Innodata's Agentic AI Bet Gathers Steam: Can Data Be the Next Moat?

Innodata Inc. INOD is leaning into one of the most transformative shifts in artificial intelligence — the rise of Agentic AI. Management believes the next phase of enterprise adoption will hinge less on raw scale and more on “smart data,” or carefully curated datasets that enable autonomous agents to reason, plan and act across complex environments. This positions the company at the intersection of model training, evaluation and simulation, where demand for precision data services is accelerating.

Innodata is broadening its footprint with major technology customers. A long-standing client recently expanded its scope of work, while another big tech relationship is scaling rapidly from a minimal revenue base into a multi-million-dollar engagement. These wins underscore the company’s strength in scaling pilot projects into full production contracts as enterprises integrate agentic capabilities more deeply into their operations.

Beyond data annotation, Innodata is investing in custom pipelines, simulation datasets and safety evaluation platforms that support agent-based AI. Management sees these services as foundational for enterprises seeking factuality, reliability and compliance in their AI systems. Importantly, the company views Agentic AI as a catalyst not only for digital services but also for robotics, with the potential to drive a “ChatGPT moment” in hardware deployment at the edge.

How It Stacks Up to Competitors

Microsoft Corporation MSFT is pursuing Agentic AI from a cloud platform perspective, embedding agent services across Azure and its productivity suite. Through Azure AI Foundry and the Foundry Agent Service, Microsoft enables enterprises to design, deploy and manage autonomous agents at scale. Its Copilot ecosystem further integrates agentic workflows into Office, Teams and Dynamics, creating stickiness across end-user applications. Microsoft’s scale in infrastructure and partnerships with OpenAI provide an unmatched distribution channel, though its agentic strategy is primarily tied to platform adoption and consumption economics rather than specialized data services.

Unisys Corporation UIS is approaching the opportunity through enterprise workflow automation, focusing on agentic AI deployments in IT services and support. Its Service Experience Accelerator integrates generative and agentic AI with knowledge management to automate service desk interactions, capture institutional knowledge and improve customer response times. Unisys is emphasizing domain-specific implementations, particularly in mission-critical environments where agent reliability reduces costs and boosts efficiency. While Unisys differentiates through deep workflow integration, its agentic AI scope remains service-centric, positioning it closer to managed services than core data enablement.

INOD’s Price Performance, Valuation & Estimates

Shares of Innodata have declined 10.6% in the past three months compared with the industry’s fall of 3.8%.

INOD Three-Month Price Performance

From a valuation standpoint, INOD trades at a forward price-to-sales ratio of 4.9, higher than the industry’s average of 1.66.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for INOD’s 2025 earnings per share (EPS) implies a year-over-year decline of 16.9%, while the same for 2026 indicates an increase of 42.3%. The EPS estimates for 2025 and 2026 have increased in the past 60 days.

INOD stock currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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