Good morning, everyone. My name's Divya Goyal. I'm the North American [Analyst]for anyone that does not know me. I cover North American IT services for the bank. With us today, we have Mr. Jeff Puritt, CEO of TELUS International. We're very excited to have you join us, probably the first time in a fireside chat with me here, so exciting. Jeff, TELUS this morning, Doug mentioned how TI has been an enabler for TELUS's digital experience capabilities. In the interest of investors who might be newer to the story, could you help us understand about TIXT's differentiated business model, capabilities, and some of the key strategic priorities? Sure. Nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me. I promise to come more frequently if you keep inviting me. We've been around 19 years now. We just celebrated our 19th birthday, and we've been enabling our business customers to delight their customers through a combination of talent and technology. We now have about 650+ enterprise clients. We serve them from 32 different countries, 68 design studios and delivery centers, a little over 75,000 full-time team members, a little over 1 million members of our AI community helping to build large language models, to data annotate, data collect, to help both hyperscalers and enterprise clients to build their own machine learning algorithms, helping to build GenAI models, whether it's for Google and Gemini or others. In terms of the TELUS relationship, indeed, we started out serving 3 of their customer-facing programs in wireless and wireline with just 200 team members, gosh, all the way back in our inception in 2005. T oday we have, you know, almost 16,000 team members supporting over 300 different programs, and have really helped, TELUS to not just leverage, a global talented workforce, but through our own organic and inorganic investments in growing our capability set to really help accelerate and amplify TELUS's digital transformation. Y ou know, I think, as Doug mentioned earlier, you know, one of the reasons why TELUS is the, you know, best-performing telecom, not just in Canada but around the world, is in part because of what TELUS International has been able to do within TELUS, you know, over the tenure of our relationship. where we focus particularly, in part, I suppose, enabled because we had a parent company anchor customer. It sort of emboldened our value proposition. Instead of being your mess for less or cheap and cheerful, which is sort of the origin story for a lot of outsourcers, we really focused on delivering exceptional client experiences, finding the right balance of talent and technology. TELUS wasn't looking for saving money when it created and empowered TELUS International. It was looking to continue to delight its customers. Taking that value proposition to non-TELUS customers, where we've developed the capability serving TELUS, amplified it, scaled it, hardened it, and then repurposed it on behalf of whether it's other telco clients or now not just comms and media as a vertical, but tech and games, e-commerce and fintech, BFSI, healthcare, travel and hospitality in particular, I think we've created a bit of a unique, unique niche positioning for our business. I t's reflected in a number of differentiators for us, including better profitability and better free cash flow yield than so many of our legacy BPO, CRM peers, and really over-indexing around next-gen solutions, disruptive solutions, and GenAI, you know, seems to be on everybody's lips today. It was a short time ago, and yet it's a lifetime in, you know, in the AI world. You know, when we bought Lionbridge AI back in December of 2020, it has turned out to be a rather prescient investment for us. That business has more than doubled. The work we were doing at first instance, initially helping principally but not exclusively hyperscalers build their own machine learning algorithms like search algorithms, map algorithms, etc. You know, now today, repurposing that AI community to try and optimize, reinforcement learning through human feedback to help build these large language models for both hyperscalers and now at the enterprise level as well. In totality, I think we've taken a differentiated approach at first instance and are now better positioned than ever before to capitalize on this disruption that AI in particular is going to deliver for human consumption across every industry and every market. That's great. It seems like you've probably given a really good summary of everything we're gonna dig into in the next 25 minutes here. I do echo like when I speak to TELUS briefly about TI's capabilities, every time when I talk to them about Accenture versus TI, it's not a favor to TI. It's really about can TI truly displace some of the existing vendors they've been working with. T hat's kudos to you guys and your capabilities that you bring to the table. It's a badge of honor that we wear at TI, as we've built out our capability set, displacing some of TELUS's legacy vendors, whether sometimes Accenture, TCS, Tech Mahindra, Infosys, Wipro, Thoughtworks, the list