Measuring AI ROI Through Expertise Compounding With Kantata

**Neil C. Hughes** (0:00)
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What if companies are measuring AI success by the wrong scoreboard? Saving employees a few hours, automating routine tasks and cutting costs might look good on a dashboard. But do we really need another dashboard? Well, my guest today is the CEO of a company called Kantata. And he's going to join me today in a conversation around a much bigger opportunity that is turning decades of experience in your enterprise, past projects, client conversations and hard-won lessons and put them all into intelligence that the entire business can use today. So, we'll also look at the rise of the expertise economy, why professional services firms risk becoming indistinguishable if everyone uses AI simply to work faster. But most importantly, how companies can make every customer engagement smarter than the last. We got a lot to talk about today. So, enough for me. Let me introduce you to Michael right now.
So, thank you for joining me on the show today, Michael. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

**Michael Speranza** (1:42)
Hey Neil, great. Thanks for having me.
So, I'm the CEO of Kantata. We are a leading provider of professional services automation software. I've been leading this company for the last four years, but prior to that, we had a number of roles leading various types of software companies, mainly for private equity backed investment firms. And prior to that, I actually started my career as an electrical engineer working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California, but then quickly found my way into consulting, working at Deloitte and other firms. So, the privilege to have the leadership role I have today and excited to help transform this industry.

**Neil C. Hughes** (2:21)
Wow. It's an incredibly cool backstory you have there. And one of the things I was excited to talk with you about today is when we start thinking about AI in the workplace, many companies are feeling under increasing pressure to show return on investment for some of those expensive AI projects. But you've argued that measuring productivity gains and time saved almost misses the bigger opportunity here. So, what are business leaders getting wrong about how they're measuring AI success? Because you can only improve what you measure, right?

**Michael Speranza** (2:53)
Yeah, 100 percent. And I think everybody's struggling to measure the impact of ROI today from AI. I think you look at the firms that are out there using it today, everybody's using it at what I consider to be this level one use case, which is the chat, the assistant that all of us experience every single day. Most folks are trying to graduate to a level two use case where it's automating work and conducting tasks for them. And I think for us in this industry, I think that's going to be the race to zero, right? Everybody is going to rapidly automate things, they're going to really, really struggle to define what ROI they're getting, or am I making an actual, tangible business change because I'm using these chat assistants? And I think most customers we talk to, and even our own firm, I think really struggle to reach that level of critical business decisions with it. And what I think really the next opportunity is, particularly for professional services, is using the technology that's available now to actually unlock a totally different use case for them. And if you look at the way services firms have run for years, it's all built upon tribal knowledge that is stuck inside these organizations, a web of interconnected decisions that need to be made. It's almost like a dance that needs to be choreographed in a certain way. And I think they need to think about how this tool is going to help them dance a better dance.
And not just kind of automate the existing one. And that's what we really see as the big opportunity for our customers out there today.

**Neil C. Hughes** (4:27)
And when I was doing a little research on you before you joined me today, I was reading how you described the real opportunity as the expertise economy. Tell me a little bit more about what you meant by that and why this ability to capture and scale expertise is becoming so valuable right now.

**Michael Speranza** (4:43)
Yeah, so if you really have to understand how a services firm operates, and I'll give you one very simple example. These firms that are running projects, whether it's an IT services firm, a marketing agency, an accounting, an audit agency, they create volumes and reams and reams of information and data and knowledge. And that is their intellectual property.