While AI dented traffic and billings for Shiksha for the second consecutive quarter in Q1 FY27, it emerged as a new monetisation lever for Naukri, Info Edge’s recruitment business.
“Newer monetisation levers such as AI REX, Talent Pulse, and other value-added offerings contributed to significantly higher ARPU and expanded our revenue opportunity per customer,” said Hitesh Oberoi, Info Edge’s managing director, during the earnings call.
The management highlighted that commercial adoption of AI REX, the company’s agentic AI offering for recruiters, continued to accelerate during the quarter. As of June 2026, AI REX was live across 4,000 enterprise customers and recruitment firms, 10% of which have already converted into paying customers. Adoption of AI REX spans across sectors such as IT, BFSI, sales, finance, healthcare, BPO and core engineering.
The company said it sold AI REX to 400 clients in Q1 FY27 and another 300 clients in July. This was achieved by increasing talent demand across AI, machine learning, data science and data engineering.
Talent Pulse, the firm’s AI-powered talent and salary intelligence platform, now serves more than 600 paid customers, ranging from large enterprises to smaller organisations. Early traction has prompted the company to scale both AI REX and Talent Pulse to several thousand customers over the next few quarters.
Naukri is diversifying beyond a jobs platform. The management highlighted that Naukri is transitioning from just being a jobs board into a more comprehensive recruitment operating system. The platform now spans sourcing solutions across the premium mid-market and value segments, salary and talent planning tools, AI-led recruiter productivity capabilities, employer branding, assisted hiring services, and assessments.
“Our growth strategy is built around hiring volumes, our share of hiring, and our revenue per hire. Hiring volumes depend on the broader microeconomic environment, so our focus remains on expanding market share and revenue per hire,” Oberoi told analysts on the call.
In the premium segment, the platform continues to expand its presence through Naukri TopTier, PremiumX, IIM Jobs and Hirist. The company believes it has not fully tapped the monetisation potential across these offerings, as several features are currently being offered to customers at no additional cost.
In the mid-market segment, Naukri is aiming to boost recruiter productivity through
AI-led sourcing automation, while expanding adjacent offerings such as job marketing, talent intelligence, data products, and assisted hiring services. JobHai remains a medium-term strategic opportunity in the value segment.
On the job seeker side, Naukri is evolving from job search and discovery towards broader offerings including career insights, personalised advice, upskilling and interview preparation through Naukri 360, Naukri Minis. It also has AI-powered agents such as NEO.
“These self-serve AI-enabled offerings typically carry high margins, and the acquisition of node Coding Ninja should help us expand further into upskilling. We believe this is a meaningful opportunity enabled by our AI capabilities and data assets,” Oberoi said.
The jobseeker business, Naukri 360, saw billings grow by over 35% YoY in Q1 FY27. Over the last six quarters, paid subscribers as a percentage of monthly active users have improved from 1.3% to 2.6%, aided by increased adoption of AI initiatives, including Jobseeker agent NEO, AI mock interview offerings and AI Resume Builder offerings.
Naukri operates on a massive scale. The platform contains about 118 million resumes, with over 25,000 new profiles being added every day. Alongside that 850,000 daily profile modifications and millions of other behavioural interactions also happen across the platform. These data assets remain one of its biggest competitive advantages.
AI does not pose disintermediation risk to Naukri: The management commentary also noted AI disintermediation risk as being inconsequential to Naukri, given the company’s control over its proprietary data on both sides of the marketplace.
“We have proprietary data from both sides of the marketplace, millions of user interactions every day, and over two decades of domain knowledge. We believe these strengths become even more valuable in an AI-driven world,” said Oberoi.
However, Shiksha, the education arm of Info Edge, faces a different challenge as a large part of user traffic came through a distribution channel it did not own. As AI changed search behaviour, that dependency became a disadvantage.
“Where we own both sides of the marketplace, AI strengthens the business by improving matching recommendations and customer outcomes. Where we rely more on third-party distribution, AI-driven changes in user discovery and search behaviour created headwinds for the business. This is how we think about AI risk across our portfolio, said Oberoi.
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