A conversation with Kantata

I recently sat down with Sarah Edwards, who has transitioned from Chief Product Officer to Chief Product Strategy Officer at Kantata. The difference, according to Edwards, is that her new role will enable her to look outwards to discover and discuss with industry experts, and to drive Kantata and its internal experts to lead the market. The role still sees her setting the product strategy, but the intent is to drive thought leadership across the industry.

She will work closely with Vikas Nehru, CTO, who will execute on the product side. He will be taking on some of the responsibilities of Chief Product Officer, those that are more inward-facing. There is no intent to hire a new Chief Product Officer, though. It is, however, an interesting iteration.

Edwards concluded, “I’m going to focus outwardly. How do we lead this market? How do we get that continuous feedback loop to drive the innovation and change that we want to?”

Product(s) Strategy

Kantata still has two products within its portfolio, Kantata OX and Kantata SX, the latter built on the Salesforce platform. Those two products are still at the heart of the Kantata strategy. Each solution is tailored to work to meet the needs of specific organisations.

Edwards shared that the company is also building capabilities that deliver value across SX and OX. Edwards commented, “We’re building once, but delivering twice, and that will continue to be our strategy.”

One of the first capabilities was Kantata Pulse, a solution that measures project health across both products. Kantata also recently announced its Expertise Engine. In addition to these portfolio-wide solutions, Edwards confirmed that the company will continue to invest in SX and OX.

I asked Edwards whether, by focusing on their own platform that they would continue to leverage Salesforce-specific capabilities that they cannot leverage for OX. Edwards answered, “We will still absolutely leverage the platform capabilities with SX.

“A lot of particularly larger enterprise customers choose SX where they’ve embedded in that Salesforce platform, and they want to leverage that platform, to support the sort of sophisticated needs of their business, and that will continue.”

Edwards believes that by building their own platform, they are also giving customers a choice. With pricing, especially from Salesforce, still being worked out, this could become quite attractive for SX customers. Edwards added, “We’re offering customers choice, whether you’re on the Salesforce platform or not. So even our Salesforce-based customers will have a choice of technologies they can leverage. “

Agentic AI and Technology Strategy

Why didn’t Kantata integrate OX with the Salesforce Agentforce 360 platform that was announced at Dreamforce this year? The answer is that Kantata is building something very specific for service businesses.

Kantata’s domain-specific language model and knowledge graph architecture will enable them to respond differently depending on the type of service business – for example, whether an organisation is a consulting firm (PSO) or a services team embedded in a software company (ESO). They are developing that further, given enough data for the model to be nuanced down to a specific customer.

Edwards said, “This is about building something that has proprietary intelligence built into the core, that is tailored and understands the professional services industry, which is what we’re building at the moment with the Expertise Engine.”

You have described the Expertise Engine as having layers like an onion. Could you explain?

“We’re building a small language model that has within it a services knowledge graph at the outer layer. It understands how you run a services business. What’s the service life cycle? It understands the concepts of projects, people, and time, and how they are connected.

“We then take that down an onion layer to how do we make that specific to a particular industry? How do we make that specific to a particular customer, since some customers’ projects can look very different?

“Even within a customer, projects can look very different. We want to build a language model, a knowledge graph, and an Agent orchestration that comes with built-in intelligence. We’re already proving some of this, and we’re testing as we build.

Kantata already has its first beta customer, and the system can determine whether a project will be successful with better predictions than a generic LLM. What is the early feedback on the new capabilities?

“We’ve had fantastic feedback and have the longest beta waiting list we’ve ever had when we launched the Expertise Engine. We’ve now got a beta group, and early feedback on value has been really positive. People get the fact that this is about transforming the way they work and introducing new ways of working.”

Why is this strategy important?

Why did you take the step you’re calling the ‘Expertise Engine,’ and what value do you see in the long term? It’s a bold move, and there’s a lot of work to be done for it compared to maybe just picking off individual agents?

Edwards answered, “There is, but I don’t think services firms will survive without that. I fundamentally think expertise has to be amplified and continuously evolved now more than ever. It’s probably been something that services firms have never been great at. It just becomes a race to the bottom; someone will do it, cheaper, better, faster than you.

“We’re taking a bit of a longer, bolder view that this needs to be transformational. Expertise is at the core of that. I need agents that automate and supercharge my expertise. I still need people, but I need people who are continuously evolving and developing that expertise.

“It can’t just sit in one person’s head anymore. I’ve got to share that expertise and build repeatable IP from it, which is something firms haven’t traditionally been very good at doing.”

Two products and how many platforms?

