Hello everybody. A warm welcome to Digital Workforce Investor Day. Welcome to participants here at Sanoma House in Helsinki, , and those of us who are joining through webcast. My name is Jussi Vasama, I'm the CEO of Digital Workforce. I have here with me Laura Viita, our CFO. How are you, Laura?
Very well, thanks. Excited.
Could you give us a short introduction on our menu and agenda for today?
Sure. Good afternoon, and I will take you through the agenda. Okay, disclaimers, so consider yourselves warned, but the agenda of today. I hope that in the coming two hours we are able to open up what we do, and of course, why we would be an interesting investment. First of all, after a while, there will be an introduction to Digital Workforce made by Jussi. What we do, how we do it, what makes us different from the others? After him, there will be Karli Kalpala, our Head of Strategy and AI Agent Business, who will do a bit of deep diving in disrupting knowledge work through agentic AI, which is one of our very exciting strategic projects.
After him, there will be a short break, and after the break, Juha Nieminen, the Chief Growth Officer of Global Healthcare, comes on stage to share the healthcare market latest updates, especially the care pathway automation, which is another interesting strategic area. After Juha, Jussi comes back and goes through our outsourcing and transformation services shortly. In the end, I will be back on stage and talk about our strong track record in accelerating profitable growth and the accounting change for licenses. We will have a Q&A at the end, so please keep your questions to the end. If you're watching us over the live webcast, you can put in questions at any time, and we will take them up at the end. How's that?
Sounds great. Thank you so much, Laura.
Good.
Let's start.
I'll leave you.
Yeah.
Stage is yours.
Thank you so much. Thank you so much. On we go. It was about 18 months ago when we were here last time talking about our renewed strategy. It feels to me that a lot has happened in the market and in the company, and I'm very pleased to share where we are and where we're heading as a company with our colleagues, as Laura just stated. Indeed, we are in a moment in our market, in our economy, that there's a lot of things happening in the market. If we look at what the major investors, venture capitalists have stated in the market, the statements are bold and very transformative, disruptive.
Sequoia Capital, venture capitalist who has invested in Apple, Google, many very successful global leaders have stated that, just a couple of weeks ago, the next $1 trillion company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm. We have discussed this thoroughly with our board of directors and actually see that that's something that we are on as a company as well. We've been actually on this path as a company from the start of the company. Since 10 years ago, our founders laid out a vision that in 10 years' time, 2025, by 2025, every single person working in a larger corporation will have a digital colleague to work with. Today, that is actually reality.
Whether you think about it or not, in fact, digital agents colleagues are a fact of life today, and our company has a strong foothold in doing that. We're happy to take you on that journey with us. We think about the 10 years forward, and not even 10 years, but actually what's happening in the market already. We'll spend some time with this topic during the presentation today. In the AI era, the most valued companies in our view will not just provide tools and services. The companies that own the execution of critical workflows will be the companies that will blossom, will be the leaders in our market, will be the transformative companies who will show the way how companies will work will be carried out in large corporations.
This is how we see the market and us playing a major role as a company as well. I wanna start with a slide explaining a couple of words about Digital Workforce. Some of you know us very well, some of you may be new to our story. We have a decade of execution, discipline, and a strong track record as a company. I want to underline that we're not just another IT services company, we are actually a very different company. Our track record is very focused around execution, around knowledge work. What we do as a company, and have done already for the past 10 years, is disrupt knowledge work.
Going forward, we see that will have that will take a new shape, and the knowledge work will be disrupted as software. We will discuss that with Karli presenting on Agent Workforce, Agentic AI solution that we built for our customers and in market and deployed already. That is a very exciting topic that we want to share with you today. We feel that it's unique and very focused offering with our own IP to offer for our customers.
Looking at the vertical strategy, one of the differentiators from the company, we have a very strong foothold in healthcare, further investing in healthcare as a company, where we see a lot of pain points in public healthcare patients getting treatment and access to services, clinical workers having fatigue and not being able to focus into treating patients instead of doing something which is more mundane. Banking and Insurance markets are in a very different stage. There are a lot of IT services already in use in Banking and Insurance verticals.
How we see the market at the moment is that these verticals and these industries will be taking a completely new shapes, and the ways and means to compete in these markets will be totally different going forward. The Agent Workforce and our Care Pathway Solutions for the healthcare sector are transformative and disruptive ways of looking into the industry-related problems and also opportunities. We have a full focus as a company and have been having that focus since the get-go into Enterprise-grade use cases. We have long-term relationship with our customers with highly regulated industries, with compliance, control mechanisms that they need to and want to pursue, and those kind of customers are typically very good fit to our way of working.
We built a recurring revenue business, continuous services revenue business with our Outsmart offering, which is 60% of the total revenues of the company, and that is in fact an offering where we run work for you as customers, as a part of your operations. We'll spend some time with that as well. If we continue on the topic of what makes us different from large consultancy companies, large system integrators, business automation service providers, also in-house IT, and then Agentic AI startups, we are a company that redesign, run, govern, and control knowledge work. We are there for the customers for the long run. We only focus on selected verticals and focused use cases. That enables us to, and has enabled us to build a modular and reusable solutions revenue stream, as we already discussed.
Outsmart as a service, on the other hand, is an offering that is there with the customer 24/7, deployed in use as a part of the core operations for the customers, based on multi-tech scalable service platform and service offering that is designed for business continuity. We have hundreds of customers in large corporations, working with hundreds of processes and automating their core business items and also other processes as a part of our services. Our focused AI solutions are there to realize value in complex enterprise use cases. Our vertical focus is really sharp, as you'll be hearing from Karli's presentation later on, and we feel that that is the way to succeed in the market, rather than being a generalist in this space.
We have already, as a company, applied a principle that what really matters is the delivered value for the customer. Therefore, we have taken steps over the course of the years to price the value that we generate for the customers in an outcome-based approach and manner. Typically, customers might be paying per transaction, per use consumption, per patient, per pathway that has been automated, whatever that might be. Really the outcome in mind is the differentiator here. Not to price the technology, but what we achieve with the services that we provide for the customers. When we think about the way that we offer our services, we have a very robust 24/7 offering delivered centrally from Poland globally to all of our customers that is there for ensuring business continuity.
That is fully ISO certified solution and used by leaders in their own industry across the globe. I get sometimes questions that, "What do you do with AI? Do you work with AI yourself?" Actually if we start from the middle, we actually work with AI. We have worked with AI and agent and digital colleagues. I would say colleagues, workers, agents, those are our friends delivering the value for our customers. Those are a part of the services that we provide for our customers, running hundreds of business processes. All in all, more than 5,000 business processes over the course of 10 years in hundreds of organizations have been deployed, transformed, redesigned with the help of our services. Translating that into value for businesses, for society, that is substantial.
Way bigger than our size would, as a company, would maybe let you to think. We've delivered more than 20 million hours back to businesses and society as savings, as an opportunity to do something else, to focus on core work, or then transform the work into completely something different what it used to be before applying our set of services. Again, translating that into monetary term, that takes us into EUR 1 billion level of savings and cost avoidance in total. Substantial impact into the market and society. This has resulted in a new way of working in organizations that actually, a long time ago, passed a point of no return. If we would strip out all the automations from our customers, actually, that wouldn't be possible because they would be in deep trouble.
