Thank you very much, Benita, and a warm welcome to all of you here in London, but also to all of you who watch us remotely. We really appreciate your presence, be it here or remotely. So today, I want to recap where we've come from and also outline how we are well positioned to grow, adapt, innovate, and lead in this new intelligence era. Over the last three years, we have significantly strengthened the business. We have consistently delivered against the Simplify, Execute, and Grow agenda that I presented in the fourth quarter of 2022, thanks to a renewed executive committee and also thanks to strong local teams that are empowered to boost the business. We have reoriented the business towards profitable growth. Our focus on customer satisfaction through local empowerment and also our focus on strengthened performance management is paying off.
We continue to invest in our digital capabilities, pioneering innovation, particularly in AI, and in building a technology platform, you're going to hear about it, that drives efficiencies and better customer experiences. As a result, we've now delivered three consecutive years of market share gains versus key competitors, and the group average quarterly outperformance during this period is a strong plus 390 basis points. On top of that, and that's important, the net promoter score in the Adecco GBU, you know, this is how we measure client and candidate satisfaction, this has been rising for both clients and candidates. The result of our simplification effort has also been significant. We've delivered, as you know, EUR 174 million in G&A savings net of inflation, well ahead of the original EUR 150 million run rate target that we had set.
In addition, during a challenging market period, our agile management of frontline capacity has enabled us to strike the right balance between growth and profitability, and we ensured that we maintained the 3% EBITDA margin floor. Let's now look ahead at what is happening in the world. We have three mega trends: geopolitical fragmentation, AI and automation, demographic and talent shifts that are defining the environment in which the group operates. These trends are not new to us. They were already central to the outlook that we framed at the 2023 Capital Markets Day. However, their speed and intensity have materially accelerated over the past 12 months. These forces are reshaping labor markets, business needs, you know, business models. And at the same time, and that's important, they are driving actually exciting growth opportunities for our group. So let's talk about AI, of course.
We recognize that there has been extensive investor debate regarding AI and its potential impact on labor markets and our group's prospects. We acknowledge, of course, that AI is reshaping the employment landscape, and the chart on the left side is quite important because it shows the impact of AI overall relative to, you know, the recent meaningful technological shifts that have happened, such as the introduction of the internet. The percentage change in the occupational mix of labor markets driven by generative AI, that's the purple curve, is so far fairly similar to prior shifts. There are direct and indirect impacts, and these make us even more valuable as a partner to our clients and candidates to help navigate this change. Our own survey coming from LHH, our career transition business, shows that direct impact is small, 1.4%.
At the same time, 58% of outplaced candidates have pivoted to entirely new roles and industries. So if we put all these points together, we expect AI to drive labor market churn and to support the large-scale up and reskilling needs. So let me show you the opportunity because we expect the group's total addressable market to expand. On the left, we show, we highlight that technology-driven productivity gains have historically been strongly correlated with employment growth. For example, since 1960 in the U.S., periods of increasing labor productivity have coincided with rising employment 100% of the time over a 10-year rolling period. So with AI forecasts to drive productivity gains of 10%-45%, the range is quite large at the moment, we anticipate that overall employment will grow. And we know that new technologies have always created new roles.
So if history is any guide, models say that around 8% of the labor market demand by 2030 will be driven by AI, and importantly, AI interactions mainly augment jobs, and naturally, other mega trends and the economic cycle will continue to impact our addressable market, so these trends, putting them all together, productivity growth, labor market growth, job market churn, and new jobs requiring new skills absolutely play to our core proposition, and they increase our market opportunity. The group has a comprehensive end-to-end suite of talent and technology services, workforce strategy management, attracting, hiring, and deploying talent, skilling, development, coaching, career transition, digital engineering, and tech consulting, all this, all these services come into play in the way we can truly be a global partner for our clients where different stakeholders value different outcomes. CEOs and CHROs focus on agility, AI, and long-term pipelines.
Procurement focuses on scale, cost, and compliance. Operations on speed and consistency. And R&D people, they focus on specialized talent and innovation. So Adecco is the engine powering the broader labor force agility, scalability, and providing immediate talent in a dynamic labor market. LHH empowers professionals and organizations' agility across the talent journey in a moment where careers pivot multiple times, as you all know. Akkodis is a digital engineering company supporting clients' R&D agility through AI-enabled digital and sustainable innovation. You will hear also later how AuPotential, an enterprise intelligence company, will bridge the gap between the supply of AI tech players and the needs of enterprises with hybrid human and digital workforces, ensuring that human-centric AI creates business impact. So together, we support clients across talent advisory services. We balance human and business needs. We make talent planning more agile, efficient, and future-ready.
And hence, we drive the intermediation between the world of working people and the demands of the business world. This is what we call the agility advantage. We enable business and human agility. Let me take a moment also to review the group's power of all these business units being together. When all our services come together, the complementary position of our GBUs resonates strongly in the market. Our clients value the consistent end-to-end talent and technology expertise we offer. And the numbers speak for themselves. Clients served by all three GBUs account for 43% of the group's revenues. Clients served by all three GBUs have an average revenue size three times that of clients served by one GBU. And our array of services creates true stickiness with clients. We have 100% client retention among customers served by all three GBUs between 2021 and 2025.
This shows the strength of our portfolio of services. Our large clients bring scale and volume. They expect us to be a global and reliable partner. They also want us to bring leading-edge innovation. This is, of course, led by technology. For this, let me hand over to Caroline Basyn, our Chief Digital and Information Officer, to expand on our digital and AI capabilities. Caroline, welcome on stage. [audio distortion]
Thank you, Denis. Good morning, everyone. I joined the Adecco Group just over two years. Previously, I worked at global fast-moving consumer goods companies: Procter & Gamble, Bacardi, Mondelez, and PepsiCo. I had the pleasure to work in IT, digital, global business services, and also strategy and transformation. I must say that for now, it's an exciting time to be in technology because we are leveraging more and more technology, and especially AI.