While Kantata is building its own platform, it is not building everything from scratch. Edwards highlighted that it will not be building a generative business intelligence platform; instead, it is leveraging AWS QuickSight. Both OX and SX customers can take advantage of this. For workflow integration, it has partnered with Refold.

To remain competitive, Edwards confirms it will offer choice both on and off the Salesforce platform. Edwards concluded, “We will pick the best technology solutions that enable us to deliver quickly, reliably, securely, but also at the right price point.

With two PSA products, how do customers identify the right product? Edwards admitted there is an overlap, but most customers spend time identifying the best product for them. She summarised the differences.

Edwards explained that SX is built for sophistication, and customers that are fully embedded on the Salesforce platform, typically its much larger customers, the likes of Deloitte, Finastra and Hitachi. Customers often have multiple language requirements and complex permissioning and workflow needs. SX has strong revenue management.

What about Kantata OX

For OX, she explained it as more of a corporate solution, with quicker time to value and lower total cost of ownership, suitable for emerging enterprises. However, it does have some larger customers. OX is focused on core PSA features, including resourcing and delivery. However, she acknowledged that as the market moves towards an annuity basis, Kantata will improve its financial management.

I asked Edwards what the strategic direction for Kantata OX is, in terms of the target market going forward?

She answered, “Our direction with OX is to continue to take it up market. That is reflected in some of the things we’ve launched over the last six months, like, for example, some of the increased financial management capabilities. OX already has more sophistication to support more enterprise needs.”

If you’re taking OX upmarket, what does that mean for SME customers?

Edwards answered, “We’re typically selling to organisations of 50 people and above. I don’t think we have any desire for an off-the-shelf offering for 10 users. We do continue to serve those (smaller) corporate customers, but for a lot of those, it’s about how do we help them get to that next stage of growth.”

On integrations

The Expertise Engine will leverage the existing integrations with platforms such as Salesforce and SAP that Kantata already has. The next phase, according to Edwards, is to build integrations that combine structured or unstructured data, beyond the standard integrations to ERP, HR, and CRM.

Edwards revealed that they are looking at integrations with SharePoint, Google Docs, and even Zoom. The intent is to pull in unstructured data to surface insights. As for ERP integrations, Kantata works with several, including Sage, Workday, SAP and NetSuite. Edwards is seeing more demand from the industry for integrations with applications such as HubSpot and Jira.

On Dreamforce news

At Dreamforce, I asked vendors what they intend to do with Agentforce 360 in 2026. Edwards said that Kantata will be looking to work with implementation partners to leverage Agentforce with Kantata SX. It has already improved the APIs in Kantata SX to enable agent-to-agent orchestration. However, she reiterated that it plans to build its own orchestration platform for agentic AI.

Within that orchestration platform, Kantata is building accelerators that build a capability that combines multiple agents. Edwards describes the accelerators as solutions; the first is the sales accelerator. This gathers data from past projects and automatically scopes the project or current projects for the RFP responder. It will profile the project’s risk and score the customer’s sentiment, the project’s scope, the project’s cost, and more.

Another key message from Dreamforce was the evolution of Slack into the next generation of UI. Edwards revealed that Kantata is not seeing that as a trend yet, and most customers are currently using Teams. The Kantata direction is to give a richer embedded experience within Kantata itself. She added, “Our customers get a lot of value from the UI and the Kantata screens.”

In the future

What’s next, beyond Gen BI, beyond the Expertise Engine, or is that enough to be getting on with?

“To be honest, it’s enough to be getting on with. We’ve been clear about the roadmap for the Expertise Engine, which we will focus on for the next 12 to 18 months. We’re also looking at acquisitions. We won’t build everything ourselves. There may be some strategic acquisitions along the way.”

You talk about expertise, but what about soft skills? How will Kantata support their development?

“This is a great example of how AI can help with new data sources. For example, by listening to calls and getting feedback on how well I manage stakeholders during calls. How do I get sentiment feedback? How do I use that to understand whether someone needs to develop their communication or softer skills in a particular area?

“Gone are the days when skills are just technology skills. Those softer skills become even more important. That’s where you can start to pull in additional data sources to really sort of track and monitor that expertise.”

The book question

What was the latest book you read?

“I’ve just been on holiday, and I’ve read quite trashy novels. I did read a business-related one called The Names (by Florence Knapp, Amazon AUS, UK, US). It was quite a good story about someone who’d been given three different names and what happened to them. She called her son three different things. And there was a bit more to the story than that, but it was quite interesting.

“Maybe you could resonate that with what’s going to happen in the future here. We are taking a slightly different path than other vendors. It would be interesting to see where we land if we were to fast-track 12 or 18 months down the line. Maybe that even relates to why we’ve called it an accelerator. We’re calling it something different because we are building something different.”

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