Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Goldman Sachs Communications and Internet Conference, Technology Conference. Excuse me. My name is Jim Schneider. I'm the IT services analyst here at Goldman Sachs, and it's my pleasure to welcome Cognizant, as well as, Head of Americas, Surya Gummadi, and Head of Investor Relations, Tyler Scott. Welcome, guys. Thank you, Jim. Thank you for having us today. Thanks for being here. Surya, for those in the audience, or listening, who have not had the opportunity to meet you, can you maybe give us an introduction of yourself, your history with Cognizant? I actually think it's a very interesting history, and your responsibilities as head of the Americas. Sure. Good morning, everyone. You know, I have been with Cognizant for a long time. This is my 25th year with Cognizant, and in many ways, I joined Cognizant when Cognizant was a startup, a very small firm, and I grew with Cognizant, and I saw the evolution of Cognizant, I saw the stabilization of Cognizant, I saw the hypergrowth of Cognizant, and the next phase of Cognizant, and now the resurrection of Cognizant, so I have worked across the firm. I have worked across different functions of the firm. I joined as a business analyst back then, and since then, I have worked in sales, pre-sales, I worked in client management. I was a client partner, a BU head. I ran a few of our businesses before I took on my current role as the President of Americas. Americas constitute roughly 75% of Cognizant today. So I run the entire P&L for Americas, and you know, from soup to nuts, which includes you know, owning the client relationships, accountable for delivery of to the clients, and managing the P&L for the Americas. That's my current role. Mm-hmm. I think it's been eighteen months or so since, Mm. After, since your CEO, Ravi Kumar, was appointed. He's been pretty explicitly focused on sort of rejuvenating revenue growth. We've seen early traction with large deals. Give us a sense of how this major turnaround has gone so far, specifically, what's worked, what hasn't? Yeah. I think, you know, it's... Yes, you're right. It's been eighteen months since Ravi took over as CEO. But since his first day, the focus has been on growth, the growth. I think there are three or four key dimensions that have changed in the firm in the last eighteen months. One is obviously, as you said, the focus on growth. There is unprecedented focus on growth. We have invested in, you know, in a large deal infrastructure for the firm. We have invested. We have re-overhauled our sales engine, the front-end teams. We have done a talent refresh across the firm to regenerate, to rejuvenate our sales engine. That is one part. The second most critical part is establishing or reestablishing the channel of trust with our clients. There was a little bit of... We were dealing with a little bit of a trust issue at that point in time. In the last eighteen months, we have focused on reestablishing that trust. How did we do that? You know, by showing up well, by winning the mind share, you know, by delivering high-quality work products, and being more agile and responsive to our clients, so we have focused on that, and Ravi also has focused on the culture and employee morale, so you know, he caught the culture of innovation, the grassroots innovation. We have launched a program called Bluebolt, which was his brainchild, and you know, that hit off really well, both internally and externally, so the culture and the morale is the other aspect. So there are three or four dimensions that he has focused on, but everything channeled towards growth and making sure that we have healthy morale across our workforce. As you know, we have 345,000 -strong workforce. We just got to make sure that you know, they're highly motivated. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're in a great seat to assess this question, which is, you know, basically from where you sit, how is Cognizant positioned against your competitors today, especially in the Americas? And what improvements could we still sort of expect out of the company over the next twelve to eighteen months? I mean, going back to your previous question, over the last eighteen months, our competitive positioning in the market has significantly improved. You know, and just a proof point to that is in the last year, we won a total of 1,700 $1 million-plus deals. In the first half of this year, we have won 1,300 $1 million-plus deals already. Yeah. Our competitive positioning has improved. We are participating in a lot of much more large deals, both proactive and reactive. That way, I think, you know. We have invested in capability building across led with GenAI. I think we are one of the very first IT services firms to pledge $1 billion investment into GenAI, and we have doubled down on that. We have followed through on that, and we have built capabilities around that. We have focused on under-penetrated markets for Cognizant, and we started expanding into those markets. A combination of all of these has improved our competitive positioning significantly over the last eighteen months. Mm-hmm. Now, with the global economy still a little bit- Yeah ... uneven, we've got inflationary pressures, potential slowdowns in some verticals. You know, how do you view the state of the market? How are you positioning to kind of adapt to those shifts? And, you know, what are you really doing to drive resilient growth in this challenging environment? I think you're right. I mean, you know, the global