Digital Workforce Services Oyj (DWF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Digital Workforce Services plc webcast. We will have the next hour with you for company presentation and strategy updates. We released the company announcement yesterday on December 3 about company's updated strategy and financial targets for the remainder of the strategy period. Welcome. First, some important information for the audience. We will do the presentation together with our CFO, Heini. My name is Jussi Vasama. I am the Chief Executive Officer of Digital Workforce Services plc. I've been with the company since March 2023. Heini, would you like to introduce yourself?

Yes. Thanks. Hi, everybody. I'm Heini Kautonen, the CFO of Digital Workforce, and I've been with the company a bit over 2 years now since 2022.

All right. That's short and sweet about us. And let's dive into the agenda. We have a very interesting message to share with you, and let's dive into that now. Firstly, we'll go through a brief company presentation, take an overall look at what the company is, what we're doing, what are our main markets, customers, main solutions and the outcomes that we've been delivering for our customers over the course of the years. Then the next part is focusing our strategy update and how we will take the company forward in the next few years. And we'll start with the company presentation and the first picture is a picture that summarizes in broad terms, what we do as a company. We've been a company that have existed for 9 years. Already, since the beginning, we've been focusing on customer value-added business process automation. And we built a platform that we've called Outsmart since 2022, which is only focused on business automation and delivering customer value, unique value, with the best-of-breed solutions and technologies that exist in the market. What we have done as a company have built a unique offering that is providing a platform of services so that we can offer multiple levels of automation for our customers as a service in a model that is easy to digest for the customers, and we work through the use cases, the automation needs, benefits and opportunities for business improvement together with the customers. Over the course of the years, we've done multiple different type of automations with many different organizations starting from task automation of thousands of different tasks that exist in the large organizations in the world, moving into processes that are focusing on certain business areas and certain operations in the companies and large organizations for that matter. And then orchestrating in a complete customer journeys, care pathways and organizing operations for the internal team workers and professionals in the company, but also for the customers, sometimes patients, that work with our customers. The benefits from automation will vary depending on the use case, depending on the scope of the offering and the solution in question. However, we're very much focused on delivering customer value with a selected amount or selected technologies that will fit the use case in question. As you will see throughout the presentation, our line of thinking is that we are a technology neutral company that operates with the leading technologies that exist for different solution areas. And we are the ones combining the solutions for our customers, and that's what's Outsmart about. As I said, we've been working with multiple different industries over the course of the years, and we still do. What's unique for us as a company is that we will -- we have focused a lot on healthcare processes. Here are 2 examples of massive efficiency improvement in selected healthcare processes that we wanted to highlight more specifically to illustrate the customer benefits that we, as an organization, with our specialists in different geographies and different parts of the operations are able to deliver for our customers. Obviously, it boils down to full understanding of the customers' operations and the work life where they collaborate with their customers, patients, in this question, but also building a technology suite that supports the customers' outcomes that they want to achieve in terms of their business. On the left-hand side, we have a solution that we delivered for U.K. NHS organization, a very large organization, which is about patient registration and triage. And obviously, the outcomes were most important for the customer because the situation where we went into the customer was such that the patients were waiting, there were queues in the acute emergency care and also the healthcare workers were consuming a whole lot of time in mundane routine tasks to move patients into the EMR system, to get patients admitted to the hospital or to get to the right treatment. What we did together with the customer was to fully automate and orchestrate the back end of the solution and integrating the self-service registration desk with the hospital's EMR desk so that we could release the time for the healthcare workers to focus on the patients, focus especially on those patients that need urgent care, urgent treatment. And obviously, we were able to speed up the treatment cycle for those patients that needed high intensive care or were more critical and then maybe time prioritize those that could be helped with some other professionals in a slower pace in the organization. Customers are extremely happy. We provide this as a service that runs in our platform, 24/7 as a service. On the left-hand side, it's a different use case. It's about very long-term cancer follow-up and automation and management process. Breast cancer patients in the Finnish hospital are admitted into the process when they have gotten the diagnosis, have gone through first treatments with breast cancer. The follow-up cycle for these type of patients can be 5 to 7 years, even longer sometimes. This consists of multiple check-ins, mammography, laboratory tests, physician meetings and also other healthcare meetings and appointments. And the patients obviously have hard time to navigate in this kind of a chaotic environment of getting treatment and getting the right time and booking the times for their appointments in the right manner. Equally, healthcare workers have been suffering about the fact that the customers are missing their appointments. The test results are not there when needed for the physician to walk through with the patient. And as a result, all of the cancer patients for this particular area in Finland are part of this process now. The patient follow-up wait time has shrinked from 9 months to 1 month. 80% of the patients are handled with no clinical involvement. So no time requested or required from the healthcare workers to be spent with tasks that can be automated. In total, annually, we have automated roughtly 72,000 tasks. These are just examples of what automation can enable and do for organizers that have complex processes a lot of control needs and a lot of critical business operations, patient operations in this case. And this is just a snippet of what we do with our customers and for our customers. As a company, over the course of the year, we are a 9-year-old company. We've been a leader in the market, at the forefront of the market. On the left-hand side, we have a Forrester study that impact a year ago where we've rated as the leader in terms of the offering and our strategy where we say that the world is going and where we're heading as an organization, how we are able to support the customers with their automation challenges and also to enable them to automate processes that can generate even more revenues. On the right-hand side, for that matter, it's very obvious that we are operating in the market as a company that is very rapidly growing. According to independent studies, also 70% of the enterprises still consider themselves as automation beginners. So there are many, many customers in different geographies, in different industries, which have only just started the automation journey. So there's a lot of potential to continue to collaborate with existing customers and obviously totally new customers as well in a market that is rapidly growing. I will hand over to Heini now.

