Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Capgemini Q1 2023 revenues webcast and conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one and one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Aiman Ezzat, CEO. Sir, please go ahead. Thank you. Good morning, and thank you for joining us for this Q1 revenue call. I'm joined today by Carole Ferrand and Olivier Sevillia. We had a very good start to 2023. It came above our expectation. This quarter once again illustrates that we have structurally raised our growth profile and that we continue to gain market share. The group revenues reached EUR 5,729 million in the first quarter, up an impressive 10.7% year-on-year in constant currency. This is the 8th consecutive quarter of double-digit organic growth. EUR 5.9 billion bookings were up 6.5% year-on-year on a constant currency basis, leading to a book-to-bill of 1.02 above our historical average for a Q1. These numbers demonstrate the agility and resilience of our business model and the relevance of our strategy and market positioning. Our clients are entrusting us with their most complex business and technological transformation projects. We are positioned as strategic partners in their transition to a digital and sustainable economy. If the economic environment remains tense, the trends observed in this Q1 are fully consistent with the deceleration scenario we had anticipated for 2023, even if Q1 is better than expected. The sector trends are in line with what we discussed at the beginning of the year. The manufacturing and public sector demonstrates stronger resilience. Manufacturing is up 17% and traction is visible across the board. Our leadership and investment in Intelligent Industry is paying off. As previously discussed, we continue to witness a wait-and-see attitude at some clients. This is visible in the retail and TMT sectors that are decelerating more rapidly. The surprise came from financial service, which hasn't slowed down yet with a 9% growth in the first quarter. From a geographic perspective, there is more resilience in Europe with a solid double-digit growth. In North America, with a less favorable mix, you know, the growth was lower at 6.1% at constant exchange rates. All group businesses delivered a good top-line progression, and I'm particularly pleased to continue to see the momentum in Strategy & Transformation with 16% growth. It's another illustration of the relevance of our strategy and market positioning. It also reflects the priority given by group clients to the strategic digital transformation projects. Q1 was also another strong quarter for emblematic wins. Thanks to the investment in capabilities and solutions, the group is able to capture the structural acceleration in client demand for digital transformation, even in the current environment. We're helping our clients to lay the foundation of their most ambitious transformation, seated at the top exec level and at the heart of their business opportunities. Our wins are covering all the dimensions of our strategic framework. We are able to offer the business and technology solution that match our client needs with an end-to-end value proposition from engineering to IT through strategy and digital. Let me put that in context by taking two examples. First, for ACC, to provide green batteries for Europe, for the auto industry, Automotive Cells Company, which is a JV between Saft TotalEnergies, Stellantis and Mercedes-Benz, is revolutionizing battery technology to accelerate the transition to cleaner, greener transport. Our Strategy & Transformation and engineering teams have been selected to support the launch and upscaling of this gigafactory. The other example I will mention is in data and analytics. A top bank in the U.S. with petabytes of data spread across several platforms asked Capgemini to modernize and transition their data and analytics to the cloud to improve customer experience and ensuing analytics. The cloud data platform is the essential starting point to address a wide range of challenges, such as building better credit, enhancing risk data models, launching AI-enabled customer service advisors, and more. We are definitely driven by creating substantial value for our clients. At the end of the first quarter, all the trends come in line with the scenario we had in mind for 2023, started which discussing back as far as Q3 last year. That's why if we remain vigilant to possible market changes to react with agility, we continue to invest in our people and portfolio of skills and offers. We are expanding our capabilities in the technologies and industries to respond to our clients' business needs. We are exploring the most relevant use cases in artificial intelligence through our new generative AI lab. In parallel, we continue to expand our sustainability business through new offerings, training, and upskilling our teams on key topics such as net zero strategies, clean tech, circular economy, and biodiversity. We are also confident that our growth and margin trajectory is well under control, both for 2023 and to reach our medium-term targets. For 2023, the outlook as set in February is a revenue growth of 4%-7% at constant currency with 0.5 point scope impact at the bottom end and 1 point at the top end. After this strong start of the year, we should reach or exceed the midpoint of this range. We also confirm the other targets of an operating margin of 13%-13.2%, so a 0-20 basis point improvement year-on-year. An organic free cash flow around EUR 1.8 billion. We are convinced that the trajectory towards a more digital and sustainable economy cannot be reversed. This