The core operations are running and run by us in large organizations. We also think about thought leadership and want to be a thought leader in the market, and we've done that in the early stages of the company through academies, automation academies, and we've done that in the past two years as well with our Agentic AI Academy, where we've trained more than 5,000 people internationally and globally into what is Agentic AI about. We want to keep that forefront, forerunner line of thinking as a part of our core as a company. Couple of highlights and couple of points about the company. Start with the geography first. We operate in Northern Europe, Central Europe, U.K. and Ireland, and in New York.
Customers, very international customers, global customers, obviously using our solutions around the globe. Seven offices, six countries, 200 employees. The 200 employees actually match nicely the customer numbers. We have about 200 enterprise customers. Customer Net Promoter Score is at 62, which we are really proud of. That is the recommendation rate. Would you be willing to recommend us as a customer? We're happy to state that data point aloud because that gives an idea on the stickiness of the business and the happiness of the customers. If we think about the customers on the other hand, which verticals and which lines of businesses they are from, 50% of the total revenues come from healthcare.
We added a company, bought a company called e18 Innovation in U.K. NHS, so U.K. public healthcare system, which is the largest global public healthcare system. They operate in that space and that took us as a company into 50% level of the total revenues among the kind of in-house or organic growth as well. Thinking about the banking and insurance customers and manufacturing customers. Both of them are around 20% of the total revenues, and then other segment could be municipalities, cities, defense forces, and so on and so forth. Important sectors for us and of course, globally for us as well.
Slightly different strategies, working with banking, insurance, and the manufacturing customers, and we'll spend more time with the especially with the insurance space today. Our revenue last year was EUR 24.3 million. Of that, 58% was based on the continuous revenue. Then if you look at our gross margin, gross margin was at 42% last year, and Adjusted EBITDA for the full year was 5%. We have actually had a very nice track record of improving our profitability and executing our profitable growth over the course of the years, and we are really proud of what we achieved last year, especially in the second half of last year as well. Just a couple of words about the organization only.
Starting from the right-hand side, two globally-led business areas, healthcare and enterprise and public, to really provide focus and focused go-to-market, accelerate our profitable growth globally. Obviously, then utilize resources and then in the matrix, build scalable models, globally common practices, offerings, and resources. Resources are there to support. Our leadership team member is very experienced in the industry, and Karli and Lewis are based in the U.K. Tapio splits his time between Finland and Sweden and the rest of us are then frequent travelers around the globe, visiting our customers and partners in different countries.
I want to spare a couple of words about the moments about the vision and strategic cornerstones, very much on the high level only because then we'll be opening up the cornerstones in more detail in short while. Our vision, which you may have seen already on the first slide, was renewed and reshaped last year as we had our tenth anniversary as a company. Transforming work beyond productivity for us means that it's not just about productivity, but it's much more than that, what we are doing. It's about work and how work will be carried out in the future in large organizations. How do we go about and revolutionize the way of working in organizations? By redefining the role of people and digital agents in knowledge work.
We want to orchestrate the activities and operations in large organizations in a completely new fashion. Technology will not be stopping us from doing that, and our focus as a company will support us in achieving the outcomes that we are after. We focus on achieving results in the long run with the customers and with our partners. We build and run scalable solutions for selected customer verticals and use cases. That also means that we need to say no to certain opportunities as lucrative as they may seem in the short while, because focus brings results, repeatability, and scalability, and that's why we kind of believe in a chosen approach as a company.
It's very nice to be working in a company that has a purpose as well and serving the greater good as well. When you talk about the things that we have achieved in healthcare with our healthcare customers to make sure that the patient will get timely and accurate care and accessibility for services for patients, also for end users, there's a different meaning and purpose when discussing with our customers and anybody who wants to know what the company is really about. We are there to deliver transformative impact to society beyond our size. We always act with integrity and customer intimacy.
We're really proud of our customers that have been with us from the very early stages and still growing and still moving forward and working with us to further automate their ways of working and redesign the way that they work as organizations. We always own our position as opportunity-driven thought leaders as well, and it means that we want to go for the opportunities rather than thinking about the problems, and then be at the forefront of the market. I hope that this is visible, and I'm sure that this is visible in the next presentations to come in a short while. The ways of executing our strategy and we have picked three cornerstones that are very much driving our profitable growth as a company.
We will start with Karli talking about the disruption of knowledge work through Agentic AI. Very exciting topic. Obviously, hot topic in the market in general. Our take on that is different and unique, and we absolutely feel that we're onto something which will be transformative for our customers, but also for us as a company. The Care Pathway Automation is very much around healthcare sector and really touching the pain points of clinical workers and patients and optimizing the patient journey, as well as allowing nurses, doctors, laboratory workers to really focus on what they want to do and are trained to do. Focus to take care of the patients. Equally important is the outsourcing and transformation services for us.
That's the core of our operations, where we build the solutions and run our solutions for our customers, and we want to spend a moment with that as well, so that you as the audience understand that what are we about as a company. With that, I will wrap up my part at this point in time, and I want to introduce you to Karli Kalpala. Karli is with us here and welcome, Karli.
Thank you, Jussi. My name is Karli Kalpala, Head of Strategy & AI Agent Business for Digital Workforce. Today, I'm going to onboard you into AI Agent proposition. This is actually the opening slide of our status page. My job today is to walk you through what it means to the investors of Digital Workforce. Agent Workforce, our product, becomes your scalable team owning the execution of critical workflows. We offer to our customer a completely new capability, knowledge work as software, that allows them to decouple the human labor from their business outcomes. First, though, let's quickly analyze the business environment where we are operating. We're seeing the largest disruption of knowledge work since the internet. The characteristics of the large language models has changed over the past 15-18 months.
What used to be known and came to the public knowledge as a system that can produce text has moved and become a system that can reason through complex problems. The headline statement here is that the state-of-the-art models, or the LLMs, large language models, are on a PhD level reasoning, and this reasoning is infinitely scalable and comes from the server rack. A very important point that I'm going to allude to later in the presentation. There's another important topic as well. The inference cost is collapsing. The cost of achieving these results is collapsing very fast. We have two things going on. The capability is increasing and improving exponentially. What we see over the past 15 months is an exponential growth in how complex tasks an LLM can trustworthily complete, while the cost of applying that technology is collapsing.
You only have to look into software engineering, an industry that has completely gone over the tipping point already. Look at the media headlines, and that industry is beyond recognition. No junior positions open anymore. The key question is, who's going to be the seniors that will approve the work of the software coding agents that write most of the code today already in enterprises? One aspect of this technology change that is, in my opinion, overlooked in the public discussion, is the fact that the most vulnerable work or types of work for this technology is actually the white-collar work. The work that happens in the insurance companies, in the finance industry, work that happens in wealth management, accounting, medicine, science, even arts. All of those works, they have one or a couple of key things that are common to them.
The common characteristics to do that type of work. They all are judgment heavy, they're unstructured, and in most cases, they are document intense. That's the fertile ground for this capability that we are seeing coming and emerging for the large language models. The future of knowledge work is going to be a handful of people overseeing hundreds of AI Agents. If we play this demo, I'm going to show you how this looks in practice. In this demo, you're going to see our AI Agent, Clara, processing through an insurance claim. It is very important to notice that this is not a chatbot. There's no human prompting this system. No one is driving in the background what happens next. It's an autonomous system acting fully independently. It reads the documents, it understands policy conditions, it validates coverage.