economy is still volatile. We are dealing with four variables: the impending U.S. elections, obviously the interest rates, inflation, and the geopolitical tensions. These four variables will have to level out over the next, you know, few quarters to see where we all end up, you know, where the economy, when it starts rebooting... While that is happening, we are focused on a few things. We are focused, as I said, earlier, on expanding into under-penetrated industries for Cognizant, such as communications and media, aerospace and defense. That is a completely new segment for Cognizant. We have invested in our new asset recently to expand into that market. Then we also started expanding into adjacencies by building our capabilities. We have recently launched our Experience Star moment, and, you know, we have, we are incubating a cybersecurity offering. So these are the adjacencies that we have, you know, we are focused on. So we are trying to build the capabilities, expand into markets that we are not present today, and revamping our sales engine, you know, at the same time, so that we are ready. When the markets open, we are fully geared up and gassed so that we can, you know, participate in the race- Yeah. When we get ahead. Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, despite the weak discretionary environment, still it seems like clients are still spending, maybe different projects, different priorities and scopes, but they're still spending. So, I mean, what has shifted in the way clients are prioritizing their spending? Over the last 12-18 months, the spending pattern has changed from our clients. The clients are more focused on cost optimization, and so they are more, you know, they have more - they are called a vendor consolidation play to a great extent. As a result, you know, we have seen many large deals, ton of large deal activity in market around vendor consolidation and cost optimization. So, you know, we have done well. We have done well in that segment. We have won our fair share, or rather unfair share, of some of those deals across the, you know, businesses. So I expect this to continue. I expect this pattern to continue for the next few quarters until the discretionary spend comes back. We have seen, you know, the trickles of that coming back in some of the industries, but, many of the other industries continue to remain soft, and there is no significant departure in the discretionary spending pattern. So, you know, the clients probably will continue to focus on these cost optimization deals for the next two or three quarters. Yeah. And how are you sort of adapting your service offerings to kind of align with those shifts? And where, in what areas do you see the most potential for growth? See, you know, for example, for us to participate in these large deals, we have to make sure that, in fact, we made sure that our front end, which is our sales engine, is strong, and then we have supported that with our investments in some of the, you know, benchmarking, or pricing, and some of the other elements that are absolutely essential to position ourselves well in the large deals. That is on the front end, and then once we win the deal, we have to focus on executing the deal, so we are focused on strengthening our delivery muscle, and we are focused on the governance for executing these large deals, so that is one area of focus for us to, you know, do well in this market. Along with that, you know, we are focused on expanding into adjacencies or to address some of the capability gaps that we have. To your question, I think we expect a ton of activity in AI and GenAI-related areas as the market opens up. We'll get there. Yeah, we'll get there. That's a good segue to that. But you know, there is a lot of activity on the security space. I mean, you know, every other day we hear or read something in the market. So clients are focused on wall-to-wall security. So we are partnering with some of the, you know, these platform providers and coming up with service offerings for security. And you know, that is one of the focus area for us right now, along with experience and few other, you know, areas that I mentioned. Yeah. Now, this market is obviously highly competitive. You're still very well positioned in your major markets, like financial services and healthcare. You talked about those a little bit. How are you sort of defending and potentially expanding your share in each of those two verticals? Yes, you're right. I mean, financial services and, healthcare, segments have been, very large markets for us for a very long time. In fact, the health, health is, a very big segment for us. In healthcare, we have, unique differentiation in the market. You know, we have platforms. We have, our TriZetto branded platforms, and roughly, you know, roughly two-thirds of United States' insured population is processed on our TriZetto platforms. There is no other platform like TriZetto on the planet. So that provides a very unique differentiation for us to offer bundled solutions or end-to-end solutions to our clients. That's a very unique differentiator that would, that is helping us, and that will continue to help us, you know, in the healthcare market. Similarly, in the financial services, we have deep domain expertise. Over the years, we have built deep domain expertise in financial services, and we are coming up with tailored industry-specific solution offerings in financial services. That is gonna help us, and in fact, that is starting to show results for us to strengthen and