twin transition will result in a strong structural demand for years to come. We are well-positioned as a business and technology transformation partner of CXOs to leverage the strong growth potential for the group. Thank you for your attention, and I now leave the floor to Carole Ferrand, our CFO. Thank you, Aiman, let's start with the highlights of the first quarter of 2023. We are pleased to report a strong start to the year. This performance came in above our expectations. Revenues are at 10.9% year-on-year to EUR 5.73 billion. Adjusting for currency impact of 0.2 points, our constant currency growth reached 10.7% in Q1. After restating for changes in group scope at 0.6 points, our organic growth stands at 10.1%. The FX impact should turn negative by circa 2.5 points in Q2, same for the full year. I also remind you that we expect a 0.5 to 1 point of M&A contribution for the full year 2023. Let's now look at our revenues by region. Most of our regions reported double-digit growth at constant currencies in Q1. More specifically, the United Kingdom and Ireland regions re-delivered a strong constant currency growth of 13.9%, driven primarily by the manufacturing and consumer goods sectors, while financial services and the public sector remained solid. Revenues in the rest of Europe region increased 13.8%, supported by double-digit growth in manufacturing, public sector, and financial services, but also in TMT and energy and utilities. France reported a robust revenue growth of 10.4%, boosted by strong momentum in the manufacturing, financial services, consumer goods, and public sectors. North America recorded comparatively moderate growth of 6.1% at constant currency rates. Manufacturing and services sectors were particularly dynamic. However, financial services and consumer goods lag behind other regions, and the TMT sector experienced a slight contraction. Finally, revenues in the Asia Pacific and Latin America increased by 8.4% at constant exchange rates. This momentum, now essentially organic, was primarily fueled by the financial services, manufacturing, and consumer goods sectors. Moving on to the revenues by sector. The picture is slightly more contrasted than in the past quarters. At constant currencies, manufacturing remained very dynamic in Q1, with a 16.8% growth, along with the public sector, 13.1%. As anticipated, consumer goods and retail and TMT sectors demonstrated a lower momentum than in previous quarters, with growth of 6.8% and 3.1% respectively. With 9.4% constant currency growth, financial services didn't see the anticipated deceleration yet, except in North America. Lastly, services posted a good 10.7% growth, with energy and utilities maintained its pace of growth at 5.9%. Let's have a look at our revenues by business line. Strategy & Transformation and Applications & Technology services both posted double-digit growth of their total revenues at constant currency, +15.6% and +10.7% respectively. In a challenging macro environment, clients are prioritizing strategic projects that deliver both short-term value and long-term benefits. Operations & Engineering total revenue grew by 9.2% at constant currency, supported by a solid momentum across the various underlying businesses. A quick look at our bookings now. Bookings amounted to EUR 5,867 million in Q1, up year-on-year by 6.5% at constant currency. This is a strong performance considering very demanding comparison basis as bookings were up 26.5% in Q1 of last year. The book-to-bill ratio stands at 1.2, above the average since 2017, which is 0.99. This reflects a demand environment which remained solid during the past quarter. Finally, a few comments on the headcount evolution. The total headcount reached 357,000 employees at the end of March, up 5% year-on-year. This is marginally lower than at the end of 2022, as the focus in the short term is on productivity gains after a period of high growth and high attrition. The offshore leverage stands at 58% stable year-on-year. Lastly, as anticipated, the attrition is visibly coming down in Q1. This brings the last 12 months attrition down by 3.4 points to 22.9% at the end of Q1. With this, I hand over back to Aiman to open the Q&A session. Thank you, Carole. To allow a maximum number of people in the queue to ask question, may I kindly ask you to restrict yourself to 1 question and a single follow-up. Operator, could you please share the instructions? Thank you. To ask a question, you will need to press star one and one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one and one again. That is star one and one to ask a question. We will now go to your first question. Your first question comes from the line of Mohammed Moawalla from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Yes, good morning, Aiman, Carole. Good morning. I had my first question was just, Aiman, you've talked a lot about sort of decision-making and that being the kind of more, kind of less predictable element, even though the underlying demand dynamics are still kind of there. I'm just curious if you could give us a sense of the kind of projects where perhaps those sales cycles are kind of lengthening, where you're starting to see perhaps a more kind of unchanged effect. My sort of follow-up question is just how should we think of the sort of headcount growth that you did in Q1? Normally, in the years, a headcount growth tends to be more front-loaded. Some of your peers are obviously sort of cutting headcount. Just curious to get a sense of your expectation on headcount evolution, this year, into the second half. Thank you. Listen. I think where we have the wait and see