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Kantata to unlock growth with triple leadership hire. July 29, 2026 Kantata has announced the appointment of three senior executives. They include the appointment of Lisa Bianco as Chief Marketing Officer. It is a position that has been vacant for several months following the departure of Jeff Nicholson. Nicholson has served as CMO from Sep 2024 to Dec 2025. Bianco will lead Kantata's global marketing team and oversee the planning, development, and execution of its worldwide marketing strategy to strengthen the brand, boost demand generation, and increase market awareness. The other two appointments are Jeff Balistrere as Vice President of Enterprise Sales, North America, and Keith Bendy as Global Vice President of the Alliances & Channels Ecosystem. Balistrere will be responsible for expanding Kantata's enterprise go-to-market. He will aim to attract more of the world's largest professional services organisations based in North America to purchase the Kantata Professional Services cloud. Bendy will lead Kantata's global alliances and channel strategy. He will be responsible for building a partner ecosystem that is designed to extend customer value through strategic technology, consulting, and systems integration partnerships. Will Kantata now revamp its partner program as it looks to improve the revenue multiplier that partners can provide? A leading provider of Professional Services Automation (PSA) solutions according to the IDC Marketscape for worldwide AI-enabled PSA applications, Kantata is strengthening its leadership team for growth. These are three key appointments for its go-to-market operations. They bring decades of experience from leading SaaS organisations including SAP, Google and ServiceNow. Michael Speranza, CEO of Kantata, commented, "Professional services is entering a new era, and organizations need more than incremental improvements. They need a fundamentally smarter way to run their business. "Kantata is leading this transformation with AI purpose-built for professional services. And as we accelerate our growth, we're investing in exceptional leaders who know how to scale world-class organizations. Jeff, Keith, and Lisa each bring this experience, and together will help us capitalize on the tremendous opportunity ahead of us." Who is Lisa Bianco? Bianco joins Kantata from DevRev, an AI native enterprise software company where she led global marketing. She helped build the marketing function from the ground up for a company valued at $1.15Bn in December 2025. Before DevRev, Bianco was Global VP of Marketing, Customer and Development Marketing at Red Hat. She joined Red Hat after around 12 years at SAP, where she rose to Global VP Marketing for its CX solutions. During her career there, she also led marketing at Ariba and Fieldglass. Before SAP, she held senior positions at ConnectandSell and HP. Bianco has a BA in Corporate Communications from the University of Toledo. And a postgraduate degree in Purchasing, Procurement/Acquisitions and Contracts Management, Global Payments from Michigan State University. Bianco commented, "Kantata is defining the future of professional services technology, combining category-leading innovation and a deep understanding of the needs of services organizations to create a powerful platform for growth. "I'm joining at a pivotal moment and look forward to working with our world-class team to elevate our brand, expand our market leadership, and help more organizations see why the world's leading services firms choose Kantata." Who is Jeff Balistrere. Balistrere joins from Lucidity, where he was Vice President, Regional Sales for autonomous multi-cloud storage optimization. With a focus on enterprises, that experience will be good grounding for his new role. He was also Vice President of Enterprise Sales at Vcinity, another storage firm. Before that, he had regional sales leadership positions at both Actifo (subsequently acquired by Google) and IBM. He had rejoined IBM after sales positions at Sprint Nextel and Adaptive Trade. Balistrere commented, "Kantata is defining the future of professional services with an exceptional team, passionate customers, and technology built specifically for the way services organizations operate. "The Expertise Engine and our AI innovations create a clear competitive advantage. And I'm eager to empower more enterprise organizations with a platform that can truly transform their business." Who is Keith Bendy. Bendy joins the company after a deliberate break after leaving Sprinklr at the end of 2025. He has deep experience in leadership positions across partner roles, most recently at Sprinklr and WalkMe. Before that, he held alliance roles at Google, ServiceNow and Gainsight. He also held business development roles at Salesforce, CA technologies and NetQoS. In each of his recent roles, he helped build the partner ecosystem. He is now joining Kantata with a challenge to do the same. Bendy said, "Customers increasingly expect technology to work seamlessly across their business, and strong partnerships are essential to delivering that experience. Kantata has a tremendous opportunity to become the most partner-friendly platform in professional services by building deep, strategic relationships that create lasting value for customers, partners, and the broader ecosystem." Strategic implications. These appointments follow a pivotal year for Kantata on the product front. The launch of the Kantata Expertise Engine gave it a differentiated position from many of its competitors. A few weeks ago, it unveiled the Enterprise Agent. This digital worker supports a wide variety of tasks within the context of the Kantata platform, rather than the multitude of agents that are common with other vendors. Kantata now has a product ready to challenge within the enterprise market, and with these hires aims to achieve that. These senior appointments demonstrate that Kantata is investing in people, product and partners. Speranza: "As professional services firms look to AI to improve productivity, profitability, and workforce agility, they don't need more generic enterprise software; they need technology built specifically for the way services organizations operate. "We're investing ahead of the opportunity so we can continue delivering the innovation, expertise, and customer success our clients expect. While extending our leadership in this rapidly evolving market." Enterprise times: what does this mean? Hiring a CMO is an important move by Kantata. Bianco faces the challenge of creating messaging around its professional services cloud that consists of two different applications, Kantata OX and Kantata SX. It will be interesting to see how she nuances the messaging. It should be an easier task than a couple of years ago, as the Expertise Engine and Pulse demonstrate that Kantata now has a set of products that span both solutions. On the partner front, will Bendy revamp the partner program, or what changes will he make to expand it? Bendy's appointment may signal a revamp of the partner program. With the Kantata partner page currently listing only 8 implementation partners, 2 resellers partners and only 3 advisors, the company faces pressure to expand its ecosystem to drive revenue multipliers. If Kantata wants that number to grow, it will have to invest in more than a new head of alliances.