Yes. Thanks, Jussi. I'll just briefly go through our company highlights. For the last 12 months, if we look at our revenue, we are now showing roughly EUR 27 million with a nice double-digit growth this year. We've been focusing since the start of the company to build up as much as possible reoccurring revenue. We are currently at sort of a bit over 60% in the reoccurring revenue share. We've been able to, during this year, increase both our gross margin and our EBITDA margin, which is according to our profitable growth strategy. Our headquarters is here in Helsinki. But since the start of the company, we've had sort of broad geographical presence. We have a center of excellence in Lodz, Poland, where we serve our customers globally. We also operate widely in the Nordics and then in U.K., Ireland and USA. But as I also mentioned, we have a lot of global enterprise clients that we serve from our entities. And we're -- have a strong track record of expanding internationally and growing our customerships there. We're really proud that our customer NPS score is at 55, which is brilliant. Our customers are happy, and we are happy with our customers. And we are always trying to do what's best for them. And in our reoccurring revenue, we have very limited churn, which we are also very proud of that we're able to keep the customerships that we get. And Jussi already mentioned, the company was founded in 2015. And already then, it was clear that in addition to professional services, the company wanted to expand into continuous services and the reoccurring business that's behind that. We swiftly broadened our services in the Nordics and in Poland. And ever since then, also then to U.K. to U.S. [ under the area ]. The company was listed into the Nasdaq First North growth market in December '21. And after that, there was a small strategic acquisition from Ireland to serve our customers also in that region. We've grown from this very traditional sort of RPA service provider to a global business process automation service provider already years ago. And since the IPO, we also released a new strategy with then, for example, healthcare as our sort of focus segment where we want to focus our investments and where we're doing especially well. The last trend that's now been with us for this year are the AI agents, and we truly see them as revolutionizing the whole business process automation and the knowledge work scheme, and this is what we are also then focusing now during this year. Here, you can also see the updated 2026 targets, but I won't go through them now. I will leave that to Jussi in a short while.

Thank you, Heini.

Yes. And yes, one more. As we've already mentioned, the continuous services. The reoccurring business, the sticky one that we really love and are proud of. We've nearly doubled revenue in 4 years. We've had 18% CAGR since 2020. This is something that we can be really proud of and this also brings value to us as a company and also special value for our customers.

