Good afternoon, welcome to Gofore's Q4 and full year results presentation. Intention today is to, of course, give you an idea of how we did in Q4 and last year in 2025, also to give you an idea of in what shape Gofore currently is to face the challenges of the future, because we expect there to be a lot of challenges also for the future. Presenting today is me. I'm Mikael Nylund, the CEO of Gofore Group, I will have some guests during the presentation with me. How we're going to do it is that we're gonna start with the Q4 and full year results and highlights from that. We're gonna look at the financial highlights, some outlook.
To round this presentation off, we will talk about AI, the topic that, of course, a lot of investors are pondering about right now. We'll have a few expert guests today here talking about what AI means for the consultancy business for digital consultancies. I said, let's start with how we did in Q4. Q4 was rather good, I'm happy to say. Profitability-wise, we improved much from a weaker 2025, and especially a weaker first half of the year. The year 2025 was very much a tale of two halves, with a weak first half and then going into the second half after some corrective measures, a much stronger performance. That was well-rounded off in Q4 with a healthy profit margin.
Growth-wise, there's two important highlights, I think. First one is that we've had negative organic growth since the start of 2024, and now was in Q4, the first quarter, where that negative development stopped. Organic sales pretty much at a plus, minus zero situation. Also that the investments that we made, because 2025 was very much a year of big investments for us, have started to pay dividends, and overall net sales growth was up 20%. A significant growth from the Q4 before. Shortly looking at the sentiment for Q1, we are cautiously optimistic, I would say.
Expecting a little bit of tailwinds from the improving demand and, of course, especially, expecting a positive development from the investments that we made with business in Finland being supported by a big acquisition in Huld, and the business in DACH being supported by also a very big acquisition compared to the size of the business there in Esentri. We will look a little bit more on these acquisitions also today. We are in the midst of integration, that will be a little bit of a strain on Q1 and on the customer hours that we can book for that period. A little bit more on the Q4.
As said, profitability was high, by far the highest profitability of the year at adjusted EBITA 14%. Utilization rates were at a good level, highest level of the year, which is often the case in Q4, with a lot of a kind of a busy calendar there. As said, net sales increased by almost 20%. This is really important for us and ended up at EUR 59.6 million. We have also in Q4 made measures to support future profitability, so cost synergies from the Huld acquisition, which was closed in September, beginning of September, have been implemented in Q4. The results will be more visible during 2026, gradually, from those decisions.
A one-off item, basically was the compensation of EUR 3 million we got from an arbitration award for a dispute that we've had. From this, most of it is as one of items that affect previous years from 2025 have been adjusted, but some of the arbitration award affects also the adjusted EBITA in 2025. We are still struggling a bit, as is the industry as a whole, with the customer price level, so pretty much level for the Q4 at -0.2% in customer prices. Average salary change was 1.9% in Q4, but this mainly includes out of the ordinary one-off items, so I would look more on the full year development there being +0.9%.
So pretty much balanced with the customer price situation, but not the situation that we would like. Customer price development is a major issue for Gofore, for the industry as a whole. If you look at the full year situation, as I said, very much a tale of two halves, very different halves in H1 and H2. H2 being pretty decent half for us and goes more to show in which shape Gofore is for the started year, for the future years, and for the future challenges. What happened in spring of 2025 was that we made a major restructuring operation, and that has meant that our skill structure is better aligned with customer needs now in H2. We've managed to reduce costs, and we've maybe had a little bit better market situation as well, with a little bit stronger customer demand in H2.
Especially this is relevant for the private sector and the manufacturing industry clients there, and also based on our decision, strategic decision to go into a new industry of Defence & Space , and security-related customers, also the demand in that area is quite healthy. As said, we did investments in 2025, and that's already visible in the numbers for 2025, will be so in the future. Looking at the last 12 months, pro forma revenue of, a t the end of December, we see that we are at a level of EUR 250 million, which of course is due to and thanks to the acquisition of Huld, and is an important milestone or important step on our growth journey.
Huld was the biggest acquisition we've done to date, and that's something that reflects also, of course, on the integration work, and as said, we are expecting that to have a little bit of an effect on the beginning of this year, when we are in the midst of the biggest operational integrations with Huld. Huldians joining the Gofore organization now at the turn of January, February. In December, we also announced the other investment in the DACH region by acquiring Esentri. As promised, I will come back to a little bit more about the acquisitions next or almost next in the presentation.