We want to elevate the human potential and drive business impact. My teams and I have been working together with our businesses on the execution of what we call a dual-speed strategy. One, building a solid foundation to run operations and enable scale. And then two, developing pioneering innovations to keep the group, our clients, our candidates ahead of the change curve. So on one, in building the foundation, we have moved from a fragmented, locally driven technology landscape towards a standard, modular tech stack across our business units, functions, and markets. We have also done solid work on our data strategy and worked rigorously on all aspects of digital security. And at the same time, we have increased the focus on innovation. Specifically, I would call out two core elements. The first one, the growth of our platform as a hub for our end-to-end talent services.
And two, the pioneering work in AI, generative AI, agentic AI on top of that platform, so let me explain more on this group's platform. As we unified our tech stack, we have been evolving our platform with a focus on agility, local touch, and global scale. We have developed a three-layer platform, of which the foundation is the group's unified data and analytics, and thanks to the breadth of our services, we have access to workforce and client demand data and insights that can leverage, and we can leverage across all our services, then at the heart is our modular tech stack, an increasingly standardized set of components underpinned by a common CRM and applicant tracking system, and also a web platform. We have today 26 markets on our common CRM and ATS platform, and by June 2026, we will add another eight.
This will be about 75% of our revenue. We have also more than 80% of our websites on a common platform too. So what are we doing? We are doing it in this way. We are codifying the deployments to go faster and cheaper. This platform, the second layer, is agentic ready. So on top of our tech stack, we are incubating, packaging, and scaling agentic AI. We do this by working hand in hand with our business partners, our technology partners, and also the two innovation centers to augment our agility and our capacity. So by bringing together the three layers of the platform, data, technology foundation for recruiters and sales, and the agentic layer, we have created an engine for fast reapplication and scaling across business units and markets.
The value is clear for the clients being served better, faster, and cheaper, but also for our candidates who are getting better experience and better jobs. Growth comes from more clients being connected and more candidates being engaged. So let's look .at how our pioneering AI, we do it with a human-centric approach. So we started early with our AI strategy, implementing it through standardization and embedded in our core processes. Our approach to agentic AI takes three steps. Together with the business experts, we have created an agentic lab. And as a step one, we have worked together in the U.K. to test and learn. We are redesigning the end-to-end processes from source to redeploy to maximize automation and identify where agents can manage all the routine tasks. This enables us to free up time for our recruiters so that they can handle the high-quality candidate interactions.
In this context, you can see from the slide that we have created five different agents so far. They are today in production in the U.K. So then the step two is we adjust, we scale, and we integrate all agents within the U.K. environment to verify the business value. We reapply in France, and we continue the learning journey. And then in step three, we package and codify to be ready for broader fast-paced deployment across the key markets in 2026, thanks to this unified platform. Now, beyond agentic transformation, we have our Recruiter GenAI Suite available to all our recruiters worldwide. We're providing generative AI capabilities embedded in our systems, such as creating job descriptions, preparing for interviews, analyzing resumes or summarizing conversations, and many more. We leverage AI to benefit individuals and organizations through career transition, coaching, and comprehensive training offerings across Adecco and LHH.
We also keep nurturing our candidates in our websites, like the free CV Maker and the match with a CV with compatible jobs. This last feature translates into five times higher candidate conversion. As you will hear later from Yuval, Akkodis is at the cutting edge of deploying AI solutions in digital engineering and R&D. With this, I would like to hand over back to you, Denis. [audio distortion]
Thank you, Caroline. We are proactively positioning the group to grow, adapt, innovate, and lead, as you heard, in the years to come by capitalizing on trends, reshaping the labor market, and expanding its total addressable market. Our scale and diversification across services, sectors, and geographies give us a rock-solid and resilient foundation for profitable growth. We have tremendous durable assets.
Among them, an unrivaled data gravity, particularly with the access to over one billion candidate profiles through AuPotential. You will hear more about that when Gregg speaks on stage. A data-rich, diverse, and trusted client and candidate portfolio, which we have built over decades. A portfolio of three connected and globally recognized brands that drive trust and market credibility. Moving to the right side here, we are also proactively scaling strategic capabilities and expanding the group's digital platforms, as you heard from Caroline, and AI-powered tools across business lines. We're delivering Akkodis value creation plan. You'll hear that from Yuval. We aim to accelerate our reinvention with AuPotential, unlocking the massive opportunity of workforce reconfiguration. In short, we are building the next generation of durable assets, which will further diversify our gross profit profile, improve financial performance, and ensure the group remains a market leader.
So let me put all this together. For businesses, thinking about the future is less about predictability than it is about adaptability. And agility is core for the businesses to achieve that adaptability. So agility is also our strategic edge. Our group value proposition for the client and the people we serve is to enable this human and business agility. This is making us extremely relevant. Moreover, we will more and more leverage human insights with AI and digital platforms to create distinctive customer experiences. This will further improve the customer value proposition, increase relevance, and ensure the group captures opportunities in these evolving labor markets. So how are we going to deliver this? We do that through an execution-driven operating model, which is built on two complementary pillars: Strengthen Run and Accelerate Change. You'll hear that today.
Strengthen Run is about enhancing commercial and operational excellence, executing with rigor to deliver profitable growth. That's what we've been doing. That's what we will continue to do. Accelerate Change is about innovation, developing next-generation assets, and leveraging AI to unlock new efficiencies and growth levers. This balance between the two ensures both near-term performance and long-term upside. We expect our strategy to deliver tangible financial outcomes, market share gains, maintaining an EBITDA margin of 3%-6% through the cycle, achieving a 6% in a supportive economic environment, and deleveraging. You'll hear much more on each component of the agility advantage as we progress through the day with two deep-dive sessions in which our three GBU presidents will bring run and change to life. [audio distortion]
Good morning, everyone. It's a privilege to be here with you at the Adecco Group Capital Markets Day.