goes on. Obviously, TELUS still spends a great deal of money with many of our competitors, and we can't be all things to all people, nor to TELUS. Indeed, when you start with 3 programs and 200 people, and today it's over 300 programs and, you know, 14,000-16,000 people, clearly we're doing something right here. Now, that's right. Yo u did talk about TELUS quite a bit, and I think one of the biggest discussions that the market has is on the client concentration that TELUS International has. I t can be a double-edged sword, obviously. As you mentioned, at one hand, you keep generating stronger revenues, but then on the other hand, personally, as an analyst, I would like to see more client diversification. C ould you help us understand what are some of the diversification strategies that you're working on, especially when it comes to TELUS, Google, and obviously, the less discussed Meta is what I would say? Yeah. I mean, 2023 was a challenging year in for so many reasons, but three numbers in particular stick out: 31, 22, and 20. So year-over-year revenue growth in TI serving TELUS, 31%. Year-over-year revenue growth serving Google, 20%. And negative year-over-year growth serving our social media client of 22%. I ndeed, your phraseology, I think, is spot on in terms of this two-edged sword. The good news, I guess, in totality is, you know, we improved client concentration, 2023 over 2022 by 200 basis points, down from 65% to 63% among our top 10. I think TELUS is a fantastic anchor client for us for some of the reasons we've already discussed, but, you know, not well understood is the symbiotic relationship that exists between TI and TELUS. You know, we get to test drive a whole bunch of new capabilities for TELUS. When we fail, the consequences perhaps not quite as drastic. When we succeed, we, as I said before, scale and take that show on the road. We also have a 10-year master services agreement between TELUS and TI with a minimum spend commitment, and individual statements of work underneath it. The traditional view of client concentration risk, I think, ought to be tempered somewhat given the existence of that MSA and the attributes reflected within it, as well as the ownership structure between TELUS and TI. I think the traditional concerns regarding client concentration around Google and our social media client, you know, are perhaps more well-founded, but for surely we can all agree the receivable is good vis-à-vis these clients. T hat element of concentration risk perhaps is not as meaningful. When the hyperscalers were hyperscaling, the rising tide rose all boats. The fact that we were a near-digital native and perceived by those, tech-savvy, tech-centric businesses as being a lot like them in terms of our capabilities, our values, etc., that rising tide rose all boats. TI was clearly a beneficiary of that. When hyperscaling started to look a little bit like hyper-imploding, late 2022, throughout much of 2023, layoffs, cost containment efforts, so on and so forth, you know, we were, the victim, if you will, in part, of our own success, particularly on the social media front, decidedly less so with Google. It's tough when that rising tide is rising to not continue to lean in. Keep betting. When we had what they wanted to buy, and they wanted to buy more of it from us, you know, for fear of intensifying the concentration risk, the thought of saying, "No, no, that's enough now," never really entered into our vocabulary. R ecognizing that clearly there was a risk associated with client concentration risk, among the many things we've done differently going into 2024 is pretty significant investment in sales and marketing with an emphasis on continuing to win other clients. I mean, we have over 650 clients. It's not like we don't have client diversification, but we still have too much spend distributed among too few clients. And we will continue to work more diligently with a broader sales engine to try and mitigate that risk and hopefully continue to win more and more new clients, and then, as we have done successfully, land and expand. You know, today we've got, on average, amongst our top 10 clients excluding TELUS, nine years of tenure and 18 different programs that we sell to them. Not a bad track record. You know, if we can try and get dozens more of our clients into that $100 million or more annual spend, I think we'll all breathe a little bit more easier about the risk profile that we have today with that client concentration risk. Yeah, no, I, I agree. W hile we are on this topic, it's actually important. So you mentioned 650 clients. You acquired WillowTree early last year, right? WillowTree came with its own, very strong set of clientele, if I may say that. Having said that, WillowTree as a business, like, you know, the digital engineering as an industry has been under pressure in 2023 because of the macro headwinds and whatnot. How do you see, like, you know, as a part of your strategic discussions here, capitalizing on the WillowTree's clientele for that matter, and where do you see things going from that standpoint? S