India's second largest IT exporter Infosys wants to revive growth through automation and artificial intelligence, its chief executive said yesterday, boosting investors' confidence in the company after it posted a forecast-beating quarterly profit.

Chief executive Vishal Sikka was brought in earlier this year to chart a new strategy for Infosys, once a trendsetter for India's more than $100 billion IT outsourcing industry.

Sikka said Infosys' future lay in new technologies, and that it would look into acquisitions to expand into those areas.

The shift into artificial intelligence and automation would be a leap for Infosys, which currently offers services that include remotely managing computer networks and writing software code.

Infosys has not done a large acquisition since it was founded in 1981 by seven engineers who pooled $250. The company has cash and cash equivalents of about $5.4 billion at the end of September, its earnings statement shows.

Infosys, which makes more than two-thirds of its sales from clients in the US and Europe, said net profit in the quarter ended September rose to Rs30.96 billion ($506.25 million) from Rs24.07 billion in the same year-ago period.

Analysts, on average, were expecting to post a Rs29.2 billion quarterly profit. The company maintained its forecast of 7-9 per cent sales growth for the year ending in March 2015.

Infosys provides IT services to Western clients including BT Group, Bank of America and Volkswagen. The company added 49 new clients during the September quarter, including a multi-year contract with Daimler AG.-Reuters