The board of directors has proposed a dividend of EUR 0.49 per share, a slight increase from last year, which is, of course, reflecting on the board's also confidence that the weaker H1 was just a one-off situation, not the normal state of affairs for Gofore, and that we can improve for the future. We are well-positioned, as we will go a little bit deeper into in the financial highlights, also to use the balance sheet for further investments, if we find suitable targets. Again, 2025 was very much a tale of two different halves. H1 was the most difficult half year for Gofore pretty much ever, and that was due to weak customer demand resulting in a big free capacity, in a big bench. We also, to add on top of that, we had some profitability challenges in certain projects, which were then handled in H1.
That's we ended up in change negotiations in restructurings where we effectively made a layoff of 80 people, and that brought EUR 2.4 million of savings and going forward from that. That's the big reason why H2 was very much different from the first one. We had a better alignment of skills and expertise of our consulting force with the customer needs. We had the cost reduction supporting the profitability, and we also improved on the delivery situation, so no big profitability challenges from projects in H2, although some tails affected H2 still.
As we see here, H2 is again in a more healthy, double-digit profitability margin, even though, of course, H2 includes the seasonally weakest quarter of the year in Q3. That's a good sign for us. For growth, the investments, I want to highlight once more the investments that we made during 2025. In summer, we acquired Huld, and in December, we announced the acquisition of Esentri in the DACH region. If you look at the situation in terms of real growth, in terms of last 12 months, pro forma net sales at the end of January, we are at EUR 228 million.
Market growth from what we've seen during 2023, 2024, 2025, and that's important for the Gofore growth story. Acquisitions first, Huld, as said, the biggest acquisition to date, 400 experts added. That's a big amount of additional expertise to the Gofore crew at an enterprise value of EUR 54.5 million. A very strategic acquisition in the sense that this is something that we did to implement our strategy of going into the Defence & Space industry. Huld has a very long history of very niche expertise in the space area with satellite software, downstream data handling, situational awareness.
This is something that we see as such, as a strong, growth area, but also in terms of on converging needs from defence, security, like national security, and then space, technologies and industries. Space will be supporting the growth of our whole strategic industry of Defence & Space . It's also a complementary investment into the, what we call the Intelligent Industry customer segment. A significant complementary investment there with almost doubling the number of experts there, and especially bringing specific know-how of industrial cybersecurity, which is something that is a very growing area with these customers.
For cost synergies in Q4, we implemented the decisions that will ultimately result in around EUR 1.3 million in cost synergies during 2026, also important in that sense. The other acquisition is Esentri, a German company, supporting our DACH business. A German company, based in Baden-Württemberg, and having operations as well in Switzerland, and also Liechtenstein with the Liechtenstein state being the public sector customer there. This is also, as said in the beginning, a very significant addition, relative to the DACH operation size, doubles also that roughly. We start the year of 2026 now with 200 plus experts and also a target of growing our business there in double-digit numbers.
Esentri brings a good customer portfolio and diversifies also the expertise that we have there. As part of Esentri group, there's also a company called Impact Strategies that kind of diversifies the expertise that we have in the DACH region into the same direction where we've gone over the years in the Finnish business. Bringing the advisory business, the management consultancy business, with a specific focus on sustainability matters, which is something that German customers are very much interested in. An important growth step on the DACH timeline of growth as well.
What is always important is that how we do with the customers, and we're, of course, very, very happy that during 2025 also, we managed to improve in that area. Many customers are operating under strict budgets, under kind of economic pressure themselves, so the demands are high. In that sense, I'm super happy that we managed to improve the NPS score from 65, from the previous year to 68. A lot of our customers feel that we can meet or exceed their expectations, which is also, of course, super important. The amount of returning customers was 93% and the amount of customers that we invoice over EUR 1 million per annum was one bigger than the year before.
I think a good result also in the tough market conditions. Goes to show that the strategic partnerships that we always try to build are ones that also hold up in the tougher market conditions. That brings me to the strategy part. No changes here, but important to remember and note that Gofore is focused on chosen strategic industries. Those strategic industries being the three that I think I mentioned in the presentation already: Digital Society, Defence & Space , and the third one, Intelligent Industry. We know the customer industries. We have a long history with all of them. We understand the customer industry-specific problems and the challenges, and we can help our customers solving them.