orry for kind of moving around the questions here. That's all right. You know, hindsight's always 20/20, and I'm hopeful that, you know, over the next three to four years, we will once again be proven to be prescient in our investment in WillowTree. No question, 2023 was a disappointing, frustrating year in totality, not just in terms of the WillowTree performance, but in TI's performance overall, in our industry's performance. I think this has been a challenging year, and, you know, it wasn't exclusively the macro that had a negative impact on our business. I think we had a few own goals along the way there in terms of not more quickly right-sizing our labor force, for example, to the demand profile. When we did our IPO roadshow, I remember quite distinctly, and we presented that pyramid construct of design, build, and deliver. Design being consulting and advisory work. Build, actually software development. D eliver or run being the customer-facing, for the most part, human element of our business. W e acknowledged that we were subscale, particularly around advisory and consulting. W e believe then and now that in order to successfully win our fair share of business opportunities, the complexity of technology transformation was such that a consultative selling capability at scale was going to be critical. I think the proliferation of GenAI has made that even more true than ever before. U nfortunately, 2023's macro uncertainty put so many investments on hold as businesses thought about where, when, and how to jump on board this AI train. I don't know that there's too many folks that don't recognize the intrinsic benefits of being able to do better, not just more with less associated with it, but I think there's an understandable level of curiosity, concern, and perhaps trepidation. A lot of folks hit the pause button throughout 2023. Pause by definition, when you're talking about jumping on board here, is the consulting work at first instance. It perhaps disproportionately affected the WillowTree part of our business. If you look at them relative to their direct peers, like Thoughtworks, for example, you know, I would suggest that, you know, that near-flat-ish year that they had, is actually among the better performances, of that kind of a business. We are already seeing some very exciting green shoots in terms of new consulting engagements with existing and prospective customers. Existing customers of both WillowTree and of TI and TELUS, obviously, the best example, once again, where WillowTree is already actively engaged together with TI in helping to transform a number of TELUS platforms and properties and taking advantage of that core competency. By the time 2024 is over, I am certain we will see a resurgence in that capability. A s I say, over the remaining three to four years of the business case that underpinned, the non-trivial purchase price that we paid, it will have proven once again to have been a thoughtful investment for us. I, I believe so. I, I do agree with that. You know, I know you've alluded to a few to it a few times, but it is a very important discussion, and I've said this a few times, impact of AI broadly on the customer engagement segment. O bviously, recent Klarna press release, we, we all kind of saw it. There was a lot of questions that came up with that. Why don't you help us understand what is TI's competitive positioning when it comes to impact of AI on the CX sector, and is that something that really keeps you up at night? I don't sleep much for a myriad of reasons, and indeed, AI disruption in our industry is certainly one of them. I feel pretty darn good about where we are relative to the competition. Simple, predictable, repeatable, human-assisted interactions have been steadily disintermediated by technology-enabled solutions for many years now. For many, many years, TI has been deploying both inside TI and on behalf of our customers, TELUS and others alike, bots and technology-enabled solutions. Our legacy CXM business, although we haven't reported margin by business line, you know, has been running consistently over the past decade plus at well over 20% EBITDA. If you contrast that with legacy BPO CRM businesses who tend to generate circa 8%-12% EBITDA, I would suggest that in and of itself, that demonstrates that the complexity and value of the services that we've been providing around the CX part of the business has already moved up the value chain, if you will, hence the higher margin yield. When a business like Klarna comes forward and says, you know, we were able to displace 700 people by using AI-enabled solutions, I'm not surprised by that at all. Indeed, we believe that, you know, 20%-40% of that traditional business can, will, in fact, should be displaced by AI-enabled solutions 'cause it's way more cost-effective. By the way, it's a better user experience to not have to waste your time waiting on hold, waiting for a live agent to validate your credentials, and then put you on hold, and then escalate, and then transfer, and recredentialize you, etc., etc., etc. We're less