split between low-margin, repeatable services and high-value, differentiated services.
- Differentiated Win Rate: win rate on offerings where you truly stand apart vs. commoditized work.
- Portfolio Evolution Rate: how quickly revenue shifts toward newer, higher-value offerings over time.
These measures force a different conversation: not “Can we chase this bespoke opportunity?” but “Does this opportunity fit the portfolio we’re trying to build?”
From Lagging to Leading: Where Benchmarking Fits
Once you start thinking this way, another realization hits:
It’s not just the KPIs that are evolving — it’s your entire relationship with benchmarking.
Historically, benchmarking has been a periodic sense-check. Once a year (if that), you’d look at a report and ask: “How do we stack up on utilization, margin, win rate?” Helpful, yes — but by the time you get the answer, this year’s problems have already rolled into next year.
In the future, the most valuable benchmarks will be:
- More leading than lagging.
Are our skills keeping pace with demand? Is our client health trending up or down before renewal? Are our people-to-agent ratios creating the margins we expected? - More contextual.
How do firms like us perform — in our industry, size band, business model — not just “the average PS organization”? - More continuous.
Not a snapshot, but a feed. Not “last year’s ranking,” but “where we sit this quarter and whether we’re getting better.”
This is exactly why we’re so excited that Kantata is the first vendor with access to SPI Inside.
SPI has spent almost two decades building the richest benchmarking dataset in our industry. Until now, it’s largely been something you looked at outside your operational systems — a powerful mirror, but still separate.
With SPI Inside, we’re turning that mirror into a live reference point inside the system professional services leaders use daily to drive impactful decisions:
- You’ll be able to see how your utilization, margins, time-to-value, or revenue mix compare to peers as you operate.
- As you experiment with new KPIs — outcome reliability, expertise reuse, people vs. agent mix — you’ll be able to understand where you’re out in front and where you’re drifting behind.
- Benchmarking stops being an annual event and becomes a way of life: an always-on conversation between how you’re performing and what great looks like.
In other words, continuous benchmarking is what turns an evolved scorecard into a self-correcting system.
Why This Matters Now
We’re heading into a decade where the firms that win in professional services will:
- Treat expertise as infrastructure — captured, reused, and continuously evolved, not just something that lives in people’s heads.
- Measure client health and outcome reliability as rigorously as utilization.
- Understand how humans and AI combine to create value — and design for that.
- Continuously evolve and rebalance their portfolio of services — knowing when to lean into repeatable offerings and when to double down on the differentiated work where they truly win.
- Use continuous benchmarking to stay a few steps ahead of both the market and their own bad habits.
That’s the world we’ll be exploring at Leaders in Consulting 2025: not just new KPIs, but a new relationship with measurement itself.
Because if we’re serious about thriving in the AI-powered services era, it’s time to stop measuring like it’s 2015 — and start measuring services like it’s 2030.