I look forward to sharing with you the focus of the Akkodis Global Business Unit, which will be centered around execution in this session and later today around transformation. Before we dive in, let me take a few minutes to introduce myself. I'm an engineer with over 25 years of experience in technology and digital across delivery, operations, sales, and running large client accounts. I've successfully led transformations and turnarounds in both global and country roles, managing operations of over EUR 10 billion, as well as building high-performing teams, steadily growing businesses. My career has taken me across continents, working for major brands such as HP, Atos, and most recently, Wipro, before joining Akkodis in April this year. It's been seven months since I took charge. What have I found? Let me share that with you. This has been one of the best onboardings I've ever experienced.
In the last seven months, I've traveled across our markets, and what stands out is our diversified portfolio, not dependent on a single industry, solution, or country. We also have a strong client intimacy and knowledgeable, passionate teams recognized for their expertise and innovation. We are already delivering healthy growth in multiple markets: France, United States, and Japan. We're also achieving growth in Spain, Italy, Belgium, and the Middle East. I also discovered many what I call golden nuggets. These are impressive solutions we offer to our clients, localized rather than scaled so far. For example, in the field of aerospace systems engineering, we built accredited airplane and helicopter flight simulators for leading aerospace and defense companies. These simulators support aircraft makers and operators accelerating validation, training, and development processes. We also have an AI and data correlation platform to solve crime.
It was co-developed with the police and tested on real investigations to reflect operational reality. It allows investigators to analyze vast amounts of digital evidence to find patterns and actionable leads exponentially faster than any human analyst. We have also designed and developed car frames for next-generation electric and hybrid vehicles. Our engineers enable car makers to adopt advanced lightweight materials like carbon fiber, design optimization, and virtual validation. Our engineering solutions are the backbone of faster launches, lower cost, and sustainable growth in the electric vehicle market. Last example I wanted to bring to your attention is that Akkodis is a co-partner of Fed4PMR, an EU project creating a secure digital platform for smarter mobility across Europe. Working together with leading research institutions in the high-tech sector, it empowers cities to manage traffic proactively, improve coordination across transport modes, and support greener mobility solutions.
In other words, in the last seven months, these last seven months have confirmed why I joined in the first place. Akkodis shows strong potential, and I joined with a mission to unlock this potential. Now is the time to drive execution and transformation. Today, I want to take you on a journey to see the same strong potential in Akkodis than I do, starting with our key market, engineering, research, and development, or ER&D outsourcing. The ER&D outsourcing market is a highly attractive market. It remains resilient, driven currently by AI and digital engineering, and Akkodis has what it takes to win in this market. We have an impressive diversified portfolio. Consequently, we have the agility to effectively manage across cycles. Let me illustrate, as you are aware, that a large part of our portfolio, 29%, is automotive and transportation.
This large automotive portfolio, however, is balanced by 27% in the aerospace and defense, as well as manufacturing and logistics, complemented by 16% in ICT and 11% in life sciences and healthcare. We combine this broad industry coverage with our accelerated digital and AI portfolio, which are fast-growing technologies by themselves. We are expanding our total addressable market with a focus on growth industries in Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. At the same time, we see continued growth in Southern Europe and additional growth opportunity in the U.S. In addition to this, we have a well-balanced delivery mix. We are increasing offshore and nearshore capacity while staying close to our clients on site in more than 24 countries. We currently have five nearshore locations, including the Philippines, Morocco, and Mexico. We cover 14 time zones and can work around the clock for our clients.
Further, we have expanded our footprint in India, opening two new locations in Pune and Hyderabad to augment our main delivery center in Bangalore. Finally, the spend consolidation of our clients in ER&D is accelerating. Companies streamline supplies to reduce complexity and scale frontier technologies. Our clients are looking for a broad range of ER&D services, all from one supplier. With our size and pedigree, we are well-positioned to be a winner in this consolidation, and let's be clear. There's work ahead to ensure we capture all this opportunity and execute on the potential that impressed me so deeply over the past seven months. Now, let's run to our execution and transformation priorities.
Our execution priorities will strengthen the way we run Akkodis by landing increasing opportunities in the aerospace sector, by capturing the strong growth in defense backed by higher public spending and new multi-year programs, by targeting emerging automotive markets while defending our position in established ones with innovative solutions, by delivering a turnaround in Germany, and by further growing our U.S. consulting business to capture the market opportunity there. Both run and change are essential for our profitable growth and improved value creation. Our first lever, how we run our business, is in aerospace. The aerospace and consulting solutions market is worth EUR 7 billion, and we see a strong, profitable development in commercial aircraft. In addition, we are seeing hypergrowth in emerging markets such as APAC. Our clients are balancing resilience with innovation.
A new single-aisle aircraft is expected to be delivered by the middle of next decade for both a leading US and European manufacturer. They need to start development now. This type of innovation will require a resilient supply chain and scalable, cost-effective partners. Akkodis has the skills, size, and network to capture this opportunity. We combine classic engineering and digital engineering with deep industry knowledge. Besides airplane and helicopter flight simulators for testing and training, we support our clients in cabin and airframe design engineering. The flaps on the wings of the plane you last flew is likely to have been designed and tested by our teams in France or in India. We also recognize the role we can play in innovating for a sustainable future. Our Green & Fly is a zero-emission concept for regional flights that helps us stand out in the market and guides future innovation.