Thank you, Heini. As you said already, we are really proud of the development and the kind of advancement of the company in a very tough market condition. It's also great to mention that as Heini pointed out, that we have happy customers that are willing to expand and act as a reference for our continuous services in the market. We see ourselves as a unique company offering this type of continuous services for our customers. Many of the other players in the automation market are reseller implementation companies, whereas we provide a platform of services, fully kind of helping customer to -- not to worry about the technical part of the automation, or if the automations are running, but we are running the automations for themselves and then, of course, further developing the automation for themselves. Now that we are kind of moving into the section where we discuss about the way forward and the strategy update as such. What I want to stress is that the company has actually made a big leap over the couple of years in refining the strategy and through the IPO. And now the investments that we have done over the course of the year into a profitable growth and into the scalability are actually now in -- we are in the stage of the company where we see that we can increase and accelerate as a company and start moving forward and really improve the scalability of the operation. So very exciting time for us as a company, hopefully also for the investors -- investor community as well. So let us take through the strategy update key points of the strategy upgrade and build the picture a little bit further, what's ahead of us. What we released yesterday on December 3 was to update not only the strategy, but also the financial targets and until the strategy -- end of the strategy period 2026. I want to start still with the vision. So we see that we are a company that is empowering organizations to revolutionize work as a #1 partner for business orchestration and automation. We indeed think that we -- what we have in our hands is something that will revolutionize the modern way of working, the knowledge workers' lives in big, large organizations in different geographies and in different industries. We have everything what it takes to make that happen. And that's why we've also decided as a company to open up our numbers and the targets, financial targets, for 2026 in new fashion that hopefully resonates with the audience as well. We have stated now that we're aiming for revenue growth, profitable revenue growth. And the aim is to reach annual revenue of EUR 50 million in 2026. Of that, approximately EUR 40 million is expected to be made through or achieved through organic growth and approximately EUR 10 million through inorganic growth, in other words, M&A. What is also mentioned as a part of our release is the share of continuous services. We aim to increase that to over 70% of the revenues, which will, of course, bring stability into the company's way forward, but also as scalable and profitable part of the -- or more profitable part of the operation, we see that we are in a position as a company that we are raising the profitability targets for 2026. So what we have stated now yesterday was that the company aims to reach an adjusted EBITDA level of over 15 percentage points or 15% by the end of 2026. Let's then discuss about what and how. So we divided the strategy execution into 4 elements, which are all there to aim for shareholder value creation, not only that, also unique customer value that we really hold as a core of the company. If I start from the left -- from the number one, that's a very exciting opportunity that Heini also referred to around the enterprise AI agents. We do see that the technology that is now very rapidly developing in the market is helping us to revolutionize the way large organizations do knowledge work. Some of the technological development will help organizations to automate work that was not financially or otherwise possible before. And we are witnessing development that is very rapid. I'm sure that many of you have seen that in the market. And the use cases that are now sort of being developed and the work is now being carried out helps us to build a plan of actions that basically takes us to a growth path with the new technologies as well and accelerating our growth as an organization. We are partnering with multiple different organizations in this field. We've been testing multiple different technologies around the enterprise AI agents, and we'll continue to do so. We have mentioned Sema4.ai and Microsoft specifically here. We'll continue to work with all of our partners in this field as well. We do have also a team that is fully focused only on these topics as an organization where as we see that it's worth investing into this as a leading player in the market. We will be also launching an AI agent academy to educate and advise the audience and the public on what is this theme about and how can you, as an organization and as individuals, benefit from what's possible. And those are only the near-term activities listed there. We'll come back to these topics in a moment as well in more depth. The transformation of Outsmart automation services core business is there to really make sure that we maximize customer benefits from our productized service offerings. As I mentioned already in the beginning, we have been doing a lot of different types of automations over the course of the year. And our aim is to more focus on certain industries, certain use cases that where we see that we can -- we are in a position to deliver unique value and the business outcomes for the customers that are kind of are ready to take a grip of the opportunities that exist in their operations. We use also AI internally to improve the scalability of our continuos services and the productivity of the automation deployment. Our business consists of professional service and continuous services. So both are equally important, and both will benefit from the technological advancement and AI, namely for us as well. We will also continue to work with multiple different technologies. But in some areas, we will bring in, for instance, open source technologies and solutions for existing customers to help them to move into the areas and territories of operations where maybe the more robust, maybe high-cost solutions are not suitable from a business case perspective. But the whole idea is to really build scalable and standardized solutions also going forward. And some of those already mentioned in this call. Number three, is very much around healthcare and our kind of specialist position in this market. So we've stated that we want to be the market leader in social healthcare, social and healthcare care pathway solutions. So our aim is to change the way patients and clinical professionals operate, collaborate and work during the long-term treatment and follow-up of chronic diseases. We will come back to that, what this really means, and how do we combine the human labor and the machines and the automations in a seamless stream of activities and optimize the customer journey as well. This requires in-depth clinical process understanding. We do have a strategy, as a company, in hiring as well as we hire people that have been in these organizations, have worked with patients, have worked within the hospitals or within the development of the hospital systems or EMR systems so that we are in a position to have a relevant in-depth discussion with the customers and also challenge them to see what could be possible with automation that is already there. Our also aim is also select a certain number of use cases in the field of care pathways where we focus, standardize and then price according to the achieved outcomes. We'll come back to that in a moment as well. We do also especially see that the biggest opportunities for our growth as a company overall are in the North America and in the U.K. and Ireland markets, also in healthcare. We also stated that we want to accelerate the growth through acquisitions. And this goes back to the U.S. and U.K. growth as well. So while we're doing everything in our power to increase the organic growth, we are also looking at inorganic growth and opportunities in the market. The opportunities may lie for instance, in the healthcare vertical or then local market understanding, also automation, technology and expertise may come in question. What matters is a scalability of the operation and such targets that are able to add more volume into our platform would be, of course, something that are of our interest. Our target is to add about EUR 10 million through acquisitions by 2026. All right. We will dive into the topics now with a couple of slides in each part, and I will take you through the first one. So this is a picture that is kind of describing the space of the opportunities. What we see around the revolutionizing the way large organizations do knowledge work. The enterprise AI agent market is really exploring these data points on the left-hand side are from public sources. It's very frequently quoted by industry analysts that the market growth will be very rapid. A lot of that is due to the technology that is available in the market or has been just launched into the market or even will be launched into the market in the next upcoming months and weeks. But already, what we see and what we have now worked with helps us to believe that actually, there is a transformative value that can be gained through AI agents or applying AI agents. Gartner also introduced the business orchestration and automation technologies as a key trend for the future. And why is it relevant to mention here? We've stated that also in our company announcement that our Outsmart platform that was released in 2022 actually covers very well the business orchestration and automation platform statements, what the Gartner analysts have laid out actually this summer. So that's also going back to the kind of the forerunner position in the market. That how do we see the automation technologies play out and how do we see that the value will be generated for the customers in the future. The AI agents will complement and augment the opportunities to automate work, knowledge work and will be an integral part of outsmart value proposition going forward. Obviously, the technology is evolving very rapidly. And what we have now worked with our customers and prospects helps us to believe that actually, where we are now in short term is very much focused on radical cost optimization and working focused on aggressive activities or very active activities to cut costs, hidden costs in the operations and also to gain control and compliance into the operations, prevent losses, prevent frauds in customers' operations. Obviously, there are opportunities for new growth and increased amount of opportunities to generate new type of businesses going forward. That will be coming later when the technology matures. The current use cases are very much around building efficiency into the organization in a very rapid manner, very easy to deploy manner and which requires very little, if any, coding work or similar. What we are currently working with some of the use cases, what we have, for instance, on the health care, health insurance side, public health care, global insurance side and so on and so forth, just to name a few. What's different now here, of course, many organizations have worked with these topics and rightfully so. Some of the big programs that have been running big organizations have been even multiyear IT development efforts. What we have now in our hands and what's possible now with technology is to build on top of that and taking care of the -- using the work and the investments that have built to the organization already and then bring the technology on top of it so that we build an automation of knowledge work that is actually executed automatically, autonomously by the AI agents and touching very complex tasks that were not possible before. the AI agents will also collaborate as virtual coworker for us, knowledge workers in different kind of organizations. So it's very, very important that anybody and everybody building these models need to understand how the organizations work in depth and are able to guide through the customers that are building their first use cases and experimenting with these type of solutions. We do believe that we are in a unique position as a company that we've been working with automation technologies, multiple different technologies for 9 years, very demanding automation in very demanding industries and also in different geographies, providing this as a service so that also customers can benefit from our expertise, what we have built over the course of the year. I will hand over now to Heini, again.