We're still very much committed to our geographical focus in Finland and DACH, and have been investing into the DACH region, as said. We are working very hard, I think, and getting results out of improving the way we create value to our customers. The expectations are changing. They are quite high at the moment, we believe that we are in a good place to build on the exceptional offering, and we will come back to that a little bit in the AI theme as well to tell how Gofore as a whole is tackling the challenge that customers, of course, place on us also in terms of the AI transition.
As said, three strategic industries: Intelligent Industry, Defence & Space , and Digital Society. We are focused on these customer domains. We are focused on these customer problems in these domains that are domain-specific and different from each other, and that's why we can produce good value to all of our customers in these strategic industries. Good. That was about Q4 and full year 2025, and hopefully also giving a little bit of an idea that we feel, at least ourselves, that we are in a good shape to tackle the future challenges. Now for the financial highlights, which usually are given by the chief financial officer, but today I'm here giving also you the financial part of the presentation.
We are in the midst of a change in CFO. Outgoing CFO Teppo Talvinko is not available today, but we will have an opportunity to have a short introduction from our incoming CFO, shortly to that. To start off with the net sales analysis, big picture, of course, is that growth is driven by the Huld acquisition, which is reported in the numbers since beginning of September. There's an increase in volume, both on own crew sales and subcontractor sales. Private sector sales was around 8% up year-on-year, again, driven to a large degree by the Huld acquisition.
There are strong areas which are growing and compensating for other areas which are not as strong, so like areas with like cybersecurity, many areas of our advisory business are growing. Here we wanted to highlight also the simulator product sales, which increased 60% year-over-year, so a sizable increase there. Simulator products are, especially for the Intelligent Industry customer segment, an important part of our offerings.
Kind of, augmenting the consultancy offering that we have for these customers with our own technology in areas which are important for all of the manufacturing industry clients, especially in the mobile work machines area, where simulator technology is used in a lot of different scenarios, especially as virtualizing the product development. We are very happy that that area is on a growth track, and that also is an indication that the digitalization, the transition to more digitalized products from a very physical world, where we've been only recently, is ongoing in this customer segment.
Profitability-wise, again, I want to say that the important part here is that first half and the second half are very different from each other. Volume-wise, H2 was much stronger, with, of course, Huld acquisition, again, a significant factor in that, but also the higher utilization rate resulting from a better fit between customer demand and capacity that we have. Employee expenses up a little bit, of course, reflecting both on the restructuring, which was a positive for the company, and the Huld acquisition, which drives the volumes up, and employee expenses are affected that way.
As mentioned earlier, the arbitration award of EUR 3 million, we have EUR 1.2 million of that improving H2 profitability. The rest of the arbitration award was adjusted for as being affecting years before 2025. Balance sheet-wise, we are in a situation of strong KPIs still. Cash decreased slightly during the year. Maybe you could say that to a more healthy level of cash, that's of course, due to the big investments that we've made with the Huld investment being the main one here, Esentri being affecting January. Interest-bearing debt increased, same reason behind, of course.
Dividends of EUR 0.49 per share will be paid in normal order after the annual general meeting, if the meeting decides on these dividends. This is also a sign or goes to show that we believe in the strong financial position that we have, that we are also able to pay rising dividends and that we consider the first half dip in cash flow and profitability as a kind of not normal situation in any way. We have still the continued ability to invest, when we find good targets during the year. Finally, the cash flow analysis showing s trong operational cash flow, especially in H2. This is something that we expect to continue into the current year as well.
Financing cash flow will be slightly more impactful, of course, in a negative way with the bigger debt position that we have with the changes in 2025. Also dividends will be affecting the H1 cash flow and be impactful in that way. Now as promised, a presentation from our incoming chief financial officer. Welcome, Saara. Saara Ukkonen will be joining us in March. It's nice to have you here today to present you to the investors. Tell us a little bit, who is Saara Ukkonen?
Yeah. Thank you, Mikael, and it's really exciting to join such a great company as Gofore. Just to say that my first experiences have been really, really great, so it's an agile company with very driven people, so I'm happy to join. I have worked in the past couple of years in the IT industry, so I have been a CFO for a company called Witted. I also work for a company called Akkodis, which is part of Adecco Group. I'm experiencing scaling and building the finance functions, improving the processes, enabling and driving profitable growth, also executing M&As. I have lived now a couple of years in Finland.
Prior to that, I lived and worked several years abroad in France and in the U.K. Happy to be back here, and I really look forward to bringing my experience and support Gofore in the next phases of growth.