further expand in the financial services. Yeah. And are there any kind of immediate capture opportunities that you're seeing to take share while sort of the overall discretionary environment is still depressed? Again, you know, in healthcare, we are leveraging our platforms to proactively construct end-to-end solutions to our clients to help them optimize their costs and also help them, you know, with the faster time to market and gain the competitive advantage. Those are such opportunities that we are crafting ourselves and taking to the clients, and, you know, that we will continue to do those. In healthcare, it really helps because we have platforms, whereas in the other business segments where we do not have platforms, we are leveraging our domain expertise and our partnerships with hyperscalers to build end-to-end solutions and create those opportunities, you know, to take the unfair share away from the competition. Yeah. Now, just a few months ago, you announced the acquisition of Belcan- Yeah. -and that represents kind of an interesting diversification into new markets for you, aerospace and defense. It's been an area where, you know, it's been a while, actually, since we've seen an acquisition- Yeah ... of this kind of scale. So how does that fit into your broader M&A strategy? So, you know, Belcan addresses two aspects of our strategy. One is the vertical part, which is aerospace and defense. These are the two industry segments that Cognizant, you know, does not operate today, or we do not have any presence in those. So this fills in that void or a gap for Cognizant, which is the vertical part. Horizontally, it strengthens our ER&D muscle, engineering muscle. We do have that capability in Cognizant today. With Belcan acquisition, we have, you know, enhanced that capability so that we can serve it across the industries. For example, there is engineering related... We do engineering related work in life sciences, manufacturing, and utilities, and in other segments. So it helps, it kind of fits into our strategy of expanding into markets that we're not present today and strengthening our capabilities to serve. You know, we are very optimistic and positive about that acquisition, and you know, we look forward to delivering that, so. Jim, maybe just on the broader M&A question? Mm-hmm. and sort of capital allocation question? Yeah. You know, I think as we've kind of executed on this framework for a number of years, this balanced approach on sort of return of capital to shareholders and investing for the future through M&A using, you know, our balance sheet and cash flow, is going to continue. So we've talked about roughly 50% of our annual free cash flow going towards M&A, roughly 50%- Yeah ... going back to shareholders. In years past, where M&A's been a little slower, we've kind of reallocated and done a little more share repurchase. I think this year we're probably gonna be on the opposite side, where we're doing a little bit more M&A than we typically have the last several years, and therefore, a little more aligned on the share repurchase to the roughly 25% of free cash flow. On the earnings call we mentioned, and I think phase one is sort of integration of Belcan, and so in the near term, not expecting any material acquisitions for the remainder of this year. But I don't think this prohibits us from kind of remaining active in the M&A market and sort of evaluating, you know, opportunities as they come across. Yeah. And as you integrate Belcan into your operations, sort of what are the areas of focus for innovation in the first hundred days? I'm not sure why I say a hundred days. I got politics in the brain maybe. Yeah. Yeah. First several months. Actually, I mean, Belcan is probably the one of the large acquisitions that Cognizant has made after TriZetto. We acquired TriZetto in 2015. That was the large acquisition then. So the focus for the first hundred days is gonna be, again, you know, stabilize and grow. Stabilize and grow. Growth is the focus with the controlled and calibrated integration. So we are gonna focus on growth and synergies. In the first hundred days, you know, we are gonna look at the opportunities to upsell and cross-sell Cognizant services into Belcan clients and vice versa. So we have a dedicated team from Cognizant, you know, assigned for Belcan. And again, the focus is on growth with calibrated and controlled integration. We have announced that we are looking for at least $100 million synergies over the next three years by upselling and cross-selling Cognizant capabilities into Belcan clients and the reverse. Good news is, we do not have too many common set of clients today, so that gives us a greenfield opportunity for us. You know, we are retaining the Belcan brand so that there's absolutely no client disruption in the market, in whichever way. So that way, I think we can solely be focused on growth and make sure that, you know, we supplement Belcan with Cognizant's strength of global delivery model, and the other aspects of, you know, the very robust hiring engine and things like that. Mm-hmm. Very good. Maybe I just want to pivot a little bit and talk about AI, because you raised it earlier. You know, given the market's focused on generative AI, you know, we've seen some early traction. I think you've talked about seven hundred and fifty early client projects. Sounds to me like most of those are sort of the early prototype phase- Yeah ... at this point. Maybe talk about the kinds of projects that are included in these early engagements, first