We aim to become the strategic supplier for at least five leading aerospace companies in the midterm, targeting double-digit growth. Hand in hand with aerospace goes defense, with many leading companies active in both commercial and military aviation. The global market opportunity in defense consulting and solutions is worth more than EUR 4 billion and growing fast, driven by rising budgets and new transnational programs. The Rearm Europe plan, or Readiness 2030, involves an investment of over EUR 800 billion. Member states of the European Union aim to mobilize, and nations across the globe are doubling their national defense budget from around 1.5% to 3% of their GDP. Along with increased spending, the requirements from our clients in this space are expanding. Due to the rising geopolitical uncertainties, our clients are often faced with compressed timelines, which is where our expertise, scale, and agility as a partner comes in.
In addition, especially in the defense area, there is a sustained need for local expertise. Offshoring is often not an option due to national security. Our global footprint means we can capture this opportunity perfectly while also right-shoring when possible to add value to our defense clients. Akkodis has a strong portfolio of scaled solutions in defense. We build strength in connectivity, field-ready AI solutions, as well as secure digital platforms. For example, we develop ruggedized tactical communication nodes utilizing components from civilian 4G and 5G networks tailored for secure military requirements. These are 80% off-the-shelf solutions, which we finalize according to the client's individual needs and build a service package around. Akkodis is working actively in all major defense programs and expects to enter a few more in the coming years. With that, we expect 15%-20% growth midterm and have delivered 19% revenue growth through Q3 2025.
In Akkodis Japan alone, we've seen a CAGR of 57% in the first three quarters of this year, also thanks to moving skills between defense and automotive. And that brings us to our third growth lever, automotive. Automotive is a EUR 23 billion consulting and solutions market that is growing now in different geographies and areas than before. We see a global trend towards electrification and software-defined vehicles, or SDVs. However, combustion engines and classic engineering will remain an important part of the mix. At the same time as these technology shifts, there are also geographical shifts happening, with China and India emerging as strong players. In line with this, our client requirements are also shifting. Chinese and Indian OEMs are increasingly targeting Europe for localization.
Akkodis has the footprint, expertise to help, and we are already executing and working with a major Indian OEM in a cross-regional full vehicle development program. At the same time, European OEMs target the growing purchasing power of the Chinese market and Indian middle class. Akkodis has repositioned itself to follow these shifts, delivering SDV programs for all EU and Asian OEMs and supporting clients as they expand into their new markets. We are a leader in SDV platforms, connected mobility, and battery technology, with specialized engineering teams now in China, India, Japan, U.S., and Europe, able to support our client in their global expansion. The automotive market landscape will look different than before, shaped by evolving consumer preferences and regulatory trends. By capturing technological and geographical shifts, diversifying our client base, and reducing exposure to regional downturns, we aim for stability with improved profitability.
Now let's turn to our major automotive market, Germany. Our fourth lever in the run is delivering a successful turnaround in Germany. I've led similar turnarounds before, and this experience underpins my confidence as we take a three-point approach. The restructuring is progressing very well, and we are targeting about EUR 50 million in savings this year. EUR 36 million of savings rounded have been executed through Q3 2025. The remainder is planned for Q4 of this year. In total, we made a headcount adjustment of more than 50% of our workforce. We have also rationalized the portfolio to focus on growth areas. On the one hand, we are divesting non-core assets. These include car design concept departments, electromagnetic compatibility testing units, and some CapEx-intensive testing laboratories. Thanks to our strong partnerships, we will still be able to integrate these services into our end-to-end offerings.
This also brings us a net positive impact of EUR 3 million in EBITDA. On the other hand, we are reviewing very selective investments in our portfolio, for example, in AI design engineering to further strengthen our footprint in the defense, German defense industry. In addition, we have refocused our sales efforts. We have refreshed the sales teams with focus on business development and hunting new logos in growth industries. All of this has resulted in securing several key wins just in the last quarter. Early results are promising, and we will achieve healthy run rate profitability by the end of the year. The key here is execution at speed, and this is therefore one of the key areas I focus on personally. Our fifth and last lever of the run, North America. North America, where we're also transforming our businesses to harness double-digit growth, specifically in consulting and solution services.
First, in tech staffing, we have streamlined services to focus on high-growth tech roles. While we are clearly seeing a decrease in hiring volume, there's an increase in demand for strategic roles, for example, AI, machine learning, data, cloud, and security specialists. On top, there's a rapid growth in data center and power infrastructure engineering driven by the vast AI investments. Data center-related staffing, for example, has seen an increase in demand of 60% since the start of 2025. Second, we're converting staffing engagements into consulting-led models and upselling digital solutions to existing clients. We are focused on new service offerings like building global capability centers as well as BOTs, build, operate, and transfer models. Our consulting and solution services are now reaching critical mass, having grown at over 26 CAGR since 2023.
For example, in Q3, we delivered an AI-driven managed services carve-out for our major client, one of our major clients in the energy sector, achieving significant cost savings and operational resilience. This consulting-led model supports margin expansion in the U.S. and is a key lever for our future growth. Akkodis North America overall returned to growth at +1% in Q3 2025, while consulting has delivered double-digit revenue at double EBITDA margins year to date. So this was the last of five levers in the run. Now let me summarize. We are delivering key measures to improve performance and profitability across these focus sectors and countries. We will continue to execute on the run to unlock the full potential of Akkodis, delivering the agility advantage for our clients and create value for our shareholders. Now, let me hand the floor to Christophe Catoir, President of Adecco. Christophe. Good morning.
Thank you, Yuval. I'm pleased to present to you today an update about our Adecco Global Business Unit. Remember, two years ago, I presented to you the run and change agenda for the Adecco GBU. The ambition was pretty clear. We wanted to recover on our leadership in our industry, both in terms of top line, but also in terms of bottom line. Our run agenda, as a reminder, is led by our local team. We have defined here a path to grow faster than our competitors, but also to do that in a profitable way. We have defined some few levers. I will come back on those levers. You don't have a lot, but they are very impactful. Our change agenda, as a reminder, is led by our global team.