fearful of that level of disintermediation because we already gave up on a lot of that work. We already moved up the food chain, and it's not just an opinion. I would suggest it's empirical based on the margin yield that we get from that part of our business already. E ven more excitingly, whilst we don't see the same exposure on the cannibalization front that others, whose share prices have been savaged of late, since that announcement, but we're actually an enabler of that very transformation. A gain, we are in a very rarefied air in terms of the capabilities, having been doing this kind of work for the last several years on behalf of the hyperscalers, building their large language models with and for them, and now taking that to the enterprise space. I n totality, we see ourselves as a have, not a have-not, as a protagonist, not a victim in this whole AI transformation journey. No, it's incredible. W hen it comes to the automation of some of the CX platforms, as you mentioned, as less a shopper I am, I can echo the frustration that broader markets have when they have to stay on hold or repeat their credentials over and over is what I would say. W e're looking forward to some of that automation as it keeps getting deployed. On the topic of AI, TIXT's Fuel iX platform, you talk about it a lot. Could you provide a little bit more color into that? A long with that, could you also provide a little bit more color into some of the automatic speech recognition work you are doing for a Santa Clara-based company, which I have named, in my opinion, is NVIDIA, is what I would say. C ould you provide us some color on that? Sure. It continues to be a source of frustration for me. I feel like I'm still a bit of a debutante in this industry. T he two things that bug me the most are that customers continue to refuse to allow us to name them as customers on many occasions. I don't get it. After the beauty contests we have to win, the gates and filters we go through to be selected as their partner, whether it's for a pilot or otherwise, and then more often than not, they say, "No, no, we don't want you naming us. We don't wanna put our logo on your website." That and termination for convenience is a standard contract term in this industry. It just continues to baffle me. We are where we are, and we'll continue to work to get past the pilot phases and multiple pilot phases and come out of the closet, so to speak, in terms of naming all of our partners and customers. We have some very, very exciting capabilities that we'll be doing a lot more marketing about in the weeks ahead, on the GenAI front in particular, already recognized by IDC and by Everest for our GenAI Jumpstart capabilities, our data annotation platform capabilities, the Experts Engine. Proprietary platform we launched that is part of what we're using in order to deliver this automated speech recognition capability, leveraging our million-plus AI community, a subset of them have the requisite expertise across those domains that are necessary to help optimize these large language models, to ensure that we can at scale on an automated basis. Essentially, it's like a matching game where you take the tasks and the skill sets and match them at scale automatically to ensure that the tasks are performed better, faster, more effectively, more cost-effectively in particular. H ow we've approached AI in totality is to build Fuel iX essentially as an orchestration layer that is really technology-agnostic and allows our business customers to access agent-assist tools, bots that can do real-time multilingual translation that can support both customers accessing a business customer's website or via mobile device and can enable the support ecosystem of that business, the agent population, with real-time next best action recommendations as they, the agent population, are interacting with that business customer's end user community on a real-time basis. T hen on top of that orchestration layer of Fuel iX are these applications. A gain, you can mix and match. If you've already made an investment in a bot of some kind from someone else, well, have an open API that allows you to continue to use that. Or if you wanna use our capabilities, that's sort of gift with purchase. That's the ink on top of the printer layer, if you will, to use the HP analogy. T o get folks more familiar with, more confident in their ability to take advantage of this whole ecosystem of GenAI-enabled capabilities is our Jumpstart GenAI offering, sort of a limited eight-week consulting engagement, again, led by our friends at WillowTree. I think we've got something that literally no other business has right now. I think others have piece parts of it. But in terms of the end-to-end capability with demonstrated referenceability already, I, I think we are in quite a unique position. No, that's, and that's good color. I think one thing building on your capabilities that, that we hear or get, asked quite often is content moderation. T here's a lot of automation that's happening on the content moderation front as well. TI has some very