Agentic AI Comes to Pro Services
Rocketlane has launched "Nitro," which it describes as the first agentic execution platform for professional services. The platform aims to automate project delivery and risk assessment, promising to cut delivery effort by up to 50% and showing how agent-based AI is expanding beyond core tech functions.
Rocketlane, founded in 2020 by Srikrishnan Ganesan, Vignesh Girishankar, and Deepak Balasubramanyam, has raised a total of $45 million in funding. Its latest funding round was a $24 million Series B in June 2024, co-led by 8VC, Matrix Partners India, and Nexus Venture Partners. The company, with over 500 customers, is using the funds to expand its go-to-market strategy, particularly its outbound sales team in the U.S. Agentic AI goes beyond traditional automation and generative AI by creating systems that can perceive their environment, reason, make decisions, and take autonomous actions to achieve goals. Unlike passive AI that simply responds to prompts, agentic AI can plan and execute multi-step tasks, learn from feedback, and interact with various tools and APIs without constant human guidance. This allows it to move from being an "AI assistant" to an "autonomous engineering assistant." For SRE and DevOps teams, this translates to tangible outcomes like autonomous incident remediation, where an agent can detect an anomaly, retrieve logs, identify the cause, and execute pre-approved fixes. Agentic AI can also assist in deployments by validating release health and triggering rollbacks, augmenting security through continuous monitoring, and reducing alert fatigue by dynamically adjusting thresholds. Enterprises adopting this approach have reported three times faster Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) and a 30% reduction in SRE headcount costs. The shift to agentic AI reframes the role of engineering leadership from direct task management to high-level system design and strategic oversight. The emerging operational model is one of "delegate, review, and own," where AI agents handle the initial execution of tasks like implementation and testing, while engineers review the output for correctness and alignment with architectural goals. This frees up engineers to focus on more complex problem-solving, innovation, and system architecture. Rocketlane's "Nitro" platform automates the professional services lifecycle, from creating a Statement of Work to go-live, by handling configurations, migrations, and validations. It also automates resource management by monitoring timelines and allocations to maximize utilization and profitability. The platform competes in the broader Professional Services Automation (PSA) market against tools like Kantata, Wrike, and Oracle NetSuite.