Here, the goal is to leverage, first, the tech as a clear driver for improvement of efficiency, as mentioned by Denis and Caroline before, but also to leverage the new expectation from our clients, and especially the largest client. This agenda, the change agenda, aims at creating a clear impact in our industry as a game changer. It's inspired by the hybridization of work, meaning humans elevated by technology. For us, it's clearly a reinvention of our industry, and we believe it's a clear competitive advantage in this industry today. Great flexibility and efficiency at a time that is not always easy for our clients with ongoing uncertainty. For this one, our ability to support our clients and candidate agility is a clear differentiator. This advantage in terms of agility we want to bring for clients and candidates.
I will come back to this later in our change session in order to share more about our achievements and next step. But let me deep dive now in our run agenda, what we have achieved so far since our last Capital Markets Day. First, what were the targeted levers, the impactful levers we have defined? First, a disciplined and harmonized sales approach for a large client. Second, a continuous push on our local footprint, by the way, the largest one of our industry with more than 3,500 branches and on-sites, and here, the goal is clearly to continue to grow in the SME business, which is in our industry the most profitable lever, the most profitable segment of market. Third, a continuous investment in our profitable business model, and before all, in outsourcing.
Finally, also a consistent investment in our capabilities, both tech and human, in our fast-growing geographies with a special focus for APAC and Latin America. Those were the levers we have defined, and I need to say I'm pleased with the performance we have delivered. Let me come back on what has been achieved. First, we have recovered our industry leadership in the staffing piece of our business. During the past 13 quarters, we have outperformed our two main competitors 11 times. And the average gap in terms of sales growth has been 380 basis points in terms of revenue growth. Second, the SME segment has been a consistent contributor to this performance in terms of growth. I mean, it's very encouraging when we know the superior profitability of this segment. Third, outsourcing has also brought a positive contribution to our sales growth.
The weight of outsourcing in our total gross profit is now 80 basis points above what it was during our last Capital Markets Day. And it's also a very accretive segment of market. APAC and LATAM have been the first engine, the main engine of growth for our GBU. Their weight has increased by more than 200 basis points in our total revenue as a GBU. And the good news is they are also accretive as now their profitability is above the average EBITDA of the Adecco GBU. The consequence of this targeted growth is, on top of recovering our top leadership in the top line, is also to have demonstrated the strong resilience of our gross margin, now 80 basis points above the one of pre-COVID period for the Adecco GBU.
I would like, based on those different results, now to deep dive on each of those levers to be a little bit more granular. First, the market. The market has been mixed, but as said, based on a selective and offensive approach of the market, we have been able to continue to gain market share during these three years and to keep our level of revenue stable. Let me tell you, in a very fragmented market, we still have a lot of space in order to grow, whatever the market condition. That's somewhere the mindset of the team. What has changed versus past cycle in order to get this gross momentum? First, and let me pick up some of the items you see on the chart. We have aligned all the STI system all across our 62 geographies just to make sure we drive the behavior on profitable growth.
Second, we have, as said before, a clear, now consolidated sales pipeline all over the world for our 62 countries in one single place, which means we can have an homogeneous activation of each of those countries. It means also that we can prioritize opportunities, accelerate the transformation, and implement very fast the new deals we win. And based on that, to align all the countries on the performance of this sales pipeline. Third, last year, we have decided to put exactly the same agenda for our large accounts delivery, same discipline. All orders from our large clients for our top seven geographies are consolidated now in one single platform, which means that we can have an efficient management of this pipeline and a more effective service delivery, which is new.
Fourth, all of this has enabled us to standardize our sales and delivery process to optimize our efficiency, but also to digitize what is possible. Now we can combine the best of what has been industrialized in terms of process with a last-mile customized approach of our client to create more value at local level. And here, our branches and on-site are instrumental of this last-mile performance. And as nothing can happen without our main asset, our people, we have invested also on the training, the coaching, and aligned goals for all of our people. And the goal was to boost the engagement. And we know that in our industry, this loyalty is a key success factor. Now, I would like to share how we have managed our products with agility, double-clicking in two areas where we nurture not only our top line, but also our bottom line.
The first one is outsourcing. Outsourcing now represents around EUR 2 billion in the Adecco GBU with a continuous growth, 7% CAGR between 2023 and 2025. Based on the assumption of our association SIA, staffing association, we have been able to also get a perspective which is also a double-digit growth in the years to come. We have decided to invest heavily in this segment of market, as said, and it's a very profitable one on top of the magnitude of the top line, as we have a 20% gross margin today in outsourcing. We also benefit from a highly diversified portfolio of clients, more than 7,000, but we benefit also from a highly diversified portfolio of industries and countries. As an example, more than 50% of our countries are equipped with an outsourcing infrastructure today.
All in all, in outsourcing, we want to keep our foot in the acceleration pedal because we see an opportunity to continue to grow with a global approach. I mean, global for some industries like sales and marketing, where clients are asking for alignment, but also local lock for logistics. Let's talk now about another lever for growth. I mean, MSP, the managed services market. This one is another key success driver across the Adecco Group. Indeed, there is a significant addressable market in front of us, and this market is growing faster than the industry as a whole. During the last cycle, 2022 to 2024, the revenue CAGR was +0.2% in a declining staffing market. And here, also, expectations are strong growth, +10% from 2024 to 2029, based on the SIA assumption.
We want to accelerate in this market, and we think that we have the strong foundation in order to be successful. What do I mean? First, we have Pontoon. It's one of the Adecco brands, and Pontoon is one of just three companies with a star rating worldwide from the Everest Group. Second, we have definitely improved also our efficiency to deliver on the MSP program. And third, our reach in terms of large accounts is today the broadest one of our industry. As you can see on the screen, we have started to collect the first fruit of this new strategy put in place more than one year ago. First, strong growth in staffing delivered under the MSP program. We are talking about +18% growth year on year, year to date. We have been also, with Pontoon, able to capture a strong growth in statement of work.