In other words, it executes judgment-heavy, unstructured operational work that normally requires a human claims handler or adjuster to complete. This is the opportunity with modern AI. This is the promised land. Knowledge work coming as software, enabling the leaders in insurance, for example, to decouple human labor from business outcomes. What it actually means for them is that it allows them to grow their operating margins with an arbitrage level to the normal people-driven way of delivering these services. This is the logic behind the statement that Jussi showed earlier from Sequoia Capital. The next one trillion dollar company is a software company that is masqueraded to be a services company. There's still a challenge here for everyone who is building in this environment. Large language models is a general purpose technology.
Everyone has access to the same model, everyone has access to the same API. Every software company, every consulting company is building AI solutions as we speak. It's even worse than that. The capability that you have in the state of the art models today, let's say the Opus 4.6 that was leading the charts on a couple of slides back, it's going to fit inside your own local PC, and run on an open source model, and the historical data shows that it takes eight to nine months to reach that point. Any investments to create proprietary adaptations or of these models will lose its value very, very quickly. LLMs is the fastest depreciating asset in human history. The critical question becomes. How do you build a defensible business in this business environment? Our answer is very simple.
You go deep instead of going wide. Depth is the mode. Instead of building horizontal tools or services, we build vertical AI Agents. Clara, that you saw on the previous slide or in the previous demo, Cora, we will focus on a little bit later. These agents, they execute the work itself. Once you have this capability that executes the work, now the point is that you sell the outcome of the work to your customers, just like a BPO. This workforce that delivers the work, it doesn't run with caffeine, it runs with compute, and compute is infinitely scalable. Our approach, if you have this depth in mind as your mode, where should you focus? You should focus and target domains where the work is highly manual and there's very large pools of that human workforce existing.
The work is judgment-heavy, unstructured, and document intense like we just discussed a bit earlier. Most importantly, the work is something that can be realistically replaced by an AI agent with the today state of the technology. We have selected two domains. Both of these domains shares these structural characteristics listed just a second ago. It's highly manual, large pools of manual labor, judgment-heavy, unstructured, document intense, and the technology can actually replicate that work today. Also importantly, we have subject matter expertise in these domains in-house already in the company, so we can start building, and have started building already a year ago. Most importantly, we have existing customers that we can bring the capability to. Our focus is in insurance claims processing, as well as risk governance and compliance operations in highly regulated environments. Are we just blowing hot air here? No.
Though the technology is very new, 15 months ago, this wasn't even possible, and it improves very quickly. We have already strong proof points that our strategy works. Couple of observations worth to highlight here. First, we have built very strong partnerships. First, I wanna mention the partnership with Davies Group we announced a couple of weeks back. Davies is one of the largest insurance services and BPO providers in the world. Through them, we have access to real operational workflows, real data, and subject matter expertise to productize the agents through their distribution channels to the largest insurers in the world. Microsoft, or more specifically, their ISV Success Program, which is an invitation-only program for the 200 most promising software development companies in their ecosystem, together with which we have access to the latest tools, best models, and Microsoft engineering teams.
From the customer side, our agents are processing real operational workloads as we speak. A couple of observations. We haven't observed any hallucinations in the early production setups. Very important in these regulated environments where we operate. Second of all, what we're actually enabling, we are enabling an AI- native operating model to emerge for our customers. What do I mean with an AI- native operating model? This is a use case from our agent, Cora, which focuses on the governance, risk governance and compliance. An AI- native operating model for risk governance and compliance means that you move from random sampling into 100% risk coverage, in this case, insurance policies. You transform the work of the subject matter experts from being 1% productive into becoming 100% productive.
While you do this, you reduce the number of manual cases with a factor of 10. How? Let me run you through the numbers. Before our agent is in production, a typical operation in second line risk compliance, governance and compliance, which has a team of 10, 15, 30 senior experts who need to know the underlying business operations as well as the compliance and control frameworks applied on top of the business, are performing the work as random sampling. When they come to work, 99% of the time, they go through an underlying policy, they go through an underlying contract, they use their judgment, and they move it into a pile, everything is okay. Actually, very good news for the society and everyone. You don't want to have issued cases too much.
From this lens, only less than 1% of the time, they actually need their expertise to go through the case because the case has some issues in regards of the compliance or the governance frameworks that they're analyzing. From this lens, only less than 1% of their work is actually productive. While they do this, they're able to cover around 500 cases in this example, which is 10% of the overall volume. Your oversight coverage is actually limited. What happens when our agent comes to work? You immediately scale to 100% coverage. Why? The reasoning applied by Cora is infinitely scalable. It runs with compute. It can scrutinize every risk policy on a level that it would be the only risk that that company has, the only policy that company has.
While we do that, Cora is the one who filters the 99% or more of the cases into the pile everything is okay, and lifts only the cases that need a human decision. You need to actually understand what you do with the case that has alarming signs in it. When the compliance officer come to work, they start with the pile of exception cases. Their work becomes 100% focused on the cases that really matters for the operational governance of the company. If you run the numbers, the team that you needed to do 500 cases, which is 10% of the volume, and now when you focus only on the 1% of the 5,000 cases, which is 50, the amount of manual cases is 10 x less than in the state before the agent is applied.
This is the value when you go deep into judgment-heavy, unstructured, and document-intense work. This is what Agent Workforce is all about, and this is the new AI- native operating model that emerges. Let's summarize here. We are building vertical AI Agents, Clara, Cora, that execute operational work. We call this Agent Workforce. We sell the work outcome of Clara and Cora to the operational budgets. Not as a horizontal software license to the IT budget. Depth in these operational workflows is the moat when the technology is a commodity. The key takeaway, our total addressable market grows with an order of magnitude when we execute our strategy.
On the field, what we actually do for the lead-claim leaders and the risk governance and compliance leaders, we force them to ask themselves a question, "Who, or more specifically, what, will perform the work in their operations going forward?" Finally, let me discuss quickly where we compete and why we win. There are three main groups of competition. First, the service integrators and large consultancies. They focus on operating model designs. They focus on horizontal transformation programs rather than delivering the operational work with AI. They build the framework, we execute the work. Second, there's the AI startups. They build Vertical AI solutions, but they struggle with the operational deployment capability to regulated environments where reliability, governance, and domain expertise are essential. It's not enough to build the agent once. You need to commit to deliver the work outcomes for years.
Third, there's the Horizontal AI platforms. They have a vast capability, but they themselves rely on customers and service integrators to deliver the operational outcomes. They lack the depth, and in the end, they end up competing with the latest state-of-the-art LLM models and how far those investments can push the envelope of automation. Our moat is different. We focus on highly critical, domain-specific workflows in regulated environments. We combine deep domain expertise, both in-house and with our strategic partners, with operational deployment capability, 10 years of experience of delivering knowledge work as software to hundreds of enterprises, and delivering that outcome every day throughout all of these years. Owning the work outcome, the business content service that Jussi mentioned earlier, our heritage. When we build these AI Agents together with Microsoft, we have a very important design principle in mind.
We want to leverage all the tailwind from the hundreds of billions of investments that go into building the state-of-the-art large language models. If there's a new large language model coming out with a superior capability or an exceptional price point, we open the champagne bottle because our agent has became better. In the era, it's written there in the bottom, in the AI era, the most valuable companies will not just provide tools and services. They will own the execution of the critical workflows, and that's the journey where we are on with Agent Workforce. Now, it's time for a short break. We are actually almost three minutes ahead of schedule, which is probably the first time I have accomplished that. Anyway, let's come back at 3:00 P.M., which is top of the hour. Thank you.