Thanks, Jussi. Now then looking at the second stream, the transformation of Outsmart Automation Services core business. I'd like to first go through basically our business model. So we do value discovery and implementation projects for our customers. And mainly and most strategically, we want these projects to then lead to continuous services. And we want to make sure that our customers' automations operate fully 24/7 smoothly with no issues. And what's also at the core of our business is to enable our customers to maximize their own automation potential by then constantly with new rapid value discoveries and implementation projects to make sure our customers get more and more automations up and running. It is usually so that now we are going to these pay-as-you-go pricing models or value-based so that the customer outcomes are really at the core of our business. And as already mentioned, our continuous services share of revenue is now already over 60%, and we are aiming higher. And as shown before, we can go to the next one. We are now a profitable company. So we are not only looking for growth, but for profitable growth. And our Outsmart platform is at the core of this as well. It is a highly scalable platform where also more volume brings value for our customers and for us as a company. We want to streamline our customers' processes, and we want to make sure that our customers get the most value out of the automations that we're handling for them. We are also doing license resetting for our customers and then, of course, the valuable projects and the value creations that we do for our customers. What we want to highlight as well that when we are moving into this pay-as-you-go and value-based pricing, it brings value for the customer as they are able to automate more rapidly. It brings more value to them. And then also as our platform scales nicely, it brings value for us as a company. So really win-win situation for both sides. And we are seeing a lot of growth potential, especially in the platform services and for us as a company.

