Ruplu Bhattacharya: Okay, thanks for the clarification there, Andre. Chris, if I can come back to you, I mean, I think in the prepared remarks, you said 2024 will be the year that GenAI will positively influence revenues, and maybe in the latter part of the year and into 2025. I mean, so I guess my question to you would be, is that correct? And if it is, then what’s giving you confidence that the revenue impact will actually be positive from Generative AI? Because you kind of have to balance some volume going away because of AI, but then you could get higher level work. So can you just give us your thought process on how you’re thinking about this revenue impact in 2024 and 2025?
Chris Caldwell: Yeah, for sure, Ruplu, it’s a great question. I think there’s two things that we look at. First, when we’ve now been at this sort of a year and a quarter, give or take with clients looking at POCs and actually getting them in. And frankly, we’ve been spending a lot of this in our own dime and kind of co-developing with clients, et cetera, et cetera. Haven’t meaningfully put anything into from a revenue perspective. And so it’s been not a drag, but it’s just been an investment that we’ve been making. And we start to see near the end of 2024, where there’s enough momentum that we think these things will start to go into more production that where it’s chargeable, then we’ll start to see more chargeable, then we’ll start to see some benefits of that.
And in the POCs, we are seeing where we’re driving revenue. And we’re starting to develop all these new levels of service for Generative AI, whether it be from different types of content tagging and content management, whether it be from how we implement the LLMs, whether it be from how we manage the LLMs, whether it be from kind of the annotation of the data, whether it be from the analytics and supporting the application layer that integrates into it and then running it, because you have to continue to tune these elements. We’re starting to see all this new opportunities for revenue that’s coming out that will offset some of the decline that you’ll get from people being more productive with the technology being put in place. And so we now have enough kind of test cases and data that we can start to extrapolate and start to see, okay, we see how this works.
Now, why we talk about the fact that visibility is a little light is that we still have clients who generally are looking at this and POCs are okay but there’s still a lot of hesitation for adoption full scale where you’re going to see sort of probably a bigger inflection point. We do think that’ll come. I think it’s a matter of time, but we’ll start to see I think early signs within sort of the back half of 2024 to early 2025.
Ruplu Bhattacharya: Okay, thanks for the details there. I’m going to try and squeeze one more in if I can. So, you’re doing the Webhelp integration and you said that the focus is going to be on debt reduction for the next two years. How should we think about your propensity for future M&A in these two years or at least in 2024? You do — I mean do you think that that’s something you’re going to consider? And if so, what are the metrics? What size? What are you looking for? And if you can just give any thoughts on inorganic growth in the near term.
Chris Caldwell: Andre, can you take that?
Andre Valentine: Sorry, yes. Yeah, so obviously, Ruplu, the real focus is on paying down debt. And so I don’t think we would say never as related to smaller or tuck-in type M&A. Obviously, we want to keep investing in the business, but anything that we do will be consistent with the investment grade principles that we’ve outlined and our desire to get that net leverage close to 2 times within the two year period of post transaction close. So what would we look to acquire? I think it would be again, tuck in nature, could be domain expertise, technological expertise in a certain area, but again would be relatively small and not something of scale such as what we’ve done with Webhelp. Chris, anything you want to add there?
Chris Caldwell: No, I agree. As we’ve talked about, it’s really about domain expertise, it’s about technology, and it’s about furthering our differentiated value proposition. And so we’re focused on kind of making sure that we keep to our investment grade principles and enhancing the business if we have the opportunities from an M&A perspective in those areas.
Ruplu Bhattacharya: Okay, thank you for all the details. Appreciate it.
Chris Caldwell: Sure, Ruplu. Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. And there are no more questions in the queue. So this does conclude today’s conference call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.