attitude is really on the large transformation programs, right? Some mid-size one, but it really is a large one where we see the delay. Again, the pipeline actually continues to increase quarter-over-quarter. The demand or the underlying potential demand in the market remains quite big. And the appetite for clients, of course, around all the transformation required to move to the digital and sustainable economy is still there. They are delaying some of the decisions by several months. You know, some of them are proceedings. That's why we see it at some clients, but at some others, we see that holding pattern that basically weighs, is gonna weigh more and more quarter after quarter until this uncertainty weight comes out of the market and people feel more confident and then start basically accelerating the decision-making. That's really what we see today. On the headcount, I did say since Q3 that we will see a couple of quarters of optimization, and I think this is what we have. I mean, for me, we have well anticipated, and we start slowing down the recruitment, you know, before we saw the slowdown because we expected that to come. I think we have anticipated properly what we expected to happen, and we are in an optimization mode. We have, you know, attrition is half what of peak right now, so we're able to operate in a much better environment which doesn't ask us to front-load basically a lot of headcounts, and we're able to start working a lot more on the optimization of our utilization, and that's what we're working on. We will resume headcount growth through the, you know, sometime during the year to be able to basically continue to support our growth. That will happen in due time, but right now we are still in a mode of optimization. The last couple of quarters pretty much are flat from a headcount perspective, you know, we still have the capacity to be able to continue to grow the revenue without adding headcounts in the short term. Got it. Thank you. Thank you. We will now go to your next question. Okay, one moment. Your next question comes from the line of Adam Wood from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning, Aiman, Carole, Olivier. Congratulations on a strong start to the year. The question from me. Thank you. I remember last year, everyone was pushing you on why you weren't upgrading the guidance for the 1st quarter, you commented on that call that you would never do that at a Q1. I'm not sure whether narrowing the range counts as a formal upgrade, you've obviously indicated more confidence on that. I know the headline numbers are good, if we look at North America, that's sometimes a leading indicator. The growth was slower there. You mentioned attrition is half the peak and the headcount growth slower, which might lead you to err a bit more on the side of caution. Could you maybe just give us, you know, a couple of reasons what gives you that confidence on the top line now? What does the pipeline look like, how much visibility do you have into the rest of the year? Then maybe just versus competitors, where again, as you flagged, you know, the numbers are better. This is a follow-up. Do you think this is a very different in terms of go-to-market and strategy, or is it a little bit more timing of guidance and exposure to North America that's the difference between you and those main rivals today? Thank you. Okay. Let me start with the second one. Listen, again, you can make the interpretation you want. I mean, we have been saying that we have changed our positioning and what we are focusing on, that we are gonna be more industry focused. We're not just driven by basically moving headcounts. I do believe this is paying off. You know? That basically our strategy is allowing us to better deploy and take advantage of the opportunities still in the market where clients are looking for real transformation. To be able to drive their move towards a digital and sustainable economy. Even if you have some of these large programs today which are on hold in terms of decision making, the pipeline is full. We know at one moment this will unlock and basically we'll see a re-acceleration in terms of growth. In the meantime, yes, we see the slowdown link coming from the wait-and-see that now we see at some clients. Plus, you know, it is true that some clients on the other side have moved more into cost cutting. Compared to what we saw two quarters ago, but it's what we anticipated, that we see more consolidation and cost cutting deal, definitely in financial service, but even beyond financial. You talking about... Coming to your first question, you're talking, yes, there is some differential today between North America and Europe. Some of it is linked to the mix. Remember, we are heavier in financial services and we are heavier in tech and telco in North America, which today basically are slowing down faster, as we will see in the coming quarters. On the other side, we still continue to see no positive traction in North America in a number of other sectors. For me, we are definitely overall demonstrating, you know, pretty good resilience in a number of our, in a number of our businesses and in a number of our sectors. You know, look at manufacturing, how it's holding up. I think manufacturing is doing well, thanks notably to what we do around Intelligent Industry. That was part of our strategy. It's getting deployed and it's working and it's paying off. We have pretty strong numbers in Germany still, including in Strategy & Transformation. That's driven definitely by what we do around Intelligent Industry. That's very helpful. Thanks, Aiman. Thank you. We will now go to the next question. The next question comes from the line of Amit Harchandani from Citi. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Thank you. Good morning, all. Amit Harchandani from Citi. A question and a follow-up, if I may. My question is, with regards to your comment about relative resilience and Intelligent Industry, could you give us a sense for, or maybe give us a greater detail in terms of what do you think is truly differentiated? Is it what you have done with regards to post Altran that has enabled you to be more strategic? Is it simply the end market or the customers being under pressure to transform? I'm just trying to get a sense for the resilience in manufacturing and how sustainable do you think it is likely to be as we go through the rest of the year. My follow-up is, if I understand you correctly, I mean, 8 quarters of double-digit organic growth, and this quarter particularly of tough compares. I get the impression the slowdown in your growth is more a reflection of clients holding back or delays in decisions, and therefore shouldn't you logically then return back to double-digit growth down the road once the decision-making picks up again? Is that a fair assumption to make as we think about, outlook beyond 2023? Thank you. Thank you, Amit. On the first one, excuse me. Definitely there is, from my perspective, a positioning that has changed. Remember, we have been working on this strategy before the acquisition of Altran, the development of that concept around the Intelligent Industry, which drove a strategy to make that acquisition and to really focus on that convergence. I do believe where we are performing well today is because we have leveraged that convergence between digital and physical world through engineering that brings us the knowledge of the physical world and the digital strength that we have or, you know, coming from the Capgemini side, through the evolution we have done in our portfolio in the last few years. That convergence, I think, is pretty unique in some sectors. Again, remember, we're not on all sectors. We don't say we are, you know, we are top leaders in every sector. There are a number of sectors today where the convergence is giving us really a leading edge in terms of being positioned to really deliver the value that the clients can expect. That's, you can call it differentiated. I like more to say that adding more value to clients and basically giving us more traction and giving us a more strategic positioning as well, because now we are really working on influencing what will drive their future top line and bottom line. On the growth, you know, that's my expectation. My expectation is that we'll see re-acceleration. I think we are well-positioned. We see the program being shaped up at our clients. Their drive toward, to go towards a digital and sustainable economy is there. They're gonna have to make the investment. These investments are gonna be in trillions across industries, and we are well-positioned to take advantage of that. Like everybody else, we have to learn to navigate with agility the economic cycle. Clients in tough times slow down some of their decision-making, put on hold some large programs, waiting for some certainty to come back to be able to drive. Not all of them. That's why we continue to grow, and some of them are still proceeding. Definitely, you know, we do expect that there are gonna be a re-acceleration when there start to be more certainty around the economy and direction of the economy, notably, you know, the interest rate and inflation, which are today the big topics. That will unlock and speed up the decision-making, and we should see a re-acceleration in terms of growth that could help us get back to the double-digit growth. Thank you, Eman. Thank you. We will now go to the next question. The next question comes from the line of Sven Merkt from Barclays. Please go ahead. Great. Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. First I wanted to follow up on the earlier comment on improving efficiency and utilization. We have seen some decline in utilization this quarter and therefore, can you comment please, how we should think about improvement in utilization from here? Then secondly, on the guidance, you obviously now expect to achieve or exceed the midpoint of the guided growth rate. How should we think about the margin range? Should we see it as you will likely also end up here at or above the midpoint, or is it a bit too early to say? Thank you. Thank you for your two questions. On the utilization, we have restated some of the numbers from last year, so actually utilization should be perceived as flat. Here, again, in utilization, you have to look at different components. You know, there is a fresher utilization, there is other. We always load quite a bit on freshers in the Q4, and that has some impact on utilization at the start of the year. Again, when I look at overall the trends that we are looking for, we should see improving utilization through the year. Remember, 2023 is a year of optimization for us that will basically allow us to optimize our economic model going into 2024 and be a boost, you know, in terms of re-acceleration around the margin to get us to the 14% by 2025, which we remain quite comfortable with. For this year, you know, to be honest, we're talking about 0-20 basis points, so it's a pretty narrow range. The only thing I can tell you is that we don't see phasing in terms of that margin. We are comfortable on the fact that we will see improvement, I mean, of the 0-20 basis point, both in H1 and H2. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you. We will now go to the next question. Your next question comes from the line of Toby Ogg, J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead. Yes. Hi, good morning, and thanks for the question. Just firstly, just on the building blocks of the growth. Clearly, as we've discussed the headcount side of the equation moderates a little bit, and Eman, you've talked about an optimization of the utilization there now becoming more of a focus. Could you just talk about some of the specific levers that you can pull in order to drive that improvement in utilization? Then just to follow up on that, if the growth is becoming more sort of utilization driven over the hiring, is there a margin tailwind to consider here that should come, you know, with less hiring, recruiting and onboarding costs? Thank you. Listen, on, on the utilization, for us, it's simple. It's basically, it's efficiency of deployment of resources. It's always the same. Of course, you know, when there are slowdown in some places, attrition in some places, there's a bit of basically being able to recalibrate and agilely redeploy the resources. This is what we are working on. The second thing, again, I remind we take quite a lot of young graduates in Q4, you know, and this growing environment, it becomes a little bit more challenging in the short term to deploy them, but definitely through the year, we are able to absorb and re-accelerate around some of these young graduates. That for me is basically is a thing that we are working on. Again, with the slowing growth and slowdown in attrition, the optimization of utilization becomes easier of course to do because we don't have to to front end and buffer basically on resources, like we did when you have high growth and high attrition. On the margin, you know, it's already taken into account, so, you know, the 0 to 20 basis points is already, how would you say, a very good performance in an environment where we had to absorb when at the beginning of this year, we're taking the full-blown impact of all the increases, more expensive resources that we have been onboarding all of last year, plus, you know, the salary inflation we onboard at the beginning of the year. The margin is already taking into account these efficiencies, that we're able to deliver them and that utilization improvement that we'll see through the year. Remember, as I said, the 2023 is an optimization year where we show resilience on the margin and we prepare for re-acceleration for the next two years to be able to get to our 14% in 2025. Understood. Thank you. Thank you. We will now go to the next question. Your next question comes from the line of Laurent Daure from Kepler. Please go ahead. Yes, thank you. Good morning, all, and congratulations from my end as well. I have also two questions. The first one is on the phasing of the rest of the year. I am asking that because one of your closest competitors has guided to a pretty soft second quarter. My follow-up is on the offshore penetration. It is very slightly lower than a year back. Is there anything to read in that number? Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Laurent. Listen, on the first one, again, we have to be realistic. We will see a slowdown in the second quarter, coming from different things. One, you have a higher comparison basis. You know, we grew, we accelerated in terms of growth between Q2 and Q1 last year. The second thing, you know, it's a continued deceleration that we expect. The third thing, there is a softening on financial services. I mean, again, we're not hiding the fact that we see definitely, at least in the Anglo-Saxon world, U.K. and U.S., we see a softening that accelerating now on financial services, as you expect with the nervousness there is a bit around the what's happening in the US. This impact we'll see in Q2, and we'll see a deceleration in Q2. If not, if not the guidance, Will be very conservative. Yes, the deceleration will continue in Q2, as we expected. On the offshore ratio, remember the tension, the area where we had the most tension in terms of resources globally between onshore and offshore was more on the offshore side. That's also where you have the most optimization potential compared. This is where we have buffered more in terms of resources, et cetera, and things like that. It's normal. This is also where we see a bit of deceleration, more deceleration today, and that reduces a little bit, you know, the offshore penetration ratio. If you move forward, you know, as I expect to happen in two, three, four quarters, when we have the inflection point, the tension on the resources will push for re-acceleration of the offshore penetration, right? For me, it's something that will reverse probably as soon as we move back into faster growth because the shortage of talent in most Western countries will still be there, and it will push more for the global delivery centers, which we are investing more and more now to expand in other countries beyond India to be able to be ready for re-acceleration, you know, in the coming quarters. Thank you. Thank you. We will now go to the next question. Your next question comes from the line of Michael Briest at UBS. Please go ahead. Yes, good morning. Just in terms of revenue per employee, it looks like it's up about nearly 3% year-on-year, which given the lower utilization rate is a little puzzling and the headcount decline. Can you talk about maybe subcontractors, pricing, mix within that? Then a second one is just around the financial services exposure. It's the second biggest market. Can you say how it's broken down between, you know, continental