Thank you, Heini. I believe we are moving into the next topic, but it's actually a continuation from the previous. So -- and this is around the healthcare, healthcare care pathway solutions and the productization of our offering in this field. What Heini just said, which is very important is the pay-as-you-go model and the outcome-based value creation. So we always think about the outcomes and then start with the outcome in mind when we're starting with the initiatives, what needs to be achieved and how do we prove the value for our customers in these areas. By doing that, we've been very successful over the course of the years. So on the left-hand side, you see some track record of the international health care business growth. We've been adding both customers but also growing the business quite rapidly in -- with our healthcare customers. And it's been very successful this year. We've been also publicly announcing several wins, new customer wins this year, which is very good. And we also see that we are in a unique position of the company, as I referred already to the clinical process understanding and the expertise what we have in the organization from the life and work life in hospitals, but also the pain or the kind of burden of getting service from the patient's perspective, because the people have been working in hospitals and health care organizations to a large extent. And that combined with the automation expertise, the technological know-how in the organization is something that where we believe that we are in a position to actually replicate the successes what we have achieved with different type of use cases in care pathways. So here is just an example with big chronic diseases and geographies. There's an orange square in the bottom of the graph showing and highlighting that there's 50,000 cancer patients, for instance, in Finland, breast cancer patients in Finland. If we look at the expansion opportunity to the other chronic diseases. We already know this public data that prostate cancer will double the amount of patients needing long-term treatments and care pathway management and optimization. Other cancer types, adding to it, getting to 175 cancer patients in Finland, talking about Alzheimer's, other diseases, adding more into that diabetes, getting us only in Finland into 450,000 patients in Finland that all will need long-term treatment and follow-up as a part of their treatment cycles. As we also know that the Western economies working in a very similar fashion, looking at the geographies where we operate and obviously, also Europe, Europe as well highlighted there. And this is basically simple math. So when there's more people actually in the Western economies, unfortunately, these illnesses occur in the same fashion and the data points are very clear that the bigger the society, the bigger amount of people in terms of the population, the more diseases there are. We do see that a lot of what we have achieved with our customers in Finland in this case or in the U.K. in some other cases, one of the examples already shown in this call is something that we can replicate, not 100%, but to a very large extent from one customer to another, one geography to another so that what we have in our hands is scalable and can be further productized going forward and taking the new customers and new health care systems internationally and a very exciting opportunity and very much part of our growth plan as a company. We still do have one topic, which is related to the accelerating growth through acquisitions. Obviously, we -- this is something that is a topic that we need to treat with care. What we want to -- what we have stated as a part of the strategy update is that during the strategy period or by the end of the strategy period, our goal is to complete 1 to 3 transactions in order to achieve EUR 10 million revenue growth through acquisitions. Obviously, these are lengthy processes and require kind of full match from both parties or all parties. But if we take us through a little bit on the rationale, why are we working on this and what are the type of maybe potential targets that we are looking into. We have still relatively small operations in very, very big markets like the U.K. and the U.S. What we can achieve through acquisition is also to bring more muscle into the local markets and also more in-depth knowledge of the healthcare -- local healthcare systems in these markets. While we had really, really nice wins both in the U.K. and in the U.S. with a stronger local team, we think that we could further accelerate our growth, let's say, through acquisitions, for instance. Obviously, this relates to the general understanding of the differences and similarities of the healthcare processes in different parts of the world. The Western healthcare systems are different, some publicly funded and in the U.S., the funding model is very different. But certain processes, certain ways of operating are then very similar from one geography to another, one customer to another as well. Obviously, we have had a focused approach here and we will have a focused approach here. So the likely targets could be coming from healthcare, healthcare and with the aim to increase margin from the repeatability of the solutions from one customer to another and to the target company's customer base as well. And obviously, then as a part of the M&A activities, some considerations would be coming from achieving cost synergies as well. So then we are here with summary. As a conclusion, with the 4 strategic pillars presented on the -- during the call and then repeated on the right-hand side, we do feel that digital workforce is a highly compelling investment opportunity. Just highlighting a couple of topics here. So we are a company that is a leading position in our market that is very rapidly growing. This is not based on our analysis, but independent industry analysts and organizations. We have global enterprise-level customers across industries with particular growth opportunity in healthcare. Also, as pointed out during the call, the customers are very happy, and we have a very limited churn from our existing customers. Our business model is predictable and scalable with high share of recurring revenue. So 60% of the recurring revenue in the last 12 months and also high growth in the recurring revenues from 2022 to 2024. We do have a strong team in place with excellent track record. We've proven ourselves that we can take the solutions and company into international growth and our leadership holds on average plus 20 years of relevant executive and industry experience. We also do a tangible plan for long-term growth and margin improvement. And obviously, the data points in terms of the financial targets that we shared during this call as well, hopefully resonate well with you as an audience and the strategic pillars that we went through as well helps us to communicate where we're heading as a company and how do we go for the opportunity-driven growth as a company. I think that concludes our slide material. I will leave this in front of us and then Heini, do we have some questions from the audience, please?