Good afternoon, and welcome back to the Digital Workforce Investor Day. My name is Juha Nieminen. I'm a Chief Growth Officer in the Global Healthcare, and I will be today covering three things or, let's say, trying to light up more backgrounds on, first of all, why h ealthcare is the major growth area for Digital Workforce? Secondly, what are care pathway solutions and what they actually do? Thirdly, why we believe that this can scale from few proven use cases into much broader business opportunity? If you look our healthcare strategy, let's say from the geographical point of view first, Finland is the proof market. We have been operating in the Finnish healthcare already 10 years, and we have established customer base with major providers in Finnish market.
One fact point is that 20% of our Finnish employees currently are healthcare professionals. We have really proven ourselves in the healthcare market, in the Finnish market, and driving also the annual revenue in the customer side quite high. On the other side, the market is just opening in the care pathway side. I will tell you more about care pathway later today. Also, there's lots of potential still in Finnish market with current customers and also in the new customer side. The U.K. is our near-term scale market. We have, through e18 acquisition, what Jussi mentioned earlier, a very good foothold already in the U.K. NHS market. We have 55 customers in the U.K. which are coming through the framework contract. We have framework contracts in place.
We have really good established customer base in U.K. already. Like you can see from the numbers, there's a lot of potential in expanding. I could say that U.K. is maybe three to four years behind, Finnish market in the automation journey into healthcare, and we have a huge opportunity to grow both in the current customer base, but also there's a big potential in the new customer space as wellh
The U.S. is a long-term opportunity market for us. We have successfully acquired a few new big customers in past months, which makes it really positive outlook for the coming, let's say year, that we can use these reference customer to really try to grow it in the U.S. as well. It's of course, as a market, is once again much larger than even the U.K. or Finnish markets. If thinking about how to scale it. Basically, we have already established foothold in healthcare. We have the competencies, we have proven solutions from the Finnish market. There's two ways to expand this in our business and grow our business.
First of all, if you take an example of the breast cancer care pathway, which we'll also open a little bit later in more detail, we can expand the business and scale it through the same use case to different patient groups. We can use the same care pathway solutions to different cancer patient groups, diabetes, etc. , etc. , where we have much bigger patient amounts in the same customers. The other angle is the geographical expansion. We can take these proven use cases and start expanding those to new markets like U.K. and U.S. as well. There's two ways and big multipliers in both ways.
If you see that from the patient amount side, from the breast cancer to the diabetes, the multipliers are 10 x bigger patient groups when we can expand same use cases to that patient group. On the other hand, when we talk about geographical expansion, in U.K., 10 x bigger market than Finnish market, U.S., 60 x bigger market. There's a huge potential in both ways, which are coming together in very nice potential numbers. But then if you go a little bit deeper into U.K. and why is the U.K. so attractive for us in the h ealthcare? Basically, first, of course, the scale, like mentioned, that it's 10 x bigger market than Finnish market at the moment. There's a, like said, that we are, t he U.K. is maybe three, four years behind in their automation journey.
There's a big potential on really scaling up our businesses. Secondly, from DWF point of view, as stated, we have the framework contracts in place. We have all the contract limitations away. We can sell our services through those framework contracts to any NHS customer. It's really, really good starting point for the growth. Secondly, we are in the pole position now, that through the e18 acquisition, we are the leader in the automation in NHS. We are the biggest player in the NHS space at the moment with huge potential to grow. We are really good position now when going for the coming years.
Secondly, I think the scale is the first thing, the second one is the workforce pressure that the U.K.'s healthcare has. Similar challenges that we have in the different regions as well, but especially in the U.K., there's a big problem with finding good workforce. There are a lot of high retirement rates coming, and there is a big challenge on providing high-quality healthcare at the moment already from the workforce point of view. Secondly, there's a very big productivity mandate from the government to drive down the healthcare cost on the U.K. side. Third, there is a big funding to automate, develop digitalization.
I would say that all these three things are really playing in our playbook, that when we are in pole position as the market leader with a market that's just starting, they are just going for the automations, and there is both mandate from the government to really drive down the cost, and then there's also funding available from the governmental side. Basically, we can say that for the NHS, the automation is not nice to have anymore. It's must-have. There's no other way for them to solve this, the problem with the productivity and also address the patient expectations for high quality, high-quality care.
Basically, if thinking about how to go there and what are the care pathways, this is very detailed picture in a way that what are the care pathways to tell you a little bit that what does it really mean that when we are talking about care pathway solutions. This is a real-life case, which has been in production already a few years. This is our breast cancer follow-up. Basically, when the active care of the patient is ending and the patient moves to the care follow-up processes. Previously, there was lots of manual tasks that nurses, secretaries, doctors were performing. In this one healthcare provider, in this one patient group, there was almost 100,000 manual tasks in a year. That was about booking times, making referrals, communicating to the customers.
Huge amount of manual work that was performed by the healthcare professionals. Now, with the automated workflow what we have created, 95% of this manual work has been automated. Only things that humans are doing in this process are clinical decisions, that when there's clinical decision needed or there's exception in the process that needs human intervention, or it's a physical appointment or diagnostics. Basically, our automation is running seven to 10 years per patient in the follow-up process, with only human interactions are the real interactions when you have to have an appointment or diagnostics, there is a clinical decision that has to be made, or there is a exception in the process which has to be handled by human. 95% of all the manual work has been automated with this process.
Even though the manual process in a way might look quite simple, but we have to understand that inside this process, there are different age groups, there are different, for example, care plans, around, let's say 10-20 different kind of sub-processes that the process decisions are done by our automation and recognize that in which which of the process which of the patient has to be put or done. Basically, we have been looking from the result point of view. Like I said, 95% of the task is automated. 95% of all the patients, this patient group, are in this automation. We can cover 95% of all the sub-cases or special cases which are inside the space group.
What it means for the patients and also the providers. Operationally, of course, the staff can spend much more time to the patient with general need and attention. We have been able to reduce a huge amount of nurse appointments and create new time to really treat those patients that needs the care. Financially, of course, it lowers the workload, it reduces the inefficiency. For example, cancellations and rescheduling has been minimized, which has been a huge problem before. Also from the clinical point of view, the patient experience has changed dramatically. First of all, waiting times in this country have dropped from nine months to one month. Information about neutral diagnostic results have dropped from weeks to less than 12 hours. Also the self-service rate has been increased significantly.
Basically, nowadays, the patient can influence a lot in their own care pathway by booking, scheduling appointments, affecting that does he or she need an appointment or not, that what is the preferred way of taking the care plan forward. Let's say last but not least, the human errors. When we have automated process, we have the trackability for all process. We know if there's some error for some reason, we can track it always back. Or if somebody's dropped out from the process, they haven't gone to the diagnostics that are required or doesn't reply, we can alert, we can see that and make sure that the process has been conducted and the care is conducted as planned.
Maybe the key thing is that how to scale this. Like I said, this is not about building one workflow for one clinic or one customer. This is more about scaling the modular platform and modular solution to different regions, to different customers. How the solution is built is that we have three layers in the solution architecture. The first layer is the care pathway logic. So that's the IP what we have on how to build and what is the process for, let's say, long-term illness follow-up or medication monitoring. That's like the process logic what we have built in our solution.