Here, we have a growth of 15%, which is also beneficial for the group, as we can deliver the service under the MSP program from Pontoon in the outsourcing piece, again, a strategic segment of market, and some recent key wins will generate additional growth. We have already secured 13% revenue growth for 2026 in those programs, so strong lever for growth. I would like now to share more about the agile management of our geographic coverage. We have decided to strongly invest in some fast-growing geographies. What does it mean? First, we have divested from some less promising geographies like Uruguay, but at the same time, we have started to open some new markets like Saudi Arabia or Indonesia. Second, we have maintained and sometimes increased our capability in fast-growing markets such as LATAM and APAC, especially in Brazil, India, and Japan.
We have also invested in our new delivery model and our tech support at a very early stage. As said by Caroline before, this full integrated front office tool info has been implemented across the vast majority of those countries in APAC and LATAM. At the same time, we have accelerated on our diversification program, especially in outsourcing, which represents a big weight of the revenue in LATAM and APAC today. Let me tell you here, the execution has been strong, and the delivery is clearly positive, and as you can see on this slide, it means strong growth, increased profitability due to leverage and product mix, and also productivity gains. As a consequence, we have started to put in place the same agenda for EEMENA with the idea to replicate the performance with those geographies.
On top of that, as you can see, we also focus on our development in China. As you know, we do not consolidate China, but we do take a share of income in our P&L. Our performance here is important for the group. We are now talking about one of the leading countries for the group with approximately EUR 3.5 billion as a revenue yearly base. We will continue to fuel this growth because there is an impact on our EBITDA. It's accretive. We are talking about approximately 25 additional basis points to date in 2025 for the Adecco GBU. This agile management of the geographies is a key driver for our profitable growth. I would like now to speak about another geography. As you know, two years ago, we have focused a lot on how to execute our plan to fix our turnaround country.
I mean, the United States, by the way, the largest country in front of us in terms of potential. The U.S. was strongly in the spotlight during our last capital market day, and I've explained then that the road to success was not an easy one as we are talking about a very big geography. Let's tell it we are not done yet. However, I want to say that we are heading in the right direction, executing on our plan. And as you've seen in Q3, we have been able to deliver strong results demonstrating progress with revenue in the United States up 20% year on year. What has changed so far in the U.S.? First, the level of engagement of our people is very high. Turnover has been reduced by twice since three years. Second, in terms of sales, our pipeline is very strong.
At the same time, we have also improved our delivery efficiency in the U.S. We have some nice promise coming from some new opening branches for the SME segment of market. Performance has ramped up with strong market share gains across the last two quarters, with positive indication as we look ahead. The good news is we have started also to leverage our revenue growth to improve our bottom line. This profitability is now positive, and I want to say and even more later. What's next? MSP is one key geography, one key priority, sorry, and the U.S. is the first geography where we have implemented on our plan. Second, digitization of our delivery is the other priority combined with offshore.
Finally, we want to continue to invest on our branches to reinforce our proximity, but also the specialization of our network, which is one pillar of the profitability we can get from staffing. After the U.S., I would like to talk about France now. Our French operations are not in a turnaround mode. Nevertheless, we have still space for improvement in France. Cost competitiveness was the main challenge in this country as the price pressure has become stronger and stronger due to the challenging environment of the French staffing market during the three last years. Our G&A savings plan, digitization of our operation, centralization of low-value tasks have been clear priorities in our action plan. While we recognize that there is still room for improvement in terms of productivity, as you can see in our figures, clearly, we've seen some recent improvement.
In a declining market, which is always a challenge, with a lower cost of G&A and those improvements, consequently, the first quarters of market share gain have been experienced in Q2 and Q3. How do we build upon this in France? We want to reinforce this cost competitiveness, especially for the large accounts. France is a priority as the U.S. is in terms of implementing our change agenda. On top, in France, we have also relaunched an investment plan on some targeted specialization part of our agility, especially when we have strong potential to grow like nuclear as one strong vertical in France. The goal is to make sure that we balance the growth of large accounts and the growth of the SME business.
To conclude on this run agenda for Adecco, our newly recovered leadership in pure staffing meets the main expectation outlined during the last Capital Markets Day. Our agility in product, geographies, and also client segment has been key to deliver our performance. Our leaders and their teams have demonstrated strong engagement, expertise, and ability to execute and to deliver. We have also accelerated on our omnichannel strategy. Here, the inspiration comes from the fact that we want to build the most powerful talent supply chain of our industry. What does it mean? First, as said by Caroline before, we have harmonized large parts of our tech stack all over the world on a growing platform. Same front office tool, same vendor management system to capture automatically the orders, same web platform, same pioneering GenAI suite for recruiters all over the world, and same end-to-end processes.
Soon, the same AI agent orchestration, pretty new for the Adecco GBU. This unified tech approach is a foundation of our talent supply chain and delivery model. This has enabled us to capture all of our operational data in one consistent and systematic way. Being the base of our supply chain and gathering in one single place the data from clients and candidates means better matching. Based on that, we have started to strategize the allocation of tasks. What does it mean? Low-value tasks centralized and digitized in our global and local recruitment centers. For what is about clients and candidate interaction, here we remain local with a much more value and human touch from our recruiters and salespeople.
As you can see, our strong improvement in our delivery efficiency is now visible, both in our operational KPIs, but also in terms of speed of delivery, fill rate, and NPS. We are still on a journey. It's not finished, and I propose to get a much deeper approach on what's in progress during our change presentation later today. Now, I would like to hand over to Gaël de la Fosse, President of LHH.