Yes. We have a couple, and please keep posting those as well. We'll go through some themes here. There's a question that, who are our competitors in the various markets? And what do you see as our competitive advantages in those? So maybe a couple of examples.

Yes, very good question, and thanks for asking. We do have competition, obviously, as every single company has. I would say what we face in our field of expertise and in our industry is some competition from the very big 4 type of consultancy companies that tend to go to the customers with overarching large multiyear development program, and then they might have automation opportunities as a part of their portfolio. But we do rarely see them in head-to-head in our competition. In our automation market, the companies that are fully focused on business automation, business process automation, there are actually very limited amount of companies that are operating internationally at this scale, what we have and are providing solutions, as I already referred to, as a service, as a continuous services for our customers. So I feel that we are unique there. But then there are local players, I think, in each geography that can be 10 to 50 people that can be focused in a special kind of area of operations or in the special industry. And I think sometimes the competition comes from these sources on a local level. I see that we -- I mean, our growth and our win rate in the tough market shows that we are able to win business in very different type of circumstances and against different type of competition. I think largely, it boils down to our kind of strategic choices that we have made, the productization and scalability of the offering and also, obviously, then the way that we have built our business model as a continuous services offering.

Thanks, Jussi. Then there's a couple of questions regarding our M&A strategy and the funding of that. So maybe I can take this one. So I fully believe we have a strong cash position. And also, we are in a position to take more debt if necessary. So there were some questions regarding our financial muscles, so we're doing good and the position is strong. Then one question is regarding our continuous service growth, so what's driving it? Is it new customers? Or is it upselling to our current customer base?