As you said, you've been working in the IT industry...
Yeah
For the last couple of years, and it's been a kind of a turbulent time.
Yeah.
With, not only the Gofore numbers, are showing that, but also the industry numbers, showing that many companies kind of feeling the change in the economic climate, maybe even the changes in the technological landscape with AI and so forth, but I would say more of the economic climate. There probably will be a little bit of winner and loser situation in this, for the future. I would like to ask you, what do you consider to be the success factors of that make a company the winner in a turbulent period like this?
Yeah. I have couple of points. I think one is adaptability. As you said, the industry has been in the constant change, and the technologies are also constantly changing, the winners are the ones who are able to adapt and then transform. I think one important point is focus on the client. Basically understanding the client needs and business problems, and actually helping to solve those and deliver real results rather than just technical work. I think at the end, it comes down to having the best talent and best people. Who has the skilled and smart consultants that the client trusts and want to employ again and again? I think at least with those three, you go quite far.
I think we understand each other quite well here. I do believe that Gofore is well-placed to deliver on those success factors. Thank you, Saara, for this presentation, looking forward to being with you here in the future results presentation.
Yeah. Thank you. Me too.
Of course, at this point, I also want to take the opportunity to give huge thanks to Mr. Teppo Talvinko, who has been for 6 years my partner in crime up here and talking to investors on, in, on many occasions. It's been a pleasure working with you, Teppo. Next, let's look a little bit on the future, on the targets and outlook for 2026. A reminder, Gofore has ambitious targets set by the board in 2024. In the midst of the little bit more difficult economic cycle, and we have not seen any reason to change this. This is what we believe in and want to work towards.
If we look a little bit where we are right now, the growth target, we are actually on track, and that's, of course, at this point, thanks to the bigger investments that we've made during 2025. Those investments are also super important for this year, for the coming years' organic growth. I believe that they have not only made Gofore bigger, but they have especially made Gofore a lot stronger to compete for that growth that we will need in the future. Profitability-wise, as I showed you, the second half of 2025 was closer to our profitability bar target. We are not there yet.
We have a lot of work to do, but also we consider that we have the right tools here in place to take also our profitability in the coming years to the level that we have been targeting for, well, almost ever, the 15% target being the longest living part of the target setting that we have. If we look at the outlook a little bit, here you will find the Q1 performance drivers that we've included in the results report. If you first look a little bit on the fundamentals, in Finland, we do see from the beginning of the fourth quarter, and we are estimating that the Finnish economy will grow in 2026, and the growth will accelerate in 2027.
These are important, of course, fundamentally wise, our, for our growth. The same goes a little bit for the German economy. We've been, I would almost like to say, a little bit unfortunate with bad luck, being focusing on the two countries in Europe that have been the weakest in the current economic cycle. Both Germany and Finland have been suffering in the last couple of years. We also see that the German economy is expected to grow this year. Again, very important, especially for the Finnish growth, it is estimated to be driven by export industry by manufacturing industry. That suits well with the customer segments that we are focusing on.
Looking a little bit on the shorter term drivers here, growth-wise, we of course, have the capacity increases from the investments that we made from the acquisitions, and that's going to continue the growth in Q1. That's something that is almost a certain. On top of the acquisitions, we are expecting a little bit of total capacity growth also. We have areas where we recruit quite actively right now, and that's important. Then there's, of course, also the areas that are not yet, at least in a similarly strong situation. To have the capability areas that are growing, that's important, and we expect the net change here on top of the acquisitions to be positive in the first quarter.
Especially, we are counting on demand to pick up within the manufacturing customers and the DACH market. It's smaller here, but of course, we do also see that there will be growth during 2026 in the Defence & Space industry. Profitability-wise, we expect the good level or the kind of fundamental drivers for the good level to continue from Q4 to Q1. We've had a, let's say, better transition of the year than we've seen in going from 2024 to 2025, or going from 2023 to 2024, in terms of customer demand, quite well holding up over the year change, and that's always a good signal for the coming year.
On the other hand, what we've highlighted in the report as well, is that the absences during January have been on an unusually high level, that will be also reflecting on the results for Q1, as we'll also do the integration work. There is some integration work related to bringing together Huld and Gofore organizations operationally now, and that will result in a slight loss of customer work, and that will be reflected on the Q1 profitability. Nothing we are worried about. It's just something that has to do with the integration work and nothing structural.
