John Gibson: Again, I’ll go back, if our sales are growing at double-digit rates in the first quarter, digital is an ever-growing portion of that business where you can surmise that that’s growing as well. So, we continue to see strong demand environment across the businesses, both digitally and really across the board, I wouldn’t — that’s about it.
Samad Samana: Great. And then maybe just on your own hiring plans with the quarter doing better than expected and maybe some trends you’re seeing, any change to your own sales hiring plans or should we expect maybe the original game plan to be here?
John Gibson: No, really no change in plans. We are certainly, in the second quarter, always in the staffing up and making sure we are fully staffed and able to cover any thought or planned attrition going in for the selling season, both on the service side and the sell-side. So, I think it’s fair to say when you add now going on close to three quarters of strong demand, when you’ve been relatively, is it going to stay, is going to stay, yeah, we certainly want to make sure that we are properly staffed to take full advantage of all the opportunity in our selling season and we are fully staffed on the operations on the service side to make sure that we can both onboard and service these clients during year-end.
Samad Samana: Great. Appreciate you taking my questions. Thank you.
Efrain Rivera: Thank you.
Operator: And we’ll take our next question from Eugene Simuni with Moffettnathanson. Your line is open.
Eugene Simuni: Thank you. Good morning, guys, and congratulations, Efrain and Bob.
Efrain Rivera: Thank you, Eugene.
Eugene Simuni: Efrain, we will miss working with you, and Bob look forward to working with you. Just have two quick follow-ups. One tying together your comments on sales and current, can you comment how it adds together to client growth trends this year so far? Last year, it was a bit below your historical target range and I think you commented that last quarter that this year you’re looking for a reacceleration in client growth kind of above 2% a year. So, can you comment on how it’s going so far?
Efrain Rivera: Hey, Eugene, I’ll start, then John [can make a comment] (ph). It really — if I were to give you a number, it would give you some sort of false sense of what reality is. It’s almost impossible to draw a conclusion on that where you are in first quarter. In some ways, some trends are positive and you can draw conclusions on project out through the year, but client base is really a tricky one. And the reason is you just lose so many and gain so many in the selling season that it’s almost difficult to predict and we expect to be a bit better than we were last year, but it’s still early innings.
Eugene Simuni: Got it. Okay. And then, another follow-up is on the PEO and the question there is, in your PEO customer base, in terms of kind of checks per control, are you seeing any trends that are different from your overall base whether better or worse employment growth?
John Gibson: Yeah, I would say it’s probably consistent. We definitely see employees in our PEO — clients in our PEO business adding employees. I wouldn’t say it’s a huge tailwind, but it’s positive and probably in-line with what we are seeing in other areas of the business.
Eugene Simuni: Got it. Okay. Thank you very much, guys.
Efrain Rivera: Thank you.
Operator: And we’ll take our next question from Mark Marcon with Baird. Your line is open.
Mark Marcon: Hey, good morning. Hey, Efrain, we go back a long way as it’s been an absolute pleasure working with you.
Efrain Rivera: Same here.
Mark Marcon: I want to thank you for the relationship. And Bob, looking forward to working with you, but Efrain, it’s been an absolute pleasure.
Efrain Rivera: Thank you.
Mark Marcon: A lot of questions have been on the short term. John, one big-picture question. A quarter ago everybody was asking about AI. Obviously, you’ve been — Paychex has been doing a lot with AI for a long period of time. I’m wondering if you can just talk a little bit about — now that some of these LLMs have been around for a couple of quarters and permeated the consciousness, how are you thinking about further evolution of your journey with AI? And what are the longer-term implications from a margin perspective or a scope of business perspective?
John Gibson: Wow, that’s — Mark, that is a big question.
Mark Marcon: Well, everybody is asking about the quarter…
John Gibson: Yes, it is a great one, because I really think this is probably has the potential to be one of the biggest differentiators that’s going to help company like Paychex, separate ourselves from the rest. Because as you said, the large language models, it starts with a large, and the only way that this works is you’ve got to have large sets of data and large sets of data coming through to continually train those models. I will also say relative to, it’s expensive to do, and it’s getting more expensive both in terms of finding the people and buying the technology, and I think that’s going to also back some people out. But let me just give you some idea. I mean, we have multiple teams across the organization looking at every aspect of our business, front-office, back-office, G&A and evaluating how we could better leverage all of the capabilities of the data that we have.