DevRev CEO Dheeraj Pandey has introduced Enterprise-Bench, an open enterprise-AI benchmark designed to address the gap between frontier AI tests and real-world business needs. Whilst frontier tests focus on complex, data-free problems, enterprises face simple tasks with messy data. Pandey argues that pointing models at legacy systems through Model Context Protocol forces speculation and excessive token usage. His solution centres on "enterprise memory", a pre-integrated shared layer evaluated on precision, efficiency and safety. DevRev's Computer harness achieves 90-95% accuracy compared to Claude's 63%, whilst using one-fifth the tokens. The benchmark aims to measure AI performance on practical enterprise applications rather than theoretical capabilities.

DevRev launches Voice AI with shared organisational memory across agents. DevRev, maker of the agentic AI product Computer, today announced Voice AI across its Customer Agent for self-service customer support, extending the same organisational memory already powering chat and email into live customer conversations. By embedding Voice AI into Computer and the agents built on it, DevRev is enabling voice agents to understand enterprise context, reason across business systems, and act while customers are still on the line. Enterprise voice AI is maturing to the point where natural conversation is table stakes as advances in large language models make realistic speech increasingly accessible. Organisations now need AI agents that understand how their business operates, connect information across fragmented systems, and resolve customer problems rather than simply routing them to another queue. A Gartner survey published in February 2026 found 91% of customer service and support leaders are under executive pressure to implement AI, with leaders prioritising first-contact resolution and reduced customer effort over back-office efficiency. Yet deployment is outpacing results. Gartner reported in March 2026 that only 20% of organisations have reduced agent headcount due to AI, and Forrester predicts roughly one-third of brands rolling out AI in self-service will fail in 2026, largely because the data foundations underneath the AI are not ready. Enterprises are buying conversation and discovering they need resolution. "Voice has become another interface for AI," said Manoj Agarwal, Co-Founder and President at DevRev. "The interesting engineering problem isn't making an agent sound more natural. It's giving an agent enough context to make the right decision while the customer is still on the line. In an enterprise, the answer rarely lives in one place. It lives across tickets, documentation, customer records, orders, engineering systems, and business applications. If an agent can't reason within that context, it must eventually hand the conversation to someone who can. Shared organisational memory changes that by giving an agent enough context to resolve a problem instead of simply responding to it." Enterprise memory extends depth of voice automation Computer, by DevRev, builds a shared organisational memory by continuously synchronising information across customer records, support tickets, orders, code, documentation, and business applications while preserving existing permissions. With today's announcement, those same agents can now handle live calls, extending the same organisational memory, permissions, and workflows into another customer channel rather than introducing a separate voice AI product. Many voice agents escalate unresolved calls because they don't have access to the data required to resolve a caller's query. Because DevRev's Voice AI is grounded in the shared organisational memory of your business, it reasons across systems to determine what happened, explains the issue, provides the latest status, initiates the corrective workflow, and documents every action taken, all within a single conversation. When a conversation needs a person, Voice AI hands off to a human agent with the full conversational context intact, so customers never have to start over. Conversations run in multiple languages with the low latency of natural speech, and every call is recorded, transcribed, and available for analysis out of the box. Built for production enterprise AI Voice AI in Computer is designed for production enterprise environments. It connects to existing enterprise telephony through SIP-based integration, and existing DevRev customers can add voice without deploying another AI platform or rebuilding workflows they already run, allowing organisations to extend the same AI agent across chat, email, and voice. Setup is seamless: Computer studies an organisation's business data and ships a working first version of Voice AI within hours, no army of engineers required. From there, it improves with every conversation, recommending weekly refinements based on real performance, so the agent on day ninety is measurably better than the one launched on day zero. Governance carries over with it, and field-level permissions are inherited directly from connected systems. Now, every interaction is auditable, and every action is traceable, so the controls an organisation applies elsewhere remain consistent during a live call. To lead the next phase of its Voice AI strategy, DevRev has appointed Jennifer Heape to lead Voice AI product. Heape brings extensive experience building enterprise conversational AI, including co-founding and leading product strategy at Vixen Labs. "I joined DevRev because the company is focused on what customers actually care about: resolving their issue during the conversation with customer support," said Heape. "A call can sound polished and still be a poor experience if the agent cannot reach the information needed to solve the problem. Customers do not care which system holds the answer. They care whether they have to repeat themselves, wait for a transfer, or call back again. Bringing voice into Computer means the conversation can carry the full business context with it, and that is what makes DevRev's Voice AI so exciting." Why architecture matters The architecture behind Voice AI is the same architecture validated through Enterprise-Bench, DevRev's open benchmark for evaluating enterprise AI systems under real production conditions. Enterprise-Bench demonstrated that enterprise AI performance depends not only on the underlying model but on the architecture responsible for retrieving, reasoning over, and acting on enterprise data. Computer achieved 94.3% accuracy on the benchmark while using four times fewer tokens per correct answer than Claude Code on identical tasks using the same model, showing that the difference came from system architecture and data context rather than the model itself. Voice AI extends that architecture into another customer channel. The same organisational memory that produces trusted answers across chat and email now powers live conversations. Availability Voice AI can be accessed across the agentic suite in Computer.