There is a second layer, which are the variations that, for example, if we have the long-term condition follow-up care pathway, there are variations for breast cancer, lung cancer, diabetes, different kind of long-term illnesses that we can use the same logic layer to really cost effectively scale to these customers. We have there the patient subgroup side, which means that almost all the illnesses have different kind of sub-processes based on the gender or age group or the care plan, which can be then modularly applied to our platform. This enables us to reach 90%-100% coverage of the patient group. Basically, with this standard logic, it's easy to scale.
We have the standard components in the layer three, which is, I would say, the building blocks. Basically, we have there different kind of building blocks which we can use in different care pathways, that we don't have to rebuild, redesign, but we can really just use the same blocks that we have built for different care pathways, different variations, and different customers. Somebody after the Karli's presentation might ask that where is the AI in my presentation? Maybe could say that AI is in the details, that when we talk about healthcare, the AI is one technology there as a standard component.
The standard components in the care pathways can be, of course, RPAs, but they can be AI Agent that would be applied, and they can be AI bots, or they can be third-party, medical device-grade AI tools that we can really implement as part of the care pathway. I would say that we can with this approach, when we are automating the whole process from end to end, we can really implement the AI benefits for the customers, for the AI investments. That if they have invested in AI development, we can really harness that to the business process level and care pathway level and really bring the business benefits of using that one maybe niche AI tool which is solving one task or one independent problem.
AI is inside and if the solution and the Care Pathway needs AI or AI brings value, then that's something of course which we are also building ourselves as AI agents, independent AI Agents or AI tools inside the Care Pathways. That's one of the critical things also what we are driving in healthcare, that we want that AI will be used more and more as a part of the Care Pathways in those places, in those tasks where AI is needed. Basically, what this modular care pathway solutions means is that we have reusable IP, which we can scale to different markets, to different use cases. We have lower delivery costs on implementing this to the customers, much faster rollouts, and then of course the whole automation coverage will be much wider.
This is looking from the potential point of view and getting back to the U.K. market. Like I said, Finland, we are still in the starting point also in this type of Care Pathway Automation. But we have proven use cases, we have ongoing customers which are expanding the use of this platform as we speak. Then when we are going to U.K. market, we can really start driving the sales up within our current customer base with the Care Pathway Solutions and also of course go to the new customers as well. As a proof of that, we already have started six discovery projects and the Care Pathway implementations in NHS with regard to lung cancer with Cancer Alliances.
That's already happening, and we have proof that also in the U.K. market, the Care Pathway message and our solution is working already. Basically, if thinking about outcomes or takeaways from the healthcare side, there's three things that I want to, let's say, bring out still. First of all, we have very good established position in healthcare in our main markets. If talking about Finnish market, we have there almost half of the well-being counties are already our customers. All of them has lots of potential on additional automations. Also, there's a big potential on the new customer side in Finland as well.
In the U.K., like said, we have already 1/3 of the NHS trusts as our customers at the moment, and we have the leading position in the market as automation provider. Secondly, we are solving the productivity challenge that all our markets have. Basically, all the markets have really big challenges on fighting against the productivity risks what the healthcare has, meaning the cost pressure coming, the funding is decreasing, and also the population is getting older, which means that the demand for the services at the same time is going high. Automation and AI and our Care Pathways are really good solution or really solving this problem, which is really big in our markets, but of course wider in the Western countries as well.
Thirdly, we have the scalable solution to expand these task automations then to high-value Care Pathways and really start solving these major challenges what the healthcare providers in public side and private side has. That's about healthcare. I hope I answered most of those questions or I gave more insight on the topics that I was planning to. Now I will welcome Jussi back on the stage about our outsourcing and transfer the automation services.
Thanks a lot, Juha, and hello, everybody. This is what an excited Finn looks like, so I'm super excited. I hope that you are as well, I mean, here in the room, but also listening to us through the webcast. What Karli and Juha just shared shows our passion not only to our work but also to the work that you are carrying out in your organizations. We are onto something which is very different from the rest of the market, and I hope that we have already provided you some proof points of that. Actually, I'm certain about that. What I'm gonna share next around the outsourcing and transformative automation services, it's very much at the core of what was just being shared by Juha and Karli.
Everything what we do for our customers builds on continuity, customer intimacy, and understanding the true value of our services for our customers. I'm gonna scare you with a slide with a lot of logos. A lot of logos which are essential and important for us to deliver the value, but this is very much to showcase that actually everything what we have shared is running in a fully productized automation and business transformation service. We call it Outsmart. It's a multi-tech solution that is actually taken into use with different customers in different shape and form depending on the nature of work that the customer wants to conduct and run with us, depending on the nature of tasks, processes, customer journeys that we heard about.
We feel that it's truly transformative, and we have a lot of proof points of that because this is the core of our 60% of our recurring revenues as a company that we built over the course of last 10 years. It's fully AI-driven, it's Agentic, and it benefits from automation technology from the leaders in the market. We are top-tier partners with the technology vendors here on the wall, and we have a strong go-to-market collaboration with them in the U.K., in the U.S., in the Nordics, and so on and so forth. We are really proud of what we can do with technology, but we never start with the technology.
We start with the work and what needs to be achieved and what are the outcomes that we are after with aiming to deliver for our customers. Impact matters. Benefit matters. What you have heard about already today, it's about productivity, but it's much more than that. It's redesigning the distribution of work in large enterprises, in healthcare. I always get super excited when we talk about the biggest public healthcare system in the world, the NHS that Juha was just hearing about. We have a unique position in there, and we are running this in the healthcare customer space already, and Outsmart is at the core of the Care Pathways here.
End customer experience, for sure. It will be a totally different experience for a breast cancer patient to be part of an automated flow that they don't need to worry about if I'm falling out of the kind of a service practice designed for my cure and to follow up that I'm okay and continue to be okay. Employee experience will be transformative as well, and we have a lot of proof points of that with the happy customer data that we already shared with you. This is not about savings or productivity alone. What Karli shared with us today, the new transformative business opportunities are such that will change the way of working and in the whole of.
Whole industries, for instance, in insurance space. Everything built in-house on top of best-of-breed solutions that are available in the market. Maybe one more thing that Karli already said, shared as well, that technology is not limiting us. It's the way that we use the technology and our in-house understanding, healthcare understanding, insurance-based understanding, and so on and so forth, and picking up the right use cases. I want to kind of spend a moment to discuss about the mechanism that how we run this. Obviously we can work with the care pathway and start with the big bang with the customers. We can also start quickly and move fast forward.
Professional services are needed for value discovery to understand really the pain points and then implement the solutions for the customers. The core is in the continuous services. We have made it easy for the customers to start. That's always been the ideology in the company. You don't need to have a huge advanced license investment in order to get the benefit of the solutions, but you can start small and then expand. We are agile, rapid in our delivery, and it's productized, modular way of delivering the solutions as well. When the number of units, patients, transactions continue to increase, our Outsmart recurring revenue continues to grow.
Then the customers can introduce the next pathway process or the next insurance claim handling process or whatever that is that the customers are after. This is the model that is at the core of our business, and hopefully you're getting the hang of it in short here. A lot of data here on one slide. Want to talk about Outsmart as an outsourcing and transformation with the automation services solution as a whole. We work with enterprise-grade customers, global leaders in their field, with our modular Outsmart services.
