Persistent Systems Banks On AI Revolution To Drive Growth

The artificial intelligence pivot happening in the technology space will drive the growth story for Persistent Systems Ltd., the company’s Chief Executive Officer Sandeep Kalra has said.

The Pune-based multinational technology services company had on Tuesday reported a 23.4% year-on-year increase in net profit for the quarter ended September 2024 at Rs 325 crore. This was driven by the company's focus on AI services as well as the strategy, Kalra noted.

“This (growth) was led by our healthcare life sciences segment followed by BFSI (banking, financial services, and insurance). We saw reasonably good growth in both segments followed by tech, where we are seeing a good revival,” he told NDTV Profit in a conversation.

Kalra said that the IT industry was at an interesting cusp at the moment. The top executive said that while most people focused on factors like the macroeconomic environment and the US elections, AI is bringing in a big change.

“There’s a much bigger pivot happening on the technology side, and that is the AI pivot at a broader level,” he explained.

The top executive said that Persistent Systems’ investments in AI over the last six quarters have helped it significantly.

“We are seeing good traction based on our AI for a tech platform called Sasa and our AI for business platforms like AAJ Hub and so on,” the CEO said.

“That, in my mind, for Persistent, will be the growth story—very differentiated from the sector—and that should give us sustainable growth going ahead,” he added.

The top executive revealed that Persistent Systems is working on the development of its AI platform SASVA.

“We do believe, from what we see, the ramp-up will happen over the next 2–3 quarters. We expect the tech sector to turn around for us,” he said.

Kalra revealed that as the company ramps up its business, it will need to hire more people but AI will have a solution for that as well.

“We hope that as we use more AI platforms, we need not necessarily have a linear increase in headcount concerning our revenue increase,” Kalra said.

“From that perspective, we are trying to use the latest technologies that we are evangelising to our customers to be operationally efficient—whether in our own operations or service delivery to our customers. We believe there is scope to keep utilisation where it is and have better margins as we go along,” he added.

Shares of Persistent Systems on Wednesday closed 10.94% higher at Rs 5,722.75 per share, as compared to the benchmark Nifty 50’s dip of 0.15%.