January was reported as part of our full year report, and let's say that roughly in line with what I just said, holiday period was a little bit of a surprise to us. Capacity developed as expected. We added to the capacity numbers, added Esentri, otherwise close to net zero change there, I think. A little bit of a positive change, but very small. I want to round off the outlook part with listing our priorities for 2026, what we will be focusing on and what we also encourage the investors to look at. First one is that we want to make sure that the integrations from the big investments in 2025 are successful and that we maximize the value of those investments.
We will see cost synergies realizing during 2026, and we will also see business results improvements during 2026 from both Huld acquisition in Finland and the Esentri acquisition in DACH, or that's what we are targeting. Secondly, what is super important is, of course, deliver on the turnaround in organic growth. We are now at zero level, looking at Q4 and looking forward. We want to see that as a trend and of course, return to the positive organic growth track. That's extremely important for our future performance. This will especially be true in the DACH region, where we are doubling, we are targeting double-digit growth in terms of net sales in this year.
Thirdly, on the agenda and priorities is our slogan of rethinking consulting, which means the development of our offering portfolio, making sure that we with the chosen focus industries, we are in a place where we can develop unique value to our customers. We've done a lot of work here, and now is the time to reap the results of that and get the results actually visible in performance numbers. That's the three-part priority list that we have set up out for ourselves in 2026. That concludes the targets and outlook part. As a last one, I want to welcome Tommi Rasinmäki and Osmo Haapaniemi here with me, and we will be talking a little bit about AI development. Welcome, Tommi and Osmo.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Osmo, you are the managing director and founder of Valimo Studios, which we will come back to shortly. Tommi, you are working in Gofore as the head of business in our management consulting part, which is also responsible for the AI advisory services that we do with our customers. So good to have you here, and I will let the experts do much of the talking. But to start with, kind of give the big idea of how we at Gofore approach the topic of AI, which is, of course, a big change for our customers. It's a big change for the digital consulting industry. Some even consider it to be a disruptive change. We'll see about that, I guess.
We are prepared, of course, to face big changes from there. What our playbook basically is to, of course, see to it that we upskill our workforce, that we are attractive to new talent, because in times of change, of course, you want to make sure that you also get the new talent from the market. Secondly, we develop our own AI offering and expertise. Basically, that's where we want to position Gofore as a comprehensive partner in AI transitions for our customers.
We think we have just taken the first small steps in these AI transitions with the customers, and they will need a lot of help in concluding the transition. That's where we are strong. Again, focusing on specific industries, that means also that we can give the AI technology some specific value in the industry context and make sure that our customers get what they want from their AI investments. Kind of a plus one in the playbook is that we are, of course, looking at investment opportunities also in the AI context.
What we now have is Osmo here from our group company, Valimo Studios, which we have together with Osmo and Ope Saksi founded, and that's an important addition to our portfolio. Basically, building on that playbook, we're going to have this short discussion about AI development. We're gonna start with Osmo, and maybe you can tell us a little bit about what Valimo Studios is and why it exists.
Thank you, Mike, Mikael, good to be here. Valimo Studios is a new specialist company in Gofore Group, specializing in AI transformation. Our core mission is to help customers operationalize AI, and that way create new business value out of the new technology capabilities that we now have at hand. Maybe a few words about me and Olli-Pekka. 20 years in the consultancy business and having led different consultancy businesses. Last year, we came together talking about the transformation and the change to consultancy business, but even more importantly, to customers' businesses.
We just saw that this is a kind of a place and a situation that kind of requires a new approach also to the market. That's why we decided to found a new company. Overall, we see that as of now, technology is moving a lot faster forward than companies are changing. That creates a kind of growing adoption gap. Now AI is moving from a kind of a passive tool, Copilot's personal productivity, more into agentic workflows and processes. Most probably at some point, we will have AI as a kind of agents and coworkers working with us.
That creates a kind of a massive change for companies, and they need to rethink their processes, operations, technology landscape, how all these enable them to serve their customers in the best possible way. We try to build Valimo to kind of bridge this gap and help companies to kind of solve this challenge.
Yes, thanks, Osmo, and great to have you in the group. Welcome, like, officially into the Gofore Group. You and we together talk about Valimo Studios as a AI native consultancy as opposed to the, can we say, the legacy, digital transformation consultancies. To be honest, there are a lot of these AI native consultancies popping up now every week or so.
Yeah.
What makes Valimo different?
