Ted Fernandez: We’ve really seen it across the board, so it’s impacted these services as well. I would say that when we look at the overall activity, it’s incredibly high. When we look at conversion, we know that we’d like to convert at a faster pace. We expected to convert the pipeline at a faster pace in Q3. But we saw that extended time decision-making extend into all offerings. And it impacted the sales of the IP-based offerings as well. I think it’s probably easier for a client to extend the decisions of a new offering from a new individual. But we think that when we look at the kind of traction and relationships and knowledge of the products that they are building, the capabilities of the team, we think it’s only a matter of time.
Is it extending beyond where we hoped? Yes. But did we also believe that the second-half of this year would be without headwinds or with significantly, I’ll them, less headwinds. But the fact of the matter is that as the prolonged interest rate environment — as the interest rate environment took longer to hopefully hit its peak, and I say hopefully, and now the decision on whether or not to extend that, there’s no doubt that the intended impact that it’s intended to have, to slow down economic growth is being felt. So, I want to make sure that it is not isolated to those offerings. I think when we look at the results for the year, under those conditions, as well as the investments we’re making and the progress we’re making, yes, would I like to have higher numbers across the board?
Did I want to in this quarter? Expected it to, even though this quarter was strong, and also in the next quarter. Look, we’re feeling it. But does that determine or dampen the expectations of the returns that we expect to get from those investors? Absolutely not.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next caller is George Sutton with Craig-Hallum. You may go ahead.
Unidentified Analyst: Hey, good afternoon. This is Adam on for George. Ted, I would love to hear if you have any early feedback on AI Explorer. And additionally, you mentioned in your remarks that you’re going to be investing beyond that as well. We’d love some further details on what exactly you’re thinking about?
Ted Fernandez: Well, we actually started all of our Gen AI related offering development at the tail end of last year. So, we did a very extensive study to look and develop a significant inventory of use cases by function at the activity level. So, what AI Explorer does is it allows a client to do a very efficient and comprehensive assessment of their opportunities and determine priorities and understand the related business changes they would have to make. We just rolled it out in October. And I know that the first thing I had is that we had 10 clients already requested. We’re going to be offering it as aggressively as we can throughout our client base. So, as I mentioned on the call, we expect this activity to increase not only through the balance of the year, but to be significant in 2024.
Now, there is no doubt that everyone that is considering any kind of digital transformation effort to do that without considering the significance of Gen AI and with and without Gen AI is no longer appropriate. So, we think that kind of activity will follow and will build throughout the year. As it relates to other offerings, we expect to have an executive advisory program, a horizontal program that will extend to all of our functional programs. We’ve actually started doing client briefings on those and we’ll formalize that program either latter part of this year or no later at the beginning of the year. We’ve also incorporated then all Gen AI related consulting services that will accompany or follow the AI Explorer, I’ll call it opportunity identification assessment that it intends to make.
Unidentified Analyst: In terms of the M&A market, I’d love to know if you’re seeing anything improved, more people come to the table or is pricing improving, any type of feedback would be great.
