Infosys expands Metsä Group IT deal with agentic AI platform
Infosys has announced a significant expansion of its existing IT services relationship with Metsä Group, the Finnish forest industry company with EUR 5.8 billion in 2025 sales. Under the renewed multi-year engagement, the listed Indian IT services firm will take on end-to-end responsibility for Metsä's application management, cloud operations, workplace services, service desk, and on-site IT and operational technology interface support across mill and office locations worldwide.
Central to the expanded scope is Infosys Topaz Fabric, the company's composable agentic services platform, which the firm says will embed AI-driven automation into service delivery, accelerate issue resolution and support ongoing cost reduction across Metsä Group's IT estate.
The deal
Kristiina Lammila, Chief Information Officer of Metsä Group, said the engagement represents "a new chapter" in the two firms' long-standing relationship, framing it as a consolidation of the company's IT sourcing model designed to meet current efficiency demands. Infosys did not disclose the financial value of the contract, the duration in years, or the specific savings targets that have been agreed with Metsä.
Ruchir Budhwar, EVP and Industry Head for Europe and Manufacturing at Infosys, cited cost pressure, operational complexity and AI-driven innovation as the three concurrent challenges facing the forestry sector. The engagement covers both Metsä's mill operations, which carry operational technology integration requirements, and its broader corporate IT environment across the approximately 8,800-person organisation.
Infosys Topaz Fabric was introduced by Infosys as its agentic AI layer for enterprise IT transformation. The platform is positioned by the company as a composable, open architecture that can orchestrate AI agents across service management workflows. Metsä Group becomes a named reference customer for the platform's deployment in the manufacturing and process industries vertical.
Market context
The managed IT services market for industrial and manufacturing customers is highly competitive, with Infosys competing against Wipro, TCS, Capgemini, and Accenture, as well as hyperscaler-adjacent managed service offerings from AWS and Microsoft. The differentiation play in recent contract renewals has shifted from labour arbitrage toward AI-augmented service delivery, with agentic automation increasingly cited as a means of reducing ticket volumes and accelerating mean-time-to-resolution.
Forest industry companies are under structural pressure from energy costs, raw material price volatility and sustainability compliance requirements, all of which increase the urgency around IT efficiency programmes. Metsä Group's decision to consolidate its IT sourcing with a single partner, rather than running a multi-vendor model, reflects a broader trend among mid-to-large industrials prioritising simplicity and accountability over best-of-breed flexibility.
From a regulatory standpoint, any engagement spanning Finnish and wider European operations will be subject to the EU AI Act's requirements as they phase in through 2026 and 2027, particularly obligations around transparency and human oversight for AI systems used in operational decision-making. NIS2, which came into force across EU member states in late 2024, also places obligations on operators of essential services in sectors including manufacturing, with IT outsourcing partners increasingly expected to demonstrate compliance with incident reporting and supply-chain security requirements.
Infosys has not stated whether Topaz Fabric has been assessed against EU AI Act risk tiers or whether the deployment at Metsä has been structured with NIS2 supply-chain obligations in mind. These are likely questions buyers and analysts will raise as the engagement progresses and agentic AI is embedded more deeply into operational workflows.