Julie Sweet: Yeah. I mean, I wouldn’t call out — I wouldn’t say that this activity is because of better valuations, right? At any given time when we look at the market, right, and we see where are the growth opportunities, we want to move quickly and we look at organic versus inorganic ways of moving quickly. We never do anything purely inorganic, right, or purely organic. And so, think about our acquisitions as being matched to what is the opportunity in the market and what’s the best way to capture that growth quickly, right? And so, the strategy of categories is the same, right? So, there are new areas that we want to go into, like capital markets. That’s an investment decision. We go into a certain number of those. We’re executing now with rigor.
We went and bought Anser Advisory. Now we bought the next one in Canada, right? So that’s just about — it’s a great growth area and we’re trying to pivot. And the best way to do that to build something that we don’t have already organically is to make some inorganic acquisitions and then that becomes organic growth and we’re able to kick in our recruiting machine. If you think about the UK, health is a great area. We just bought a health company, right? So, you look at the market and you say, “If I want to diversify, what’s the fastest way to diversify into new areas?” And that’s where often inorganic can help us do that through these niche acquisitions and consulting and industry. And then, you’ve got just massive opportunities like cloud and security, where you saw some of those acquisitions in supply chain.
And that’s all about both adding phenomenal talent quickly and scaling to go after a market that’s today, right? So, that’s how we think about it. It’s extremely rigorous. We always have a decision what’s the best way to get there organically or inorganically. And inorganic is always about acceleration and driving organic growth. So, it’s very consistent. We’ve been doing it in a very disciplined way. And in these kinds of environments, we believe the companies that invest win. And that is why we do actions like we did last year to increase our business resilience and enable us to be really well positioned to invest when others are not.
James Faucette: That’s great color. I appreciate that. And similarly, just on bookings activity and AI contribution, there are clear acceleration in the AI level of activity, et cetera. When you’re talking to clients and that kind of thing, how are they thinking about AI budget allocation versus other initiatives, et cetera, right now? Are they looking at it as, “Hey, this is an incremental investment that we need to be making given the pace of change in technology,” or are they trying to really use that spend or have that spend be to offset some other projects maybe that they’re going to curtail a little bit sooner? Just trying to think about as that continues to build, how we should think about it being incremental versus substitutive within a lot of the budgets.
Julie Sweet: Right now we’re seeing a lot of reprioritization, right, because — I mean, obviously the market is growing. Like, we’re growing. The market is growing. So, spending in technology is increasing. It’s not increasing as fast as it was increasing a couple of years ago, right? So, spending on technology is increasing. But within that, you’re seeing more prioritization. And our research, everybody’s research is saying, hey, more spending on AI. For lots of companies, it’s also more spending mostly on building that digital core, because many companies don’t have the data estates in order — they’re not in the cloud. They don’t have the data in order to use the GenAI. So, think of it as a real focus on building a digital core to enable as well.
So, market is still growing. It’s more about prioritization of where that spending is going. Okay. Great. Thank you so much. So, in closing, I want to thank all of our shareholders for your continued trust and support in all of our people for what you do every single day. And I wish everyone a happy and a healthy holiday season. Thank you for joining today.
Operator: That does conclude your conference for today. Thank you for your participation and for using AT&T Teleconference. You may now disconnect.