Europe, U.K., U.S., what it looks like in terms of banking versus insurance, retail banking versus investment banking? Just remind us of what your financial services exposure is. Thanks. Yeah. Revenue per employee is probably one of the most difficult things to read because there are so many variables that are going on at the same time, Michael. Just the offshore leverage movement, you know, can have a big impact on revenue per employee. The country mix have an impact on revenue per employee. The exchange rates have an impact on revenue per employee, the fresher intake. You know, there are too many variables to do that. I mean, pricing is holding up pretty well so far. I mean, again, we all know that when we do consolidation, we give some price concessions against volume. Okay. Overall, it ends up being accretive and recover the margin after twelve months or so. From my perspective, you know, it's in the short term, quarter by quarter, even year on year, it's very difficult to look at this revenue per employee to read. The subcontractors, definitely, we are reducing subcontractors. We know subcontractors increase when growth accelerate and you have more tension on your resources, and subcontractors reduce typically when you slow down because you leverage more your resources and you need less subcontractors. That's, that's normal trends, but it's difficult to be honest, to read the, on that revenue per employee number in the short term. On the financial service exposure, you know, it's a lot of detail that you're asking for, but what I can tell you to just to give two numbers that could be useful. One, it's about two-third banking, one-third insurance. It has been consistent over many years. That's the numbers we have always given, and they are still the same numbers. The second thing is that we have higher penetration of financial services outside of Europe than in Europe. Okay? We tend to have higher weights, for example, financial service in our North American business or APAC and Latin business that we have in Europe. Again, it's not big differences, but these are the 2 numbers that I can give you that can help you give some directions. Do you have any exposure to regional banks? You know, the ones that are on the Bloomberg screen every day. In the U.S., U.S. regional banks- Yeah. We have limited exposure. Limited exposure to U.S. regional banks. Thank you. We will now go to your next question. Your next question comes from the line of Nicolas David, Oddo BHF. Please go ahead. Yes. Good morning, Aiman, Carole Ferrand, Olivier Sevillia. Thank you for taking my question. The first is a very short-term one regarding bookings. Could you give us some color about how they were made in Q1? Are they mainly made of small deals which are going to generate revenue very quickly, or nevertheless, did you sign some large deals during the quarter, even if you maintained some wait-and-see attitude? My second question is more a long-term, longer-term one, is regarding the impact of AI on your business, notably on your pack of 6 functions and cost. In your midterm ambition, did you already factor potential positive impact from that, or should we expect more positive impact that given the new evolution we have seen recently? Thank you. Thank you, Nicolas. Olivier, you want to take the bookings question? Yes. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you perfectly. Okay. Thank you, Aiman. I would say in Q1, compared to Q1 last year, we had fewer very large deals, hence our Q1 bookings are going to be somewhat revenue accretive in the, in the short, in the coming quarters. In other terms to maybe answer some uncertainty you may have, it's not multi-year, very large contracts that are making our Q1 booking success. Okay. In terms of big generally, you know, we haven't seen a big evolution. We as I said, you know, we have in the pipeline more deals which are more around, you know, consolidation and cost cutting than we had before. This takes, you know, a few months before they sink. We should see an evolution of this booking coming from that in the coming quarters because these are not yet closed. Definitely like in financial services, you know, take the example of financial service. They're definitely slowed down because banks are cutting. We will see a rebound at some moment when we see some of these consolidation deals coming through. On AI, listen, it's a good question. You know, we like everybody, we're looking at the opportunity. You know, we are currently doing a fairly large transformation of all our finance, HR, resource deployment, et cetera, to look for more agility, more digitization, more efficiency, in our operation, which I said will have bring a few tenths of bits of improvement, excuse me, in the coming quarters. Will that generative AI help us accelerate? I hope it will help us make better decision and be able to continue to improve efficiency, but I cannot say we have a business case at this stage in terms of the potential impact. Thank you very much. Thank you. We will now go to your next question. Your next question comes from the line of Charles Brennan, Jefferies. Please go ahead. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. I was wondering if you could just touch on industry pricing at the moment. Some of the private companies that we speak to are beginning to suggest that there's real pricing deflation coming through. Prices are still going up in absolute numbers, but not going up as fast as costs, and that's driving real price deflation. Are you seeing that in your markets at the moment, or is that a trend you expect to see accelerate as the year goes on? Thank you. Thank you, Charles. listen, on the pricing environment, we haven't seen a fundamental change. Of course, in some areas, as you say, you know, the people who are cutting costs and basically looking for consolidation, part of the consolidation is to be able to drive, you know, some pricing leverage, and that's part of the game. It takes us always a bit of time to be able to recover some of the margin we give away in this pricing deflation. We benefit from higher growth, bigger revenues that basically more than compensate for that. Of course, after twelve to eighteen months, we do have a incremental benefit as well on the margin side. Do we see an overall deflation in the market? I don't see so. It will come over time, probably, as, as we have, as compensation costs, you know, become more normalized and potentially reduce in some areas. Right now we don't see a big price deflation overall in the market. To be frank, in the most demanding areas, the tension remains there. Broadly based, you know, the environment is better, but when you look at the most tense areas, I think it's still tensed for the high-end resources. Perfect. Thank you. Can I just ask a follow-up on the market environment? You've already had lots of questions here. Sure. You've described the market as being in a wait and see mode, and yet 6% bookings growth is still pretty decent in that context. Mm-hmm. Is the wait and see comment more an observation about what we should expect for the second quarter bookings, or did you see a material deceleration? Did March feel materially worse than January? No. Listen, I think our book-to-bill, which remains positive, supports the fact that we continue to grow. Remember, I mean, there is a deceleration compared to last year, but we continue to grow. So I expect our Q2 book-to-bill to remain positive to continue to support the fact that we continue to grow in the coming quarters. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. We will now take our last question for today. Your last question comes from the line of Frederic Boulan, Bank of America. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning, Iman. Good morning, Carole. To come back on the AI question, if you can discuss how you see generative AI impacting your business also from a risk standpoint. Is there any areas of business that could be automated and where we could see down the line some significant pricing pressure? Then on the opportunity side, I mean, you mentioned that lab. Is this something you think down the line can be a revenue stream, an area where clients will need your help to implement in their business? Thank you. Well, listen, our purpose in life is to turn every new technology into a revenue stream. Definitely we expect that what we're doing around generative AI and we already have done, I mean, we'll discuss that in a moment, but we have done already a number of projects around generative AI, and we're working with banks, we're working with companies in pharma, in other places on generative AI, even before ChatGPT became popular. We continue working on that. It's true that there's an acceleration today driven by the technology, by the platform, by what the tools being provided by the hyperscalers is becoming more mainstream, so we're able to accelerate the deployment of some of these use cases around generative AI. Now, is it an opportunity or risk? For me, it's an opportunity. Remember, the... One of the main issues for me moving to the digital economy is shortage of talent. We very well welcome the fact that with generative AI, we're gonna see productivity increase. I don't think it's gonna happen overnight, but, you know, we're working on coding assistance, et cetera, to be able to increase the productivity. We have seen a number of areas where we can see productivity increase over time, and I say over time, by up to 30%. On the other side, we have an AI Code of Ethics, and we have now to integrate as part of that the potential impact of generative AI. We have already issued recently, after working for them on a couple of months, guidelines internally around how we can use or not use generative AI, under what condition, how we get authorization, et cetera. How do we engage clients around that to also take into account the fact that there are some concerns, you know, raised by a number of companies and clients around the use of generative AI. We are definitely adopting, but adopting at a pace which is reflects the reality of the market. We don't see it as a threat. I see it an opportunity. We need to continue to improve productivity to be able to address, I think the talent shortage that we'll face in the coming years, to be able to move to the digital economy. From my perspective, it's not a question of we are big. I mean, we have been improving productivity over the years. What we do with a software engineer today compared to what we did 10 years ago, we are much more productive. You know, so that, of course, gets embedded into the pricing, but we still see improvement in terms of margin expansion, you know, as we drive more productivity through generative AI. I see it as an opportunity and not a threat if it's properly managed. Thank you very much. Thank you. I will now hand the call back for closing remarks. Thank you for attending this Q1 call. As you see, we are comfortable with the line in terms of what we see in terms of growth for this year and for the also medium-term growth as well as for the margin. We thank you. We look forward to interacting with you over the coming days and weeks. Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.