Very good question, and maybe we can both respond to this as well. So I would definitely say that we've been successful in winning new business with completely new customers as well, which is an excellent achievement from the team. And that is not unique in one geography or so, but in multiple different geographies. However, I want to really stress the fact that we have a customer base that is with us for long term. We have really steady growth with customers that have been us with many, many years. Happy to act as a reference and then moving into new territories of automation. As the organizations evolve, as the technology evolves, I think the use cases and the -- how would I say, the demand level or the advancement of the automation as well has gone up with the customers as they have sort of moved forward in their automation journey. So I would say, yes, both existing and new customers.

Yes, I agree. Then one more question regarding our increased profitability targets and what were the main reasons why we did this now. And what gave us confidence to do this now?

Excellent question. Thank you for that. I hope that we were able to communicate as well that what we've -- Heini showed the graph, what the company has done over the course of the years before IPO and since IPO, and we've done a big investment into our platform in 2022 to 2023, end of 2023. And we feel now that what we have built is a scalable operation. So adding more volume, adding more customers into our services, into more productized services will actually be things that will continue to kind of fuel our profitability as a company. Of course, we need to continue to invest into growth going forward. So it's a balancing act. But I would say now that when the top line is growing, the profitability should follow as well.

Yes. Thanks, Jussi. And then maybe one more regarding the organic investments. So where do you see us investing in the future months and years to make this growth and profitable growth possible?

Thank you. So I already referred to the agent AI, the enterprise AI agent. So it is a big investment for us as a company. It's an area where we see -- it's the #1 pillar here mentioned on the right-hand side as well. So there's a definite kind of investment area, also next year. In addition to that, we will continue to add more expertise, vertical expertise, in different geographies step-by-step to provide more kind of scalable muscle in the local operations as well.

Thanks, Jussi. There's a lot of questions. One regarding the 15% adjusted EBITDA target and how big the margin differences are between our services? Maybe I can also say a couple of words regarding this. And then an additional question, what are -- what margin profiles are we looking for in M&As? But if I first answer to the sort of margin differences between our businesses. We showed there visually that the platform business, the Outsmart services, is the most profitable business for us. But of course, we need to do very profitable and good projects as well. But as we see the continuous services business growing, and we want to grow it to over 70% of our business, it's because of a reason that it's more profitable, it's more sustainable, it's more sticky. Maybe do you have insight on the M&A profiles. My comment is that, of course, we are only looking for profitable target companies, not only to grow as a business.

Yes, and maybe still to add to your comments, which were very valid. So I absolutely think that we also will have a professional services business going forward, which is currently profitable, will also, in the future, be profitable. The way of doing these services will change over the course of the year with the technology moving forward and enabling us to provide our customers different services. It's become much, much more important to be kind of understand the customers' business more specifically. So moving towards advisory type of position in certain customer relationships is a likely scenario that should also protect our services margins on the professional services side. Regarding the M&A kind of target profitability or business health, of course, we'd rather look for opportunities that are healthy businesses as a kind of stand-alone operations with potential to add profitable growth into the combined company. So I would really also stress the fact that what is the combined opportunity with the target company that really matters.

Thanks, Jussi. Maybe one more. Do you want to elaborate how the M&A market is looking and what kind of companies there are?

Very interesting question. And we've been scanning the market for quite some time. That's been also a frequent discussion topic in our analyst discussions. It has changed during the last 2 years, during my time in this company as well. I think the kind of the overall sentiment in the market has changed. What I would say that there's now movement in this kind of business automation market as there have been a couple of transactions with -- where a couple of competitors have been acquired over the past few months. So there's likelihood that there are more transactions happening in the market, at least evidence of that. There are some companies that will not be our targets because of their kind of current kind of business health. But as we continue our journey on that front as well, I think there will be plenty of opportunities for us to take a look at.

Thanks, Jussi.

Thank you, Heini. Thank you so much for the audience. I think that concludes our webcast. I hope that you enjoyed our story in the company presentation and stay tuned for more news from Digital Workforce Services. Thank you.

Thanks.