of all. We are seeing GenAI projects in four vectors. You're right, I mean, you know, the projects are still small and prototypes kind of nature, but we are seeing them in four vectors. The first is customer experience. This is, in fact, the vector which is very predominant. Most of our clients across industries are doing projects and pilots, and many of them are in production in the customer experience sector. This includes call centers or anything related to customer experience. Yeah. The second vector is more around content: content generation, content creation, content dispersion, and things like that. So there are a ton of projects in that segment. The third vector is more on the efficiency and productivity, which is. It could be tech for tech or, you know, the other aspects to drive efficiency across the value chain. There are projects in that. And the fourth vector is few and far between. Some of our clients who have deep pockets and who want to, you know, dabble with this technology, are looking at leveraging this technology to create new revenue streams and new business models and things like for geographic expansion or taking products faster to market and things like that. So these are the four broad vectors where we are seeing projects on GenAI today. Mm-hmm. And, most of the customer experience-related projects are getting into production... not at, I mean, you know, relatively, that is the fastest and the broadest, we see the faster and broader adoption of GenAI in that segment. Interesting. And the rest of it, maybe just talk about, like or even in the first one, customer experience, what is it taking to kind of get to the next level in terms of scale of projects? Do they have to see, "Hey, there's real cost savings here?" Is it something, the new capabilities? Is it remediation of data stacks? You know, what is it that kind of gets them over the hump to a bigger project? I think, you know, in the customer experience sector, clients are adapting or consuming this in an incremental way rather than an exponential way. I think, most of our clients have deployed this technology to some extent in customer experience sector. To your question on why is it not at scale in the other verticals or other dimensions, I think probably three or four reasons, you know. Many of the clients are still waiting for, the maturity and the technology to a great extent. And then there is this regulatory aspect of the technology. You know, the clients are not very clear on the boundaries of the regulation. Yeah. Third, we still see a ton of activity when it comes to GenAI spending at the chip and infrastructure level. Sure. At the chip and infrastructure. So that's why you see a lot of activity with the hyperscalers and the chip manufacturers like, you know, NVIDIA. It still has not crept up to the applications layer and the business transformation layer. We expect that to happen over a period of time. And it still has not triggered CapEx cycles, probably because, you know, clients have overspent on cloud and are still waiting for benefits from cloud. But once this technology jumps the S-curve from chip and infra layer to apps and business transformation layer, we expect more broader and widespread adoption. Mm-hmm. And what's your own outlook for the, sort of the timeframe for broader enterprise-wide, AI adoption? I mean, it's hard to call, but you know, seeing what we are seeing, knowing what we know, it also depends on the economy. Yeah. Assuming economy comes back sometime in 2025, if I were to pick a timeframe, I would, I would pick somewhere from 18-24 months for a widespread broader adoption for CapEx cycles to trigger on this. Mm-hmm. I guess, you know, what kinds of projects do you think are gonna be most impactful for clients once we sort of get past this proof of concept phase, and cost take out deals, and how meaningful do you think it could be to your growth over time? I would look at it with a different lens. I mean, I wouldn't look at it from a project lens, but I would look at it from a value chain lens. Mm-hmm. Okay. This technology has to be like digital, for example. Yeah. You can't digitize components of your value chain. You have to digitize the entire value chain to reap the benefits. In a similar way, you'll have to infuse this AI across your value chain, across your value chain. For example, if you take a healthcare payer value chain, insurance company value chain, the value chain has multiple components, such as sales and marketing, member onboarding, claims administration, claims payment, and you know, all the way up to the provider touch point. So once you infuse GenAI across, then you'll start reducing the cost of care and improving the quality of care. If you infuse technology in parts of it, then the benefits will be, you know, incremental. So that's what happened in digital. You know, they started in an incremental way, but then clients started digitizing their entire value chain. They started redoing their entire plumbing across infra business and operations layers. That will trigger large-scale projects. So we'll have to look at it from a value chain-centric model or approach, and that will trigger larger projects. Mm-hmm. Got it. Okay, then so if you think about this internally, how has Cognizant sort of used AI to sort of enhance productivity? Yeah ... differentiate yourself in the market so far? So we have deployed the GenAI within Cognizant, so I guess we gonna have to eat our own dog food, too. So, you know, we have deployed it in two or three areas. So