Kevin Liu: And then just lastly, with kind of the positive reception you’ve seen to the corporate branding product on CJ so far. Is that expected to kind of accelerate their growth rates over the course of the year as more customers have exposure to that? Or how material do you think it gets out of the gate here?
Art Zeile: I would say that I believe when you think about the current psychology in the market and particularly for commercial accounts, they are going to essentially realize one way or another that they have a hiring plan and they need to essentially enact it sometime in the first quarter, second quarter of this year, and then we should see what I would consider to be a more normalized pattern of a sales cycle for us for Dice. And as we’ve said, ClearanceJobs is really unaffected by the current economic situation. In fact, we believe that there is a tailwind that we want to take advantage of because of the larger defense budget in fiscal year 2023. And so again, that’s our view is that we should see the sales cycle stabilize just because at some point, people are going to have their view of the economy to come and they’re going to place their bets by virtue of their budget, and then that will open up their hiring plan for the remainder of the calendar year.
Kevin Liu: I appreciate that context. I was actually asking specifically about the new corporate branding product. I was just wondering with some of the reception you had that whether you would expect that to accelerate CJ’s bookings even more so?
Art Zeile: Oh, I’m sorry, I missed that aspect of the question. So I will tell you that we have booked roughly about 10 of these company pages in the last month or so, a little bit over a month. We have another dozen that are in the pipeline. So it’s pretty early days for ClearanceJobs. And it’s the kind of product where the salesperson needs to be able to show a representative sample. So now we’re going to have two dozen representative samples for our sales team to really point out to the prospective ones that they’re trying to talk through the sales cycle with. I do think that it’s going to help CJ over the course of the year, but we have not modeled that into any of our budget, our plans, our forecast, the description that we’ve just provided.
Kevin Liu: Understood. I appreciate you taking my questions and good luck for this year.
Operator: The next question comes from Anja Soderstrom with Sidoti. Please go ahead.
Anja Soderstrom: Great. And thank you for taking my questions. In terms of the churn, you’re talking about that being smaller customers. Have you learned any sort of assessment on potential further churn among those?
Art Zeile: For the existing smaller customers in quarters to come, is that what you’re asking about, Anja?
Anja Soderstrom: Yes.
Art Zeile: I think that — go ahead, Kevin.
Kevin Bostick: Yes. I was going to say, to be clear, as we saw churn from our smaller customers, it wasn’t necessarily significantly different than what we had seen maybe up a little bit. What we did not see was churn from the larger customers or as big of an addition of larger customers because of the new business kind of extended sales cycles. So while our customer count came down and it was heavily, heavily driven by those customers with $10,000 or less in contracts. It was not materially different than what we had seen in previous quarters. So it is — when you think about what is driving a reduction in customer count, it is the churn of the smaller customers. but it’s not significantly different than we had seen previously.
They’re definitely — whether it’s customer size, whether they’re small or larger, they do get treated the same way by the NASH team, which is that new account special handling. And they also do work with our client success organization in the way of QBRs, et cetera. But I would say it wasn’t as if the churn in smaller customers spiked significantly more than we had seen previously.
Anja Soderstrom: Okay, thank you. And then in terms of AI and the noise around the GPT and Bard, how do you think that might affect your business? Is there something you can leverage or…?
Art Zeile: That’s a really great question, actually. So our Chief Technology Officer, Paul Farnsworth, actually is investigating a number of different AI technologies that are available right now in the market, including chat GBT, we think that they could be additive to our platform. In other words, we could essentially create a better, especially technologist experience by using the open API to chat GBT to essentially enable much more kind of personalized content, meaning if a technologist comes to the site and is a cybersecurity professional. They could essentially enter in questions that are focused on their area of specialization and get content that is proprietary to our site because it’s written by our editorial team as well as other content that is available through at GPT to answer specialized questions about their careers.
So, it’s an area that we are investigating, but there’s nothing that’s on the product road map right now. But great question. And I can tell you that a big percentage of our engineering team is very fascinated with the opportunities that are available by TAT GBT and the number of different kind of variants of AI that are emerging in the market.