Yeah. Maybe I'm not too fond of the term anymore. It's been kind of a little bit overused at this point. If we start with what does it mean to us, I think it starts from the company being kind of designed for the AI era, and we leveraging AI in our internal ways of working and processes. More importantly, in delivery, taking the kind of productivity benefits of the new technology to provide more value to the customers. Of course, a full focus on solutions that leverage AI to create that add-on value to the customers.
What differentiates us, when we were setting up the company, we were a little bit surprised that on the kind of new company's field, there were companies focusing quite a bit to strategy part, and then to technology agencies and that, and we wanted to take a holistic approach. We are building a company with multidisciplinary team, from strategy to technology, and then to adapting those solutions. Maybe that's one area. We are a team of super experienced consultancy business persons, and nobody knows where AI is in 2 years' time. At least personally, I think that our biggest competitive advantage is the kind of agility and speed we can learn.
Having a discussion with customer and learning something, and then next day having it, kind of thought through and a part of our story. That's one. Of course, Gofore. We want to have a kind of industrial partner who can bring the credibility from the beginning, and then, of course, the scale, when we kind of enter bigger transformation projects. Those three, I would say.
To me, that makes a lot of sense. I like it. Tommi, as said, you are heading the management consultancy at Gofore, and as such, you see from the, let's say, holistic perspective, what our customers are actually doing what phase their AI transition is. Can you tell us about Gofore's holistic approach to AI transition?
Absolutely. Thank you, Mikael. Well, our approach is comprehensive, as you, as you mentioned. Let me try to cover it through our AI transition model called AI Beyond Tomorrow. I think it's the best way to do it is through some concrete examples, so I think we can jump to that. I think that what it takes to succeed in AI transition is about leading this kind of systemic vehicle, so not just the disconnected parts of it. If we start looking at our framework, from the bottom, at the base is the data at the platform foundation. In practice, this means a lot of work with the data: data availability, data quality. Also about the technical governance, meaning and ensuring the controlled and secure environment for AI solutions development.
To speed up our clients' work in this area, and this area, we have productized our services, called the AI Landing Zone, which is the collection of best practices. How do you, in practice, to put up this kind of a platform and data foundation? On top of that, you can see these four wheels, so to say. If we start from the individual part, it is about the services like workforce upskilling, training services. Also about the cultural change adoption, because things are moving really fast, you need a good innovation culture. One hot topic to take on that is the AI 1,000 trainings. It's the training focused on for the management teams and board members and business owners.
Gofore is one of the founding partners of that training model, and it's been initiated by the AI Finland. Just last year, we were awarded as the Training Partner of the Year in the Finnish AI Gala as well. We've done multiple trainings for different kind of companies, from big to small, and it's been really, really great. One thing to mention, we have just announced today the strategic partnership with the AI Finland and their team, so looking forward to even more close collaboration with them. If we point out one thing from the organizational wheel, I would highlight the importance of the enterprise architecture.
It haven't gone anywhere, and I think it's actually even more important now, when we are figuring out how we get AI into our organization, operations, and processes, and how do we develop that. The business wheel, it's all about what AI really enables. It's about product and service innovations, ending up into a new business models. Gofore is very, really well positioned, as we've been talking already, that we've been quite systematically building our capabilities, the end-to-end capabilities, all the way from strategy work to the development and maintenance of these new type of innovations and solutions. Of course, important part of it is now the fourth wheel, digital development. I think this is the wheel that is at the fastest disruption at the moment.
At Gofore, we help our clients to move towards the AI native digital service production that runs on top of the AI platforms. We can provide a clear path to this changing operating model. To me, I feel like the bottleneck is not anymore in the speed of coding. We need to look at the whole life cycle of the digital development, starting from the how we define the business needs, how we do prototyping, coding, of course, as well, all the way to how do we do it in a secured and controlled manner and ensuring the quality. To run these wheels, we need an engine.
The AI transition engine is, this is the leadership that connects technology and people, sets direction, and keeps the organization moving at the right pace as well. All in all, to get the AI investments paying off, you need to have the strong foundation, four wheels aligned, and a well-lit engine.
Well put. From both of you, and from the things I hear from customers, I think we are now really entering the time when customers kind of realize that, it's not just about adding a tool or adding a simple individual, productivity tool like Copilot, which some people use and some don't to be honest about that as well. When we go into the more complicated organizational holes, we have the enterprise architecture, as Tommi said, and Osmo mentioned the kind of change need for processes. For whole organizations and even individuals, we know that we are not always the, as individuals, the best to adopt new ways of working.