obviously, for the employee experience part, you know, so we have deployed that. We have deployed that in some of our HR segments, such as employee onboarding or for any, you know, training or Q&A aspects for the employees. And then we have deployed this technology for our internal tech support, you know. Mm-hmm ... tech support, so we have deployed that, and we have also deployed it for the content-related elements, for creating training materials and things like that, and now we are beginning to deploy that on the sales side, you know, for the RFP response or case study creation and things like that, so we have deployed it in three or four different areas within Cognizant, and we are seeing results, good results for that through that. This is within Cognizant. Yeah. But obviously, we are deploying this technology to serve our clients. You know, that's a completely different element to it. Yeah. I think it's fair to say that emerging technologies like GenAI sort of always present significant opportunities, you know, but also kind of, there's this debate, and we've had debates like the whole conference long, about, you know, whether AI revenues are eventually gonna live up to the hype or not, you know, or at least justify the initial investment. I mean, for Cognizant, what milestones do you think we should be watching as we get to 2025 and beyond, that will give us greater confidence in the trajectory of those turning into revenues? I mean, you know, it's very hard to define or, you know, very, very hard to say that this is gonna be the yardstick for AI success at this, at this juncture. To me, I mean, you know, the biggest proof point would be that, you know. Yeah, actually, let me take it back. This AI is expected to push growth by 3-4 percentage points beyond the traditional market growth. When you start seeing those growth rates from the services firms, that's when you begin to realize that AI is doing its magic or AI is delivering its expected hype. Otherwise, beyond that, I mean, you can talk about the number of projects or revenues generated from projects or the AI in projects. It's very hard. Almost all the large deals that we spoke about earlier has a component of AI or a GenAI. Sure, so revenue acceleration- Exactly. just like we saw in SaaS and cloud. Exactly. We saw revenue acceleration, and- Correct ... that's how you know it was real. Yes. Yeah. When the growth rate starts, you know, pushing beyond the expected market growth rates, that's when you know that AI CapEx cycles have triggered. Mm-hmm. Maybe some more kind of operational, financial-related questions. Yeah. You know, you've instituted the NextGen program, to drive significant M&A cost takeout across the business. What inning do you think we are in? Or maybe you wanna use a cricket analogy, I don't know. To serve the kind of respect to, like, those overall cost reductions, and how much room for sort of absolute dollar reduction in SG&A do we have from the current levels? I'll let Tyler also chime in on this question. To answer your innings question, probably we have just concluded the first innings, or, you know, we are getting into the second part of it. NextGen, you know, the savings from our NextGen are kind of, you know, channeled into two or three buckets within P&L. One is investment in large deals. As I said, we have focused on investing or bulking our sales engine or revamping our sales engine. So some of the NextGen benefits have been channeled towards that. And, you know, the other element is, you know, for our training and infrastructure-related elements, and a portion of that flows into our bottom line, too. I think we have seen seventy basis points improvement in our bottom line in the first half. So these are the three dimensions through which the NextGen is helping us. And, on the broader- Yeah, I would say- That's a good question. ... you know, over the next two quarters, we still have kind of incremental NextGen actions that are coming online. You know, when we had introduced the program last year, we had talked about achieving approximately $100 million of savings simply from the real estate. Now, you've seen the charges for real estate exits and or lease exits and things like that, but the savings are really kind of starting to roll online in the middle of this year and through the end of this year. So we expect to achieve that $100 million of annualized savings in 2025. We have incremental sort of headcount and more traditional overhead actions that are happening over the next two quarters, and so we're gonna be kind of exiting this year, concluding the program, right? I think that we would expect to at least be through NextGen by the end of this year. A lot of these, you know, investments Surya spoke about where they're going into. It's also helping us. We just went through a merit cycle, right? We had talked about in Q3 absorbing- Yeah a merit cycle, so, you know, some of it goes there, right? Of course, it's. We haven't talked about pricing, but it's been a tough pricing environment. So it's helping fund some of the investments that we're making on the large deals go to market and other things, while trying to kind of accelerate revenue growth. I think the end of this year, kind of the conclusion. We haven't given the SG&A dollar piece, but I do think it's fair to assume we do have some incremental actions kind of exiting this year and then, you know, next year trying to drive some operating leverage with- Yeah ... with better revenue performance and slower SG&A growth. Actually, on