We have a lot of proof points of that from 2015 already. Here's a snippet of our customers in different industries, lines of industries, whether those are forest industry companies in the Nordics, German chemical industry companies, mechanical engineering companies in the Nordics or public finance kind of institutions in Finland. Different type of use cases can be taken over from the customers. If the customer have been running in-house operations or they have been running different technologies, we can migrate, and we have a lot of experience of migrating customers from one technology to another, introducing new technologies and complementing the existing set of technologies as a part of Outsmart services for our customers.
Customers don't need to worry about the tech cost as such, but focus on the outcome and pay for the value what they're getting. Sometimes we also, I mean, couple of maybe customer logos to share. U.K. and USA Financial Services customers, Nasdaq is one of our customers. We do a lot with them, and multiple core processes at Nasdaq are run by our service and on our service platform. We will be meeting them in the U.S. next week as well. In the Nordics, we have also very recently done a full takeover of transfer of business as well. We've taken over the development teams, the supporting teams and the technology set and everything is now running on Outsmart.
Typically, these type of customers run hundreds of processes within their organization, varying from business-critical processes into support processes, admin processes within their companies. The customers continue to be very happy. Of course, proof points are in the customer NPS scores, the automations and the growing recurring revenue and so forth, but also in the fact that among these customers we don't see churn. The customers are not leaving us. Rather, they are increasing the automation and the volume of services that they buy from us. That obviously translates into numbers, financials, and financial success. We have a strong record in accelerating profitable growth, and Laura, our CFO, will take us through that. Welcome, Laura.
Thank you.
Thanks, Jussi. Before going to our strong track record, I actually have a part one of my presentation, and that deals with the licenses and the change to net revenue recognition, what we did, why we did, and when it's going to take place. After that, we will go to the DWF financials. We'll talk a little bit about revenue growth, the improving profitability, and the increasing continuous services revenue, the GM quality, and then finally about the outlook for 2026. First, most of you probably noticed, but if you didn't, two days ago, we restated our numbers. What happened is that we changed the license sales revenue recognition to net recognition. A license means that we buy a license, we sell it to the customer. The customer doesn't buy the services.
They don't buy the full Outsmart or even part of it. It's a simple resell case. In my example, my price to the customer is EUR 1,200, price to the vendor is EUR 1,000, margin EUR 200. In the old way, or what we have done until now is that we recognize the EUR 100 as revenue every month over 12 months, and we recognize the cost of goods sold, and the margin of EUR 200 comes up in the 12-month period. What happens now is that we will actually net the margin. The margin becomes the revenue. Instead of recognizing the EUR 1,200, I will recognize the EUR 200 as revenue. In addition, the timing will change. Instead of spreading it over 12 months or whatever the license period is, I just recognize it when the customer's contract starts.
In the first month, we recognize EUR 200, and that's the end of the revenue recognition. Why go through all this trouble? First of all, there's an important reason that this is aligning our revenue recognition with the internationally recognized accounting standards. Auditors might be listening, so I'm not allowed to say it's aligned with IFRS, but this is what we would do if we did IFRS reporting. It doesn't have any impact on cash, on the result. It's just a presentation change and a timing change. The licenses recognized net will continue to be part of the continuous services revenue group, the way they have been before. The whole point is that now we will really provide full transparency on the continuous services revenue growth without having the licenses there.
We have published new comparative figures for 2024 and 2025 two days ago, there the revenue decreases, as you can see in my example. We go from EUR 1,200- EUR 200. The gross margin and EBITDA, gross margin and EBITDA in absolute terms remain, no change. Of course, the relative margin goes up because it's calculated on a lower revenue. Last but not least, the transfer. We did not change the timing of the past contracts. We only changed the timing for the new contract starting in 2026. If my contract started in November last year, we will present it net, but it will continue until the end of the original license period. Only the contracts that started in January 2026 or after will be presented in one go.
I hope my little accounting professorship ends here, and I can go to the DWF figures. One more point, by the way, all the numbers that we're showing today are after the license restatement, unless somebody seriously forgot to do the change. Last year's revenue was EUR 24.3, and that was a growth of 7% from the previous year. The times were tough, as everybody knows, but we're still very proud that we've managed to keep the top-line growth. Outlook for this year, I'll talk about in a while. On the right-hand side, I have split last year into quarters. With the revenue, there is growth, but you can see that there were some hiccups with it.
The last quarter is pulled up by the e18 Innovation joining us in the beginning of the quarter. What we are extremely proud about is the EBITDA margin curve. As you can see, we come from -6% in the first quarter and then go up to -7%, -8%, and -10% in the last quarter. This is the result of a lot of measures taken, some of them hard in the company, but also, of course, a continuous control over the costs and the growing top line. This is a track that we want to continue. The revenue bars, the dark blue bar shows the continuous revenue. As you can see, the continuous revenue share also goes down with the change because the licenses, again, are presented net. We were close to 70%, now it's rather close to 60%.
However, our ambition is to continue that percentage going up. Actually, for the continuous revenue, I pulled up a little bit longer time period. Starting from financial year 2020, over these five years, the continuous services revenue has almost doubled. I've corrected also the 2020 number, so there's no hiccup there. The average rate of growth has been 13.4% annually. Still, to collect everything that the colleagues have been talking about, why we're so excited about the continuous revenue, that's the case where the customer, maybe they come through a professional services case and then they stay with us. We run their solution, we maybe develop it further, we provide the support and so on.
Usually these are very, very good customer relationships and as you could see, the churn is, at least to some parts, is zero, which is a number I absolutely love. Also, the ability of the CS to generate gross margin is very, very high. Here we are giving illustrative figures of the Digital Workforce gross margin, which is now in the 42%-44% range. The professional services margin is, around 32%-36%, and that's mostly done, made of work done by people. Obviously the margin generating capacity is a bit lower. However, we see some potential there of, growing the margins. As Juha just told, we have scalable modular projects, products, and, it means that every PS assignment is not a completely new adventure. We have things that we can redeploy and develop for the new projects.
We're also creating standard delivery processes. On the other hand, it's all about the bread and butter of running some consulting activities. You have to make sure that you plan your work, you have a well-controlled utilization rate, utilization of resources, external, internal, and so on. Part of the margin improvement is that there was a lot of good work done in DWF last year. The CS, so that now moves to over 50% gross margin level, and there we have the increases in outcome-based services, which Jussi was just showing. Be it patients, minutes, vaccines, something, some other outcomes, when those increase, the margin increases because we don't incur extra cost by the extra outputs. Of course, the Agent Workforce and other Agentic AI expansions to our Outsmart services are a very big potential swinger to the, also to the gross margin quality.
With these building blocks, we have now issued our outlook for 2026, and we are expecting the revenue to grow by 15%. At the same time, we are expecting the Adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of 7%-13%. We are also at the end of our strategy period, and we have an aspiration for the year-end revenue, and that is that we want to come up with annualized revenue level of EUR 40 million exiting 2026, and that would include the potential acquisition. The share of the CS, the continuous services, is aimed to increase further from what it is today. The profitability also, we don't want to stop at 7%-13%, so our aspiration is to get that to 15%. Ambitious? Yes. Doable?
With all building blocks falling to right place, yes. That's the CFO presentation. Now I would like to invite my colleagues back to the stage, and we will move to the Q&A. Yep. All right. We will start with the questions in the room. There is a microphone over there, so please take that and shoot.
