Kantata launches Agent Studio to curb AI agent sprawl in PSA
Kantata, a professional services automation (PSA) vendor serving more than 1,500 organisations worldwide, has launched Agent Studio, a conversational environment for building and governing custom AI agents without writing code. The product extends Kantata's Expertise Engine and is positioned as a direct response to what the company calls "AI agent sprawl": the proliferation of siloed, vendor-built agents that individually automate narrow tasks but collectively erode visibility and control.
Invoice lifecycle management provider Basware is the named early customer. Mark Johnston, Chief Customer Officer at Basware, said the company is using Kantata to build agents that handle documentation, resourcing and time entry, freeing its professional services team to focus on higher-value client work. Kantata did not disclose how many agents Basware has deployed, nor any productivity or cost-saving metrics.
How Agent Studio works
Rather than requiring developers or AI specialists, Agent Studio lets practice leads, delivery directors and project management office owners describe a job in plain language. The platform's Expertise Agent then builds and refines the agent through dialogue, automatically validating inputs and outputs before publication. Once live, an agent can be triggered manually or via a workflow command.
The approach is designed to encode a firm's delivery standards once and apply them consistently, removing what Kantata describes as the "prompt tax": the repeated re-explanation of context to an AI tool that quietly consumes the time automation was supposed to save. Vikas Nehru, Chief Technology Officer at Kantata, said the goal is to make consistency a property of the platform rather than a function of which individual happens to be staffed on a project.
Chief Executive Michael Speranza said the company's aim is to help firms compound expertise rather than simply automate processes. "Any vendor can give a firm a tool to build AI agents," he said. "But if all you're doing is automating processes, you're just racing to the bottom and simply reducing costs, rather than developing differentiation."
Market context
The timing of the launch aligns with a broader industry anxiety about agent governance. Gartner has forecast that the average Fortune 500 enterprise will run more than 150,000 AI agents by 2028, up from roughly 15 today. At that scale, questions of audit trails, access controls and behavioural guardrails become significant operational and compliance risks, particularly in regulated industries where professional services firms serve as delivery partners.
The PSA software category is increasingly contested. Kantata's established competitors include Certinia, Planview and Unit4, and it faces growing pressure from ERP platforms such as SAP and Oracle that are embedding AI agent capabilities directly into their professional services modules. Hyperscalers are also entering the agentic layer: Microsoft's Copilot Studio and Salesforce's Agentforce both target similar no-code agent-building workflows, meaning Kantata's differentiator will need to rest on its domain depth in professional services rather than the tooling alone.
Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Ted Schadler is cited in the release, arguing that proprietary knowledge embedded in AI models and agents represents the only durable path to competitive advantage. That framing is consistent with the product's design logic, though the company has not published independent benchmark data or third-party validation of agent quality or consistency.
Agent Studio is available to customers now. Kantata's Chief Product Officer Sarah Edwards is available for interview, according to the PR contact. The company has not announced pricing, nor indicated whether Agent Studio is bundled with existing Kantata licences or sold as a separate module.