Thank you, Christophe. Good morning, everyone. I'm happy to share LHH's progress and strategic direction with you today. Let me start with our run priorities. Over the last two years, we have been laying the foundations, strengthening core pillars, scaling new solutions, and driving innovation across the board. LHH is now a global leader in talent solutions, supporting organizations at every stage of the professional talent journey, from recruitment to development and career transition.
We do this at scale. Every year, we work with 15,000 clients, including 90% of the S&P 500 and more than a million professionals worldwide. Globally, LHH is now the fourth largest recruitment solutions multi-specialist, number two in coaching, number one in instructor-led AI upskilling and reskilling, and number one in career transition and mobility. From sourcing future-ready talent to growing agile leaders and supporting career transitions, LHH is making workforce transformation possible at scale and with world-class quality. You heard it. AI is reshaping organizations, jobs, and how people and technology work together. LHH is the only player in the market positioned to offer market-leading solutions and also able to combine them to build the professional talent infrastructure and the agility that all companies need. This is why CHROs and their leadership teams choose us as their partner to build and grow their professional workforces.
As part of the Adecco Group, we also benefit from the cross-selling opportunities and the client stickiness to which Denis referred earlier. Now, let's talk specifically about two core solution areas, starting with recruitment solutions and then career transition and mobility. Today's professional recruitment market is a mixed picture. Employers and employees are experiencing uncertainty and reduced confidence, which is slowing activity. There are geographic differences, with certain regions performing better than others. We've responded to these mixed market dynamics with discipline. We've exited eight non-strategic markets since 2023, and we're focusing our resources on the geographies with the strongest growth potential. We have been focused on protecting productivity everywhere. We've right-sized our headcount to the realities of each market and prioritized execution.
For example, in the U.S., which is our largest market, gross profit per billing FTE is up 2% year on year, and we've seen some other encouraging green shoots in the recent months. Our priorities are clear: adapt to market conditions, protect productivity, and optimize performance. At the same time, we're adapting our business model and investing in innovation. We are systematically moving up market in all geographies. Management and executive now represent more than 45% of our permanent recruitment revenue. Specifically, our executive search business is on a very positive trend with over 10% growth year on year. This shift up market focuses our business on a segment that is more resilient through market cycles, but also gives us stronger access to senior buyers for a broader suite of solutions. Automation is also central to our approach. And here, we benefit from the group's ongoing investments in AI.
Caroline mentioned it. The Recruiter GenAI Suite, automating tasks such as building CVs, drafting interview questions, and preparing candidate summaries, is now available across our markets. This and other AI tools automate many tasks that free up our consultants so that they can focus on more strategic candidate and client-facing work, where human interaction is vital, exactly what's needed as we move up market, and here we have a growing opportunity to also differentiate via the power of our extended LHH portfolio and broader complementary group offerings. Because hiring qualified professionals has not become easier for any company, our clients tell us they have difficulty in finding future-ready talent. They have a hard time assessing skills and culture fit, and they struggle to effectively onboard and integrate new talent, and so we are in a perfect position to address these challenges.
70% of the decision-makers we surveyed say they see value when recruitment is combined with our other solutions, like AI assessments and upskilling, onboarding coaching, and mentoring. This is a differentiation our competitors cannot replicate and impact they cannot deliver. Our move up market and our innovation have strengthened our market position in this space. In a challenging market environment, this is how we have consistently outperformed our core competitors in gross profit evolution for six consecutive quarters. Let's now turn to career transition and mobility. LHH dominates career transition and mobility globally. We are the number one player leading both in scale and impact, and we support more than 500,000 career transitions every year. We live in a time where people will face multiple pivots across their careers.
We now find that almost 60% of our outplacement candidates need to explore new paths to land their next role. And so this is why we've created LHH Career Studio, our AI platform for candidates. Career Studio provides features including personalized career insights, job market data, and coaching, allowing candidates to explore new career paths. And we also pair our outplacement service with General Assembly's AI upskilling as a key enabler to these career shifts. This is how we've consistently maintained pricing, candidate engagement, and market share expansion with very strong and stable revenue levels over the past three years. And we can continue to achieve cycle-resilient performance through our ongoing innovation roadmap. As an example, to complement the human interactions our candidates have with their human coaches, we're also building a team of AI career experts.
Each AI career expert focuses on one critical topic, from networking and interview preparation to offer negotiation and confidence building. These agents are powered by LHH's proprietary insights from hundreds of thousands of career transitions, helping candidates build the confidence that they need. But in addition to having a market-leading solutions portfolio, we also see opportunities in historically underpenetrated segments of the market, particularly in small and medium enterprises. This year alone, we have grown this segment by 25% in the U.S. and see opportunity for further expansion. So broadening our service offer, innovation, as well as growing our SME penetration all improve our resilience. Before handing back to Denis, let me share a video that highlights LHH Career Studio, one of our award-winning innovations.
The world of work is changing faster than ever. Technology is creating new jobs and eliminating others while redefining many altogether.
For individuals and organizations alike, it's not just about transition anymore. It's about transformation. Last year, 58% of our career transition candidates moved into entirely new occupations, even though most began their journey hoping for a similar role. That's why we created LHH Career Studio, a digital platform for career reinvention that blends human support, behavioral science, and AI. Inside LHH Career Studio, every feature is thoughtfully designed to turn uncertainty into action. Career Canvas, our AI-powered role exploration tool, reveals new directions candidates may never have considered. Our CV builder tailors resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and cover letters in seconds, while our smart job boards curate roles aligned to each person's ambitions. Using our Interview Center, candidates can practice real interview scenarios and receive instant AI feedback to improve their presence.