Hello, it's Joni Grönqvist from Inderes. Thank you for the presentation and the details. We've been waiting to have on-hand comments on your business areas. I have to disappoint a little bit. I start with the boring analyst questions to start with and the updated target that you gave two days ago. It seems that you feel quite confident to the target as you updated it now. I would like to a little bit understand how you see the building blocks? Laura, you mentioned here, like if all the blocks get together, but looking at the figures, if we take your last year sales, we take e18 into account, we're roughly at EUR 28 million.
You seem to be quite confident that you could maybe get to EUR 40 million. Couple of questions, which are the building blocks and also the acquisition team that maybe is in there, but how much room do you allow, the second part of the question is how much room do you see that you have for acquisitions currently?
Mm.
From balance sheet point of view?
Maybe I start and then you continue.
You start. Yes.
Thanks for the very good question, Joni. I'm happy to take that. We are indeed confident with our target levels and executing our year very successfully. Obviously, some PowerPoints presented today. The modularity of what we sell to our customers will be increasing the margins, the margin levels, the industry ones that Laura just shared will be driving up the profitability. If we think about our success in Q4 and already the announcement and press releases we've made in the beginning of the year, we announced more than EUR 1 million Outsmart deal with 85-person professional healthcare system in the U.S. to start with.
It's those type of opportunities and wins will feed into the growth this year very nicely. Those will be very much also supporting our recurring revenue growth, which is of course our ambition as the company. Maybe Laura to comment a little bit on the room that we have for acquisitions and such. Yeah.
Well, acquisitions are on the table, and of course, we've said that before. Anything interesting would be looked at, but maybe nothing right now to share on that.
Maybe a little bit on the big picture. I think your story has been resonating and has got more clear during the past years and more focused strategy. Looking at your numbers and your confidence now, which bottlenecks have you solved now that there was before, looking at Q4 and your confidence now? Which bottlenecks have you solved now that was there before? Which bottlenecks, I assume there's always bottlenecks, which bottlenecks is there still to be solved?
Excellent question once again. Thank you for that. Maybe I'll start and then colleagues will feel free to fill in. I'll start with the structural change. Running healthcare as a global entity, as a business area and enterprise and public, with a different go-to-market model is a key step forward in our company. We're already seeing a lot of proof points in combining the forces from the Nordic, from the U.S. in kind of feeding into the U.K. opportunity. There, we now have a contracting or actually not only contracting channel, but existing customers in the range of 60 customers, the biggest market, public market in healthcare market in the world.
Our already existing foothold, the size of the existing customers in comparison with the North American and Nordic customers, how can we convert those early-stage customers, which maybe are not as advanced in automation yet in the U.K., and turn those into growth path as existing customers? That's a really kind of a model and kind of execution mechanism that we'll be going for. Of course, the white space still very much in the Nordics, especially in the U.K. and in North American healthcare. Maybe sort of feeding to Karli a little bit here as well.
Definitely, I think what we have built with Karli and the team for Agentic AI and the Agent Workforce offering, that is unique in the market. We have a really strong partnership with Davies, with the tech vendors like Microsoft that have put sort of positioned us as a leader in this space for the specific use cases. Very good collaboration with the non-London market customers and C-levels and so forth. That brings a lot of trust that we are onto something different, I mean, than before as a company. Maybe if you want to continue or fill in.
I think that's very good.
You agree?
Yeah, I agree. Indeed, I think, very much indeed, agree. Yes.
Yeah.
Of course.
Yeah.
To continue a little bit deeper on the sales. On one hand, I get the feeling that your sales focus in acquiring new customers. On the other hand, with e18, you got a wider customer base now. Can you maybe elaborate a bit on like how you feel? Is it more new customer acquisition now upselling and how do you see the potential in maybe upselling?
Mm-hmm
In healthcare, you mentioned different care pathways and, like, what is their role in your upselling?
Do you want to start?
Yeah, I can start. If thinking about the U.K. side, that we already have proof that from before the e18 acquisition, that we can grow the U.K. customers in, let's say, EUR 500,000-EUR 600,000 annual revenue in DWF side. Then we have now, like I said, 54 new customers with much lower average revenue. We have innovative track record, we have the products, we have the solutions that we know that we can drive the revenue up in that new current customer base. Definitely that's one of our key focuses now in, let's say, next 12 months to focus in the current customer, build the bigger automation coverage and also giving much more added value for the customers and also making sure that the customers will stay with us.
That's definitely one of the key focuses, and I would say it's a major focus in U.K. market. At the same time, we want to keep the leading automation provider status in there, and we have to focus also to the white space if there is quite a big potential. We are focusing on both, but I would say the bigger short-term opportunity we have in the current customers where we have already the contacts, the relationships ongoing, and now we just have to widen the cooperation with the proven solution from the Nordic markets.
Thank you. I have more questions, but I'll let the other. Oh, Jussi.
Yeah. Just a little bit kind of expanding on the enterprise and public side as well. We brought in a new Chief Growth Officer, Tapio Niinikoski, to lead that business area. The go-to-market is actually the team is just right now sort of working on accelerating the go-to-market with our partners and with the new offerings what Karli was sharing as well, and very much hand in hand with your team and your organization as well.
We don't see Agentic AI as a separate entity or separate topic for us, but it's at the core of what we're doing as a company and there we have more opportunities or even more opportunities for new customer acquisition and new market acquisition and discuss even about the London market opportunity what you're closely working with. There's a lot of potential for new customer acquisition completely with the offering that Karli was sharing.
Yeah, we have in the Nordics, if you start from there, you already have a very wide customer base. It's discussions that are ongoing with almost all of them at the moment to expand the share of wallet with them with the new capabilities. There is huge demand for this type of capability in those obvious leadership level attention. Then in U.K., obviously not yet visible fully in the numbers, but we have been opening a net new market for ourselves, a new growth market, which is the London insurance market, happens to be the largest insurance market in the world. It also seems to be very ripe for disruption with this type of technology building on old document-heavy and unstructured data flows. We see lots of potential there for us.
Yeah. I have a lot of questions, but I think I'll leave them for later. Just a short comment on Karli's presentation. I think everybody was thinking about the Agentic AI and disruption and what our Digital Workforce like positioning there. I think you found the answers in the presentation, so no need to ask it again.
Good.
Excellent. Thank you so much.
Excellent.
Did we have some questions or other questions in the room? How about online?
We have some questions online, unless, Joni, you want to continue.
[audio distortion]
Okay. Let's take some questions online next. All right. First of all, there's a question from the audience, and maybe, Jussi, this comes to you. During the first quarter, you have announced several significant contracts across different markets. How do you see growth and profitability developing in the short term?
Very good question. I'm happy to discuss about that. Actually, we've been spending time with Joni on the sales pipeline and sales execution already and your questions were also related to that. That's very much at the core of what we're doing. The Chief Growth Officers, Juha and Tapio, are chasing new opportunities with their teams all the time with existing and new customers. We have now proof points of us turning those opportunities into real work and the things that we have already delivered will resonate very nicely with the customers and prospects. We are very confident.
I'm sort of repeating myself a little bit here, but very confident with the growth ambition, what we are kind of set to go for, and our aim is high, but the start of the year looks very good.
