Mphasis buys Theory & Practise to boost AI decision layer

Mphasis has acquired Vancouver-based Theory and Practise Business Intelligence, gaining ownership of TAP's Continuum AI platform.

The deal includes an upfront payment of CAD 10 million at closing, with up to CAD 20 million in additional management milestone-based contingent consideration over multiple years.

Founded in 2018, Theory and Practise developed Continuum AI as a decision intelligence platform that combines artificial intelligence with behavioural economics. It supports business decisions in areas including pricing, demand forecasting, marketing and supply chain management.

The acquisition adds a decision intelligence layer to Mphasis' NeoIP roadmap. It also expands the company's presence in retail and consumer packaged goods and brings in a team with expertise in AI, data science and behavioural economics.

Continuum AI is designed to move beyond descriptive analytics and predictive modelling into optimisation, helping organisations make operational and commercial decisions rather than simply forecast outcomes. The platform can be applied across sectors including financial services, retail and consumer packaged goods.

The transaction also brings Theory and Practise founder and chief executive officer Dr Rogayeh Tabrizi into Mphasis' leadership team. She will join as executive vice president - CPG and head of Decision AI.

Nitin Rakesh, chief executive officer and managing director of Mphasis, described the acquisition as a way to strengthen NeoIP with a decision intelligence layer aimed at delivering measurable economic outcomes for enterprises. He said it would extend the company's reach into a significant area of AI spending and help move its offering beyond task automation towards systems that can reason over business objectives, constraints and domain context.

Mphasis has been building out its artificial intelligence offering around NeoIP, which it describes as a platform for orchestrating AI tools and data assets. The addition of Continuum AI points to a broader push among technology services groups to add software and domain-specific tools through acquisitions, particularly in areas where clients want clearer commercial returns from AI spending.

For Mphasis, the deal is also a sector play. Theory and Practise brings a portfolio of customers in retail and consumer packaged goods, two sectors where pricing, promotions, demand planning and inventory decisions can directly affect margins.

Dr Tabrizi said the combination would place Continuum AI within a larger engineering and delivery organisation.

She said TAP had shown how advanced modelling, causal inference and optimisation can materially improve decision-making. Combined with Mphasis' scale, industry expertise, ontology capabilities and execution infrastructure, she said, the business could turn those domain-specific successes into reusable decision assets that can be deployed, governed and scaled across industries. The combined capabilities, she added, would help clients move beyond isolated pilots and make faster, more meaningful business decisions.

Decision layer

A central feature of the acquisition is the use of behavioural economics alongside machine learning and optimisation models. The approach is intended to account for customer behaviour and business constraints when companies make decisions on pricing, promotions or supply chain trade-offs.

Ramanathan Srikumar, chief solutions officer at Mphasis, said the acquisition would strengthen the company's work on context and reasoning in AI systems.

He said many organisations still lack a robust layer that structures context, links concepts consistently and enables higher-order reasoning and decision-making, even when predictive models are in place. The acquisition, he said, adds to Mphasis' context engineering layer, which it sees as foundational for agentic workflows and decision intelligence that can be designed, executed, measured and continuously improved.

Dr Tabrizi's academic background spans physics and economics, including research at Simon Fraser University and time at Stanford University. She is also the author of a book on behavioural AI.

The acquisition underlines how IT services firms are looking beyond general-purpose AI tools towards more specialised products that tie models to operational decisions. Mphasis is committing CAD 10 million upfront and up to CAD 20 million more in contingent payments for Theory and Practise.