Gen AI, other initiatives will help us get faster to $1 billion revenue goal: Ashok Soota

Bengaluru: Mid-tier IT services company Happiest Minds Technologies on Tuesday announced its 'AI First' strategy that will lead to an expansion of the company's market size and share, and also enhance its future growth. Last year, the company announced 10 strategic transformation changes to drive the company's growth.

Announcing its 11th strategy, Ashok Soota, Chairman & Chief Mentor of the company said, our 10 strategic changes enabled us to commit to a 10 per cent growth rate for four years. "This is the third year of 10 per cent growth. However, the industry then began to go through a certain additional turmoil, and so one of the changes that we had made in our 10 strategic changes was the creation of Generative AI Business Services (GBS). This is a division focused exclusively on Gen AI," he said.

The company has been maintaining its long-term revenue target of $1 billion by FY31, and Soota said that this revenue target is a very ambitious thing. "We won't lose sight of the billion-dollar goal. Gen AI and these initiatives will help us get there faster," he added.

The IT firm's net profit for the quarter ended December 2025 stood at Rs 40.3 crore, a 19.56 per cent decline compared to Rs 50.1 crore in the same quarter last year. The drop was due to the implementation of the new Labour Codes. "Other unallocable expenses include Rs 22.03 crore towards the impact of Labour Codes for the quarter," the company said in a BSE filing.

Its revenue from operations stood at Rs 587.56 crore, a 10.69 per cent increase compared to Rs 530.81 crore in the year-ago period.

"Given the productivity increases that you're getting from AI, the fact that IT spend is growing," Joseph Anantharaju, Co-Chairman and CEO, told DH. He added that India contributes 18 per cent of the company's revenues.

Anantharaju said enterprises are moving beyond experimentation and are increasingly focused on embedding AI into core workflows and platforms, where the business impact is clear and scalable. "The demand environment remains selective, but increasingly intentional. Customers are not cutting technology spend indiscriminately; instead, they are prioritising initiatives where the business case is well defined. AI-led productivity, modernisation of core platforms, and automation programs are seeing traction as enterprises focus on measurable outcomes and faster time-to-value," he added.

The company is also planning to double down on its AI/GenAI investments and build a dedicated 1,000 team by the end of FY27 from the present 500.

In Q3, the company's EBITDA Margin stood at 20.4 per cent. The company now has 32 GenAI and Agentic AI use cases that have moved beyond pilots into production-grade deployments.

Sridhar Mantha, CEO of Generative AI Business Services (GBS), Happiest Minds, said the company's AI First spans four areas—building advanced AI solutions, AI‑native software development, ITSM, and cybersecurity. "We are delivering AI assistants that go beyond chatbots, domain‑specific copilots embedded in workflows, and intelligent search tools that boost productivity," he said.

He also said that starting Q1 FY27, the company will formally report AI and AI-led sales, encompassing both traditional AI and Generative AI offerings.