good clients when it comes to content moderation work that you do. H elp us understand how's that business trending, and do you see any, direct upside to that business, considering the, U.S. election that is up and coming sooner than, we think? Yeah. I mean, I think we all assume that the upcoming presidential election in the U.S. is likely to drive more activity, in terms of user-generated content, to the social media platforms. T hey continue to garner most of the headlines, certainly, and the attention around content moderation. W e think about content moderation as a subset of trust and safety more broadly. I t's not just moderating objectionable content on a social media platform. Content moderation is also fraud identification and prevention. It's also identity management. It's also ad placement. I t's a fairly broad category. In our case, back to our client concentration discussion, our story, I think it's a bit murky because we are overwhelmed by serving this one client. We have dozens of clients and many of them at scale, but none of them with this level of scale. As our relationship slash the span with that one customer goes, so too does it look like our practice goes. If I normalize them out of the equation, we continue to see meaningful growth potential across content moderation, and not just off the back of a pending presidential election, but, you know, the regulatory environment globally has continued to evolve on a heterogeneous basis. Europe seems to be ahead in terms of how it's addressing customers' opportunity to use and responsibilities around content that's posted to their platforms, not just social media, facial recognition opportunities, etc. The list goes on and on. A gain, our experience and expertise working across the globe with a myriad of customers, whether it's social media platform giants and/or fintech and e-commerce, traditional BFSIs, the list goes on and on, comms and media, we see tremendous potential there. A gain, we think we have a unique, competitive advantage, and we need to do a better job of winning more non-that one client who shall remain nameless for now opportunities to better demonstrate that capability. Hopefully, we've seen the trough of the span profile with that client in 2024. As a consequence, through the balance of the year, we'll return to hopefully double-digit growth. But you don't see automation completely taking away your content moderation business? It hasn't thus far. I think, you know, worth noting, there's circa 95% of objectionable content on social media platforms is already identified automatically. Okay. Using AI, the opportunity really is that the proliferation of content continues to explode. E ven though there may be fewer subscribers signing up on a net basis to these platforms, the amount of content, the existing subscribers who are posting seems to have no limit. T he interesting ever-growing complexity of that content. S omething as simple as trying to moderate a text string. Well, when algospeak is now interposing emojis or ampersands or those other symbols in the word, and if we're in on it, we know what that means, but it's harder and harder for AI to detect what the actual meaning is. We think humans in the loop will continue to have a role to play. E ven if it's only 5% of the content in totality, that still drives demand for tens of thousands of human moderators. I have two very important questions that I'm gonna ask next. G iven the recent CFO change, and we are glad Ms. Gopi Chande is in the room with us here on the second day of her job, so thanks a lot, Gopi, for joining us. Could we expect any changes to the disclosures other than the recent accounting change that was announced? C ould we potentially expect to see increased disclosures regarding the business split, AI, Trust and Safety, the digital IT, and the traditional CXM? Those are some questions we hear from investors quite often. W e wanted to get a take from you, and I'm sure we'll discuss this with Gopi in detail when she's a little bit more settled in her job. Well, indeed, we are so, so lucky to have Gopi with us. I can tell you I've had the pleasure of working with her indirectly through my TELUS relationship for almost a decade and a half. At some point, Gopi will tell me what additional changes, if any, we'll be making to the presentation of our financial statements. For now, I think the two changes that we announced last month going into 2024 are the only ones we anticipate. I n both cases, I think, in fact, I know, having already spoken with many of our institutional investors, they've applauded and appreciated the increased transparency and visibility into profitability. C ertainly it makes our lives, Gopi and team in particular, in terms of the consolidation, because with TELUS, because that's how they approach share-based comp, and transaction expenses. Going forward, I don't anticipate more changes in 2024, but as I said, Gopi will let us know in the fullness of the time. In terms of, is that me? Sorry. It's okay. In terms of increased visibility, you know, we provide annual