All right. A question to me from investor relations perspective: Why don't you arrange online results presentations for financial year and also for the first half? It would be a good way to be in contact with the investor community. Thank you for the comment. We've actually discussed the possibility of doing that, and actually we have a wonderful audience today on the live webcast. If there's hope of getting the similar audience online, that would definitely be worth a webcast every half. We'll think about it. Thank you. Comes a question to, maybe all of you. Please remind us who are your main competitors in the different markets, Europe and U.K., USA, and what are your competitive advantages compared to the competitors?
Oh, that's a very broad question. I mean, maybe you saw one of my first slide where we were at the top right-hand corner as you tend to do these graphs. Seriously, I think we are quite unique in the market, and we've given you a lot of proof points of that already.
I'll let the gentleman comment little bit from the kind of industry vertical perspective, but maybe in general. It's really hard to find a kind of a global match or international match or even a local match to what we are doing. We have spot competition here and there from bigger and smaller companies, but we feel that we're quite unique in what we're doing.
Yeah. If I take a look on the AI Agent side, I'm partially alluded to it in the presentation as well. There is some specialist vendors that we have come across, for example, in the London market, having kind of announced tooling capabilities there. I think our differentiation, and I know our differentiation really builds on the fact that, and I mentioned it in there, that it's a very different thing to build something once than to actually assume the responsibility to deliver that work outcome for years and years in the future. You need to have the credibility in that regulated environment that actually kind of allows you to contract these customers in long-term contracts. On that level, I think we are actually very unique.
I don't know, in the global space even, operators who would take the same level of responsibility for what goes after go live, what goes after then the system, knowledge work as software, robot or agent or AI, whatnot, live, and how do you actually ensure the business continuity and business outcomes delivered every day 24/7 for months and years into the future, and that really separates us from the competition.
I think same applies quite a lot to healthcare as well, that we are automating clinical care pathways. It's our really critical processes from, of course, from the provider side, but also patient side, and it's totally different business than going to automate purchase invoices and from the risk point of view. That has been a long journey for us also to build that capability and competencies in-house to be able to go to these very critical care pathway automations and processes and take the responsibility that they are really working as a service. I think that's one key differentiator that we have really, let's say, high competencies in the healthcare and the clinical side.
As I said, 20% of our employees in Finland are healthcare professionals, which kind of implicates also that we need that substantive competency in-house as well. It's not only about technology, it's not only about orchestration. That's like one key thing where we differentiate. Then we have the modular solution that we can really scale, like I said, with cost efficient, with fast rollouts. That's the second one. Basically, maybe on the competitor side we see that there's not really similar a provider at the moment in these markets. There are software providers, there are AI startups, also of course, the platform side as well that we can see that there is coming kind of AI Agents to the healthcare from the EHR, the patient's data system providers, also from platform partners.
We see those as more like a standard components in the care pathways that we can utilize and build new use cases and really bring the value for the customers as well.
All right. I hope we answered the question. Comes a tech question. Karli, I think this is yours. I assume you do most of your automation with tools like UiPath. Tools like UiPath are evolving rapidly. Do you believe your Agent Workforce has the potential to scale in the market, and what would be the factor that would make the automation done with them better than tools like UiPath?
Yeah. Really it was on the slide, but I don't really think that UiPath is actually competition on what we do in the real sense that UiPath is a framework. It's like a thin layer of a framework that sits on top of the general purpose technology. Their agents are also powered with the same technology underneath, and they focus on offering this kind of horizontal capability that anyone can start a journey with. Hopefully, I was able to, in our presentation, go through the fact that we are offering the outcome of those predefined tasks and elements that we sell to the customer.
In that context, there's actually very nice economies of scale that supports the fact that you build those agent evaluation datasets, you build that kind of knowledge understanding of that very specific operational context, and that allows your agents to be better, more kind of higher confidence level. It allows a better kind of outcome. Simply choosing a framework doesn't get you there. It, it's obviously an option. We have used it a lot. It was in our toolbox, but we didn't think that it's good enough for this type of task that we have been embarking on. I think that's the analysis at the moment.
All right. Do you want to add anything?
No, obviously work with multiple different tech partners such as UiPath as well.
Mm.
Yeah, I think Karli summarized it very nicely.
Good. Very good. Based on the current results from Q1, do you expect to grow by double digits in the quarter, or how has the year started? As I said, the whole outlook is ambitious. All the building blocks must fall into place, but I prefer not to comment on the ongoing quarter separately. It looks like this was the online question, so there's still some time to send in questions. In the meantime, if there are more questions from Joni, we can take them.
Well, I can ask at least one technical question to you, Laura. The license says that you phase or stop phasing now. How long were they previously on average?
On average, I think a one-year contract is very typical in the license world.
Is that what you asked?
Yeah, I was asking that how long they were?
Typically. There are also multi-year licenses, but they are rather rare. I think maybe the veterans of the company know, but I think there's been a strong annual license tradition when licenses were sold more. Also the start dates vary, so it's not that everything starts at the beginning of January. That means that there's not gonna be a big hike coming in the Q1 for the timing change.
Maybe another question. How do you see your position in bigger deals? Are you a small and agile player in the market, is it a restriction in the bigger cases? I'm a little bit referring to the Finnish Kela case that was a couple of months ago. Were you in the competition like talks or can you comment on this or why you wouldn't be in or what was the reasons maybe why you were not chosen? Was it a technology question with Salesforce or can you elaborate on this?
We don't comment on any kind of individual customer cases or sort of participation or not. However, I mean, if we think about the average deal sizes over the course of the last two or three years, the average deal size has been growing quite substantially. We have several deals, and we had several deals on top of. North of EUR 500,000 in annual revenue last year. Already this year, we are now some more than EUR 1 million in. The average deal size is growing. I mean, I think it's a very good proof point that we can win very big customers, very big deals and go bigger.
In the U.K. NHS space with the acquired company, e18 Innovation, the model has been different. It's been very much land and expand, and now we are kind of on expanding, and then the average deal size and customer size is bound to grow.
Yeah, and it was maybe a little bit of your focus also . [crosstalk]
I think, yeah, one of the key elements is that the. Not commenting exactly, but there's. If there's a core system replacement involved, our solutions, you can think of it happens on the level of work. People applying those systems to perform their work, and we automate work. We rarely find ourselves or even target in the opportunities where the point is to replace a core system itself. We kind of assume that the core system exists so that we can automate o n top of that.
Okay. Thank you.
All right. It looks like the chat went quiet and our time is up. [crosstalk] Jussi, over to you.
Happy to summarize. I think we are at the top of the hour, so keeping this very short. Thank you, dear colleagues, and thank you for the questions in the room and online. Just want to summarize this very briefly, not reading through all the points. We have presented a lucrative investment opportunity in a rapidly growing market. We've given you proof points of our unique business model that is predictable, scalable, and highly based on continuous revenues. We're disrupting enterprise-grade work with the Agent Workforce offering, transforming the knowledge work, combining people, Digital Workforce, and agents in collaboration, rethinking the business model, opening up new revenue-generating opportunities for our customers.
Healthcare leadership is at the core of the company. 50% of the revenues come from healthcare already, and we have huge growth opportunity internationally in that space. Our kind of way into the market very much is care pathway transformation and in selected disciplines and use cases, which of course underlines our go-to-market as well. Pick our battles, choose our solutions very wisely and use cases where we're heading. Solid financial performance, as Laura was discussing that already and we're confident of achieving a good year financially as well this year. Very nice that you spent the two hours with us, so happy to wrap this up and thank you all for joining.
Stay tuned for more and see you again next time. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.