Now we're talking about a lot of professions, a lot of roles in white-collar work that will be actually quite radically changing. Tommi, could you just mention a couple of concrete examples what we do with our customers in the AI sphere?
Absolutely. Starting from our public reference, City of Helsinki, and their centralized application maintenance solution office. It's a great example. Might not be the most awesome case, but it's saving millions. The thing why it is saving millions, of course, bringing centralized maintenance solution is already an efficient way, but we are bringing more and more AI into it. Of course, we're doing it in a kind of a gradual way, taking AI where it is bringing value right away, and we have great experiences on that, and expecting to save even more and do it even more effectively, the maintenance there. Another thing is to the AI governance models.
We have been now doing these, that kind of, comprehensive governance models for large enterprises. It means defining the roles and responsibilities, and also the processes on how to procure, develop, and operate AI solutions. To mention a few others, I'm really excited about one strategy project that we have ongoing. It combines also the organization-wide coaching and learning into the strategy process. I think it's actually a smart way to approach this the AI strategy work because it's all about adapting and learning new all the way along as you go. W ith AI, it doesn't work that you set the strategy and just implement it. You need to learn along the way.
One other thing to mention, we're also leading the human side of change in one of the largest AI transformation programs in Finland. There's few, and there's a lot more, of course.
Yes. Yes. Interesting what the future brings. Before we go to the audience questions, just one short question to both of you. We are now in 2026, as you know, and 2026 might be the year when organizations, on an average, there are leaders, of course, already, start to invest more programmatically into AI. Coming from kind of the capability building, the expertise, learning about what AI is, and doing the more of the proof-of-concept type of projects to something bigger. Would you agree? Is 2026 the year when when we see that?
We will definitely see at least a kind of a big jump forward in that, and at least in our customer discussions, productivity is on finding the kind of a bigger value lever cases in the organization, and then starting to move those forward is kind of a very topical discussion that we are having. Definitely, I believe that we are moving forward. Last year, we were still hearing that in some companies, majority of the AI investments were going to Copilot licenses, and then they were just given to people, and not much happened. Now, clearly, there's more kind of this organizational productivity approach, which I think makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, I think, even though it's one hype word, more, but the agentic approach is really speeding up the production-level implementation. Also, we're now starting to see the investments in the public sector as well, more and more coming, that is focused on AI. Of course, they have been putting the investment budget, two years ago, and now we can see the results and expecting to see a lot more in the coming year.
P ublic sector on average, it's a little bit behind the private sector, I guess. When the wheels get turning, things will happen. Yeah. Let's go to audience questions. We have Jaakko Tyrväinen, an analyst from SEB, following us. First question is that the financial markets are speculating that the AI native software will disrupt the existing SaaS market. How are you expecting this to impact the IT consulting market? I've been recently learning the mindset of the financial markets, I guess, with the sell first and ask questions later thing. This is at least something that's happening there.
Joke aside, I think at least the markets have kind of, t hey are confused about this. On the one hand, they say that SaaS software will be replaced by more tailor-made solutions. At the same time, they are saying that there will not be a need for software development. That's, at least something that I'm a little bit puzzled about. Do you have something that you want to add to this question?
Yeah. I wouldn't call myself as a kind of an expert in this field, but I don't think that the kind of bigger SaaS products are going anywhere. Maybe their role is evolving, and they will definitely be there as a kind of a transactional and master of record type of systems. It will be interesting to see how much companies start to build their own tailored workflows on top of those master records, and, kind of, moving away from the UIs of those, SaaS platforms. Potentially, that, of course, means quite a bit of work for consultants like us, to be there and, help them redefine those processes and ways of workings and then connect AI, for example, AI into those.
If the trend really would be that the SaaS market is dying, that would mean that we're going to replace those solutions by some customer tailor-made solutions, that would be a big potential to go for, and companies like us, we can see this as an opportunity as well. As mentioned, those players will be there in a form or another.
Yeah. I think we are a little bit kind of overreacting to the software development productivity topic. Even if it's very fast to build stuff, the faster you build, the more you need to test, and the more you need to do work on the kind of product management side, and so on. I don't think that to the overall workload, it's that a major change.