that note, I, I would like to expand on- Sure ... a few. Okay. You know, we have defined our strategy in three pillars. What, one is, you know, accelerate growth, become the employer of choice, and modernize our operations. So we are executing our strategy flawlessly across, and the NextGen is kind of helping us to a great extent. On the accelerate growth, we spoke about our focus on large deals, having the channel or winning the channel of trust with the clients, expanding into adjacencies, expanding into the markets that we are not present today, focusing on underpenetrated markets. Those are the four or five elements of accelerating growth, element of our strategy. And when it comes to becoming an employer of choice, we are focused on multiple employee engagement initiatives. Part of what was the hikes, when not many people have awarded hikes, we kind of went ahead with that. And then we are focused on learning and development infrastructure for our employees to improve the morale of the employees. We have said that we are gonna invest in a training campus in India and also in U.S. And so things like that. I mean, you know, just to make sure that we retain and attract the right talent, that is, become the employer of choice. The third element is modernizing the operations, which includes, you know, some of the platforms that we have built for enhancing our delivery effectiveness and delivery industrialization. And you know, some of the investments that we made towards our large deal infrastructure. And we are doing a lot of other things to be more agile, more nimble, and to improve our competitive positioning in the market. Mm-hmm. So I think, you know, these three elements of a strategy, the NextGen dovetails well into all the three pillars of our strategy, so. Yeah. Yeah. You know, your revenue trajectory has already started to improve. You know, what is your outlook for kind of sustaining improved revenue growth this year, and more importantly, into next year? And sort of what are the key levers you're pulling and focusing on to kind of achieve that? ... Listen, I mean, a lot of it depends on the economy, too, like we spoke. But coming to Cognizant, what are we doing to be fully ready when the race begins is, you know, we just want to make sure that we have unfair share of client, of the mind share of the, our clients. So through our AI and GenAI, and through our domain expertise across the market segments that we operate in, we are constantly monitoring where the puck is moving in each industry. We are making sure that our capabilities are aligned to the market. If there are any gaps, we are focused on building those capabilities and plugging those capability gaps. That is the first part. Second, we are, you know, leveraging our large deals engine and our competitive leverage in some of the industries that we are growing, to make sure that, you know, we stay highly competitive and reasonably aggressive to win some of those large deals. That's the second element. And then we have called an M&A player. For example, Belcan is one part of it, you know? So we are focused on executing to make sure that we have a strong foothold in aerospace and defense, and we expand our engineering muscle across. That is the third element. And fourth, we are making sure while we are trying to win the market, we want to make sure that our delivery engine is primed to the right levels. We are focused on delivery, industrialization, automation, and agility within the, you know, the delivery infrastructure to make sure that delivery engine caters to the sales. These are the three or four things that we are doing to keep ourselves fit and fully ready to jump in when the market opens. Yeah. On the margin side of things, you know, you know, large deal wins, those are good. You've talked about them. They also involve upfront costs, especially the larger outsourcing deals. So how are you thinking about balancing sort of the short-term, you know, margin impact with a long-term revenue growth? You're right. I mean, you know, so these large deals are long tenure deals, okay? In the first year, you know, we will have a bit of a margin issue, but, you know, we have planned through that. We have balanced through that with a bunch of two or three things. One is the next gen. So we spoke about a portion of next gen returns are being used to balance that. The second element is, you know, usually when the discretionary spend is high, we tend to carry a larger bench. And now that discretionary spend cycles are compressed, we don't need to have the bench that we used to. And historically, Cognizant also is a little on the higher side when it comes to the bench costs. So we have optimized our bench and used that, you know, benefit that we got from that to balance some of this issue. NextGen, balancing the bench, the bench cost, and we have, we are focused on driving the automation across our delivery framework. We are either through GenAI or otherwise, you know, we are dialing up the automation lever to make sure we get benefits of that. A combination of three of these vectors is helping us balance that, you know, short-term margin issue while we are focused on, you know, buttressing the long-term revenue backlog through these large deals. Mm-hmm. And at the same time, you know, this. And as the years pass, as when we get to year two, year three, the automation levers will kick in in these large deals, and the GenAI advantage will come in, and that should, you know, help us in all the ways. Great. Got more, but-