visibility now to service line revenues. Will we move to quarterly? I don't know. Maybe. I mean, the challenge, of course, is always trying to find that elusive balance between providing as much visibility to the investor analyst community as we can without, you know, unwittingly perhaps revealing competitive insights that aren't gonna help my business but might help my competitors unnecessarily. S triking that balance is the challenge always. I think where we are, I mean, just celebrated our third anniversary as a public issuer. The amount of disclosure we're providing feels like we're not in a bad spot. I know there's seemingly an insatiable thirst for more, and we'll do the best we can to meet those expectations. I think at some point in time, it's important for investors truly to understand what is your pure-play legacy CX business versus the DX, which, you know, I cover a broad range of companies, right? Like, you know, when do you start to be categorized more as the EPAMs and the Globants of the world versus traditional Teleperformance or TTECs of the world, right? Like, I think that is where the markets are trying to get to. H opefully, we can start to get more clarity over time as you start to kind of mature in your business streams as you're talking about. Last question. It's a very important, and I'll not belabor because I think that's a very, that's a discussion that we have had enough, but, I'm sure some of the investors will ask you that question later. Last year in the Investor Day, you did mention that you plan to take the company or an aspirational mention to 10x. Considering where we are right now, what are some of the steps from a capital allocation standpoint that you see you would need as a company to get to potentially anywhere close to 10x or even a few turns higher from where you are right now? As bold a prediction as that may have been then, I continue to believe that, you know, what I affectionately refer to as our little lemonade stand is still capable of getting there. Obviously, the valuation rotation decline in our sector over end of 2022, 2023, you know, have not been kind and have just made the target that much more distant. I don't think any less achievable then and now, grow the business organically, healthily, double digits. We have work to do. Obviously, there's both macro and micro considerations there. You know, given the guide at 3-5 for this year, taking a conservative approach, I think underpromise, overdeliver is a better movie to be in. We need to get back to double-digit growth, and hopefully through the back half of the year and into next year, assuming the macro stabilizes, interest rate stabilizes, goodness knows we all would prefer to see some geopolitical stability and certainty out there. We need to continue to deliver industry-leading margins. I think with the ongoing evolution of more tech-centric solutions that reduce the dependency on labor as a component of those solutions, the opportunity to mitigate never-ending wage inflation, improves the likelihood of continued margin expansion. I ndeed, the fact that we're able to improve, you know, over 500 bps in margin just Q2 to Q4 in 2023 alone by right-sizing our labor force would suggest that, you know, that is indeed a, a lever at our discretion to be pulling. We need to be more thoughtful and act with greater alacrity in terms of matching labor requirements to business demands as they evolve prospectively. Then, of course, while certainly it's never been a strategy for us, I think our track record on M&A has demonstrated that being thoughtful around strategic investments in capabilities, delivery, locations, accessing talent pools, going to where the puck is, as Canadians like to say, since I relocated to the U.S., I love using the Canadian allegory whenever I can. We've made some really, really prescient investments in this company over our history. I think you should anticipate as our leverage continues to decline and given our cash-generating capabilities, while we're sitting sort of within our 2-3 times net debt EBITDA leverage ratio today, and I think circa 2.8, you know, all other things being equal, we'll be closer to 2, 2.1 by the end of the year. I think we've got lots of headroom. And as long as the organic business is firing on all cylinders, I think you have to earn the right to go shopping. You shouldn't expect to see us, you know, go making any transformational investments in the near term, but tuck-ins perhaps here and there along the way where the opportunity is appropriate. B etween that and then a return to more appropriate valuations, I know the market knows, you know, the value of nothing sometimes and the price of everything. If we can get back to a recognition that this little platform has the significant growth profitability potential, hopefully we will attract the multiple that I think we deserve. B efore you know it, we're back up to where I hope we'll be at $100 billion. With that, we are at time. Thank you so much, Jeff, for your time. Thanks a lot, everyone, for sitting through the presentation.