Because no one reinvents alone, LHH Career Studio connects them with the people and resources they need within one seamless platform, empowering career reinvention through diverse learning opportunities, including AI skill building powered by General Assembly, LHH's upskilling and reskilling business. LHH Career Studio is trusted by hundreds of thousands worldwide and loved by our candidates. It's broadening horizons, building confidence, and winning awards. Backed by decades of proprietary data on candidate outcomes, trends, and skills that drive progress, LHH Career Studio helps organizations navigate change with confidence, turning career transitions into success stories and building a more adaptable, future-ready workforce. Because the future belongs to those who can reinvent. LHH Career Studio. Reinvention starts here.
This video that you've just seen showcases how our innovation delivers significant impact to our clients and candidates.
This is a unique offering in the market and shows how powerful it is when humans and AI come together. With this, I hand back the floor to Denis. [audio distortion]
Thank you, Gaël. And let me now summarize what you heard from Gaël, from Yu, and from Christophe on our run part. The Strengthen Run is focused on enhancing the group's commercial and operational excellence to drive profitable growth. And you have seen how much of that agility and that focus has delivered results over the past three years. I insist on that. And on top of that, we will complete the turnaround of Akkodis Germany and Adecco US. We're going to have strong local execution that will drive expansion in key geographies such as Adecco Latam and APAC, and sectors such as Akkodis in aerospace and defense.
The group will also continue its shift into a better mix towards higher value solutions, including outsourcing in Adecco and with LHH, pivoting recruitment solutions up market and achieving cycle-resilient performance in career transition. So this closes our Strengthen Run part. This session is focused on innovation, how we are developing next-generation assets, and leveraging AI to unlock new efficiencies and growth levers. Once again, you will hear from all our GBU presidents, and you will also learn more about our potential. So to begin, please welcome back to the stage Yuval Bachar, President of Akkodis. [audio distortion]
So good afternoon, everyone. Now we pivot to the change agenda for Akkodis, our transformation initiatives designed to secure long-term success and sustainable growth. This is about more than operational excellence. It's all about foundational shifts that will shape our future and help our clients stay ahead of the change curve.
I will present to you how we're driving sales transformation, expanding our global reach and evolving our portfolio to unlock new opportunities, build agility, and set us up for future growth. Our transformation is focused and intentional, addressing gaps and capturing the opportunities ahead. We are moving beyond operational excellence here to foundational change of our business, anchored in five key levers: sales transformation with a more client-centric approach and selling more innovative solutions. Establishing global accounts to address client expectations of working with large and single vendors. Focusing on our sweet spot, digital engineering, where classical engineering and leading-edge technology actually converge. Delivering with hybrid teams onsite, nearshore, and offshore for value and cost efficiency. And finally, powered by Akkodis Intelligence, combining human intelligence with artificial intelligence. Like in Run, our change focus is on execution and accelerating results.
Let's look at the first lever in change, sales transformation, to boost our growth trajectory by changing the way we actually sell. Currently, our sales setup is more local, primarily focused on traditional engineering, onshore delivery, and time and material contracts. It's basically delivery-led and providing clients with mainly specific solutions. Our ambition is bigger. In the future, we want to build a more globally minded sales team focused on digital engineering as our unique differentiator, capable of selling a mix that combines onshore and offshore, staying close to the clients while driving cost efficiency. We want to sell both time and material contracts and work packages and lead with consulting. The goal is scalable innovative solutions that can be reused across clients delivering better and faster. Upscaling and aligning our sales team is the foundation for sustainable growth in Akkodis. Client proximity remains non-negotiable.
We will keep the passion, the deep industry knowledge, and the local touch, even as we scale globally. As I said before, client intimacy is one of our golden nuggets, and we will maintain it. Executing on this sales transformation will secure and strengthen our growth trajectory. As well as execution, we need a focused approach, which is why we have decided to find a set of global accounts to further accelerate our growth. This brings us to the second change lever for Akkodis, global accounts. As we explored in the Run section, vendor consolidation in ER&D spend is accelerating, and Akkodis has the scale and the critical mass to lead this trend. Global accounts are a strategic growth engine for any company. We have identified key clients in aerospace and defense, automotive, life science, and ICT to drive growth, margin expansion, and client stickiness through integrated delivery across countries.
This is where our scale has true power. Global companies demand consistent solutions across geographies, leveraging size, right-sized delivery, and innovation. A global operating model for these enterprise clients brings consistency, accountability, and scalability. We can also benefit from the coordination across the Adecco Group. For these large accounts, the impact for Akkodis is clear: improved pipeline visibility, enhanced margins, and much stronger client retention. We've already proven this blueprint. A leading European aerospace and defense company demonstrates our model success with a multi-country footprint in Germany, Spain, France, and global delivery hubs, again in France, Germany, and India, plus nearshore for scalability, as well as integrated digital and engineering offerings for very complex programs we do for them. Further, a strong pipeline here is supporting our double-digit long-term growth target.
With global accounts, positioning ourselves in both digital and engineering is actually much more important than ever before. And that takes me to the third lever, practices and portfolio. With this, we respond to the fact that the worlds of digital and engineering are very clearly converging. More and more engineering services are becoming, in fact, truly digital. And operating where IT and engineering converge, Akkodis brings decades of expertise on both sides, as well as deep domain knowledge, leveraging AI, data analytics, cloud computing, edge, automation, and cybersecurity to digitize our client engineering needs, like in manufacturing operations or physical validation. This sweet spot of digital engineering is illustrated by highly profitable and replicable projects that deliver value for clients and margin for Akkodis, like digital product simulation or digital product development or advanced driver assistance systems, or ADAS, and software-defined vehicles.
It's exactly through digital transformation projects that we enable our clients to become more agile, to embrace progress, to accelerate the time to market, and to tackle complex issues faster. So this forms the backbone of our delivery model, enabling both scale and repeatability, as well as client intimacy. Repeatable solutions accelerate the time to market. It drives profitability, while client intimacy enables loyalty and long-term growth for Akkodis. Of course, to fully realize