James Faucette: That’s great. And then wanted to ask is — it’s interesting in each of the last couple of quarters, you’ve increased net head count slightly. I think usually, that’s taken as a positive indicator. Can you just talk about, as you’re maintaining head count even in the face of potentially being down as much as 2% at the bottom end of your guided range this year, how you’re thinking about managing that? And is the nature of the people you’re adding and retaining just to serve kind of these larger deals that you’ve already booked? And how much of it is just in anticipation that more discretionary and smaller deals could come back? Just trying to get a sense for how you’re thinking about managing head count and what we should take from that?
Jatin Dalal: Yeah. So James, this is really a combination of both retaining sufficient flexibility for the growth to come. If the growth comes back, you should have sufficient flexibility on the bench. That’s one. And two is really some plant addition that we do systematically to certain skill sets and certain part of our pyramid that has both contributed to this small addition that you are seeing on the total headcount.
Ravi Kumar: Also, just to add to what Jatin said, you should remember, we have an extraordinary story on how well we have done on attrition. I mean we are now really a top-notch player with industry-leading retention plan. I mean we have — look at where we were at the start of quarter one in 2023 to now, our attrition has significantly improved. That is also helping us to be ready for the discretionary at any point in time it comes back, because it gives you the cast and capacity to fulfill.
James Faucette: That’s great. Thank you so much to both of you for your help.
Ravi Kumar: Thank you, James.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Ramsey El-Assal with Barclays. Please proceed.
Ramsey El-Assal: Hi. Thank you for taking my questions this evening. I wanted to ask you if you could comment on how much visibility or maybe relative visibility you have right now into fiscal ’24? And I guess I mean relative to a more settled normal environment, and I guess the underlying question is, are you having to bake in more conservatism into your guidance this year to account for environmental, external factors that are difficult to kind of see through at this point?
Jatin Dalal: Sure, Ramsey. Ramsey, I mean, this is a typical beginning of the year where we don’t know what we don’t know. If you really see mathematically, if you dissect our guidance, you would see that there is a certain growth — sequential growth that we have assumed during the course of the year. So there is a certain growth assumption that we are working in with. But environment remains uncertain, and it’s certainly a slower start to the year, as Ravi indicated in his opening remarks.
Ramsey El-Assal: Got it. Okay. Thank you. And then a quick follow-up from me. Could you also give us your view on the extent to which clients are prepared to embrace generative AI? How much work still needs to be done on core sort of underlying technologies at this point for enterprises to start taking advantage of the new technology?
Ravi Kumar: I would say, in some areas, we are seeing more confidence. The two big areas I want to highlight is employee productivity and the second is customer service. We see them getting faster to production grade. Employee productivity is amplifying human potential, as we call it. Customer service always had uniquely opportunities here because remember, when robotic process automation, which is down the chain and the continuum of AI and generative AI, we also had the most reduction there. These are the two areas where they are ready. I think the things that grappling with is, as I mentioned, and the need of a system integrator like Cognizant plays an important role. The things they’re grappling with is the accuracy of the models.
They explain ability of the models, the traceability of the datasets. So that the explainability could be judged. I mean, remember this is, this is output, which is coming out from a computer which is building logic, which means you need to have explainability behind it to make it responsible enough. And I think the other thing that grappling with is — I mean, we call that hallucinations but that’s what it means in different ways. The other thing that they are grappling with this performance versus cost. So that they can make it production grade. But we will — If it will disrupt, one of the studies we did with Oxford Economics is it will disrupt 90% of the jobs. Some jobs will get disrupted more, some jobs will get disrupted less. The tasks within jobs will get disrupted and we created something called an exposure of core on jobs which gives us the opportunity to figure out with jobs will actually go through more disruption.
But at a high level I would say, these are the two broad areas where customers are probably going to be more prepared to cross the bridge on embracing generative AI into enterprises. Needless to say, this is going to be one of the most pervasive technologies in — at times. So, I’m excited about the prospects but I’m equally, I’m equally getting prepared to what it means for a system integrator.
Ramsey El-Assal: Very interesting. Thanks.
Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our question-and-answer session. I’d like to turn the call back to management.
Tyler Scott: Great. Thank you all for your interest in Cognizant and for joining our call. We look forward to catching up next quarter. Thank you.
Operator: This concludes today’s conference. You may now disconnect. Enjoy the rest of your evening.
