James Faucette: Got it. Thanks for that, Danny. And then quickly on AI, it seems like there’s a little bit of incremental investment there and certainly a big focus on this call, but wondering about how we should think about the – how you’re anticipating a return on that investment and over what kind of timeframe. And maybe more qualitatively, what kinds of paybacks, whether it’s increased customer satisfaction or internal operations, et cetera. Thanks.
Maria Black: Yes, so I’ll start on the on the AI side and tell you all the reasons again that I’m so excited about it. Maybe Don can give you a little bit about how we’re thinking about the return on investments that we’re making. So, just to remind everyone how we’re thinking about AI, in its most simplistic way, I think about it really in three buckets, the first of which is product and innovation. So, putting generative AI into all of our innovation cycles. So, that’s everything from product development to the features and functionality that I mentioned in the prepared remarks. And by the way, later this morning, we’re actually issuing a press release that goes through some of our product and innovation, call it, philosophy and launches of products, right?
So, some of what this press release speaks to is how we’re thinking about and our design principles around making things easy, smart, and human within our product and innovation cycles to really drive things like payroll assist, things like ADP Assist into the market in a meaningful way. So, product is really kind of the first bucket. And as you’ll see, we’re making significant investments there. We do have ADP Assist now more broadly deployed across the product set, and we’re seeing meaningful impact as it relates to our client experience on that. The second bucket is what I call efficiency and service efficiency. And this is really about giving all the same things that we’re looking to give our clients to make their jobs easier and more effective and efficient, and giving those same tools to our associates.
And so, we have Agent Assist. I’m pleased to say that from an Agent Assist perspective, we’ve more than doubled the number of associates today that are engaging in AI tools overall. Specifically, a big piece of that is anchored in Agent Assist and the things we’re doing around call summarization. Again, I’ll let Don comment on investments and return, but just to kind of give you a flavor of what we’re talking about here, the feedback we’re getting from our associates is, there are times we’re shaving off a minute or two minutes by aiding things like call summarization. And while that probably seems minuscule, what I would offer to you is we have thousands of service associates, and we also have millions and millions of calls that we take every single year.
And so, we’re pretty optimistic and excited about a minute here and a minute there, and what that means from an incremental opportunity for us over time, right? So, we continue to lean into our service efficiency and really getting all of our associates more effective as it relates to their ability to engage with our clients. And then last but not least – by the way, I could go on and on and on all day on this topic, but last but not least and very, very important is how we’re thinking about generative AI in our go-to market motions. And so, we have for years been at the tip of the spear of sales modernization. We have partnerships that are two decades old where we’ve always been leading the way with what it looks like to have a best-in-class modern distribution and sales force, and this is no different for us.
So, we already have a broad set of our sellers leveraging tools along the lines of Generative AI, many of which are through our best-in-class vendors and partners that we have, and we’re seeing great impact there. Things that I used to do myself at a personal level manually, such as pre-call planning, by the way, things like call summarization for prospecting, these are big items for us as it relates to our go-to-market motions, and we’ve just started scratching the surface. So, all in, really excited again. Just to kind of wrap it all up, I think it’s about product, service efficiency, and our go-to-market motions. We are making active investments. Some of those investments are things that we’ve shifted that we were already working on in digital transformation.
Some of it is incremental investments. And so, I think with that, I’ll turn it over to Don who can kind of talk about how we’re thinking about our incremental investments and moreover the return on that.
Don McGuire: Yes, so I think Maria just outlined some of the exciting areas that GenAI will have for us and some of the things that’ll change, how they’ll make the client experience better, how they’ll help our associates, how they’ll help us sell more, et cetera. But I would say at this point in time, what we’re really talking about is some modest investments in GenAI. I think it’s going to be a little while before we start to see returns from those things, but we certainly do anticipate returns. But in the near term right now, it’s really a time for investing in these tools, et cetera, and we’ll see those outcomes, those financial outcomes somewhere down the road.
James Faucette: That’s great. Thank you both very much.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from Ramsey El-Assal with Barclays. Your line is open.
Ramsey El-Assal: Hi there, and thanks for taking my question this morning. You guys called out higher seller expenses as just one component of the margin headwinds in PEO. I guess the question, is this just the cost to compete in PEO at this point? In other words, is it becoming more expensive to compete in PEO, or do you expect expense levels related to selling to sort of abate in a more normalized time period?
Don McGuire: Yes, I don’t think there’s – just to answer the question, there’s nothing really unusual or fundamentally different about our selling expenses and how we go-to-market in the PEO. I think certainly as we see higher sales, as you know, we get a lot of our sales, half of our sales, give or take, from internal. So, some of that’s a little bit of our internal housekeeping if you will, how we allocate expenses between business units, et cetera. But higher sales generally translate into higher selling expenses. So, really nothing fundamentally different in how we go-to-market. Certainly, not seeing any fundamental differences in the competitive landscape that’s driving those expenses.
Ramsey El-Assal: Got it. Okay. And then one follow-up for me. In the context of the international product launches like Roll in Ireland, and also I guess the partnership you guys just announced with Convera, can you comment on the international value proposition itself, whether it’s sort of largely the same as it is in the US, or are there distinctive products, needs, partnerships required in these markets that you guys sort of still need to build out to more fully execute on the international opportunity?
Don McGuire: Yes, I’ll start, and Maria can add here in a second. So, as you know, you look at our revenue as – international revenue as a percentage the total, and it’s not where we’d like it to be, even though roughly 40% of the people we bear around world are in international. So, and the reason for that is that we have fundamentally different offers in the US. We have things like PEO. We also have money movement services, tax services, pretty much broadly distributed. Some of those offers don’t have the same value proposition outside of the US market. So, our opportunity there is not quite the same. Perhaps it will be as time goes on, some of those services may be available in other markets, but as we speak today, they’re not there.