Jaakko's other question is related to that. How has the AI-powered code creation been so far visible in daily operations? Have you been able to speed up the outputs, and if you, if so, have you or your customers benefited from the productivity gains? Yes, on the other hand, both Tommi and Osmo have been already referencing the kind of, t hat code creation as such is not the only thing happening in a software development process. So when you speed up that, and get the productivity gains from that, there will be other bottlenecks.
Typically, when the scale of projects of software development grow, there are other bottlenecks that need to be addressed that are maybe even more important. AI can be helpful there as well, but, it's not only about the software development productivity.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In the daily operations, obviously, our software developers are AI-enabled, and we'll be using AI tools, and we're really systematically building that capability to everyone in the software development.
Again, from Jaakko, a question: Given the foreseeable productivity leap in code creation. He's really into code creation, I see. How are you positioning against those rivals who trust offshoring in their delivery? For example, how large a share of your billable hours are coming from software engineering, pure code creation, relative to larger international competitors? Not commenting on the larger international competitors and what their share of code creation is, ours is maybe comparing more to the domestic competitors. I think we have a little bit of a smaller share of pure code creation work because we have the comprehensive offering, and we have the advisory business.
We have the quality assurance business, and we have kind of the all of the phases of the transition that customers need. We are a little bit, I think, less dependent on the software creation capabilities going. That's not something that you can even put an exact number on, but let's say 30% of the business is in that area. Daniel Lepistö from Danske Bank asked that, "What are the areas or segments where you are recruiting currently and seeing better demand?" Well, I've been mentioning some examples. Cybersecurity, and especially strong in the manufacturing industry and the kind of cybersecurity of more and more digitalized products and the cybersecurity of production. Those are very important areas.
In the advisory arm of the business, there's several parts that are also recruiting quite heavily, including project management, which is often a kind of a good sign that the customer demand is there. There's things happening with the customers. They need project managers, so that's always a kind of a good, more general sign. Data, AI part kind of the natural answer to that. Daniel goes on to ask that: "Are you satisfied with your current Defence & Space capability now post-Huld, or could there be room for further M&A in this space?" Answer is that we are actually quite satisfied.
What we got with the Huld acquisition is both a customer portfolio, domain-specific knowledge for both defence and space , but especially I think something that is often overlooked is the capability, the ability to operate in security-sensitive environments, which is about. It's about, of course, expertise of the experts, but it's also about process-related stuff that needs to be adapted to the security-sensitive environment. It's about even premises, that you have the ability to work with security-sensitive subjects. These are not the subjects that are first where AI tools are brought in first.
Actually, quite often it is not allowed to use the AI tools, and that's of course a security thing happening there, and has to do also with another big topic that we haven't discussed today, maybe in future shows, but digital sovereignty and technological sovereignty of t hat, I think has gone from being just a policy concept to being something actually really on the agenda of our customers. From Daniel again: "Can you discuss the positive outlook for your Defence & Space business in a bit more detail, especially what comes to opportunities and potential collaborations ahead? What was the Defence & Space share of 2025 sales through Huld?" We haven't disclosed exact numbers, so I won't do it here either.
Of course, it's a little bit difficult to discuss in concrete terms the opportunities, but as we all know, and for unfortunate reasons, investments into defense, investments into security, are not the ones where public finances are limited. That's an area, and that's of course reflected then to the defence equipment manufacturing part, where actually we have quite a lot of organizations working in Finland with product development. Both, of course, the domestic ones, but also the big European ones. A lot of them have product development operations in Finland, being interesting customer opportunities for Gofore.
We have a question from ST: "How is agile and lean processes advisory nowadays? Is data slash cloud AI or leadership taking major parts of customers' attention, or do they improve on business agility too? Tommi, do you have some viewpoints on this?
Yes, they are, because now, maybe because of AI, the organizations are also evolving. Of course, we've seen a lot of change negotiations in the recent years due to the economic situation, probably, but also because the organizations are more changing. They're changing their operating models, and the roles are evolving because more AI coming into it. There was one study that stated that by the end 2030, there's 60% of the kind of job roles are different than nowadays. We don't even know what the roles of the future are. Definitely, there's the need of different kind of consulting related to the agility and the overall management consulting.
Maybe you could even say that, in a sense, there's nothing new with the change that AI brings. We've always lived in the changing world, AI is only accelerating that, and every organization needs to live with the very fast-paced change. We've spent a little bit over an hour. I'm sorry we can't take all of the audience questions. This was all for today. Thank you for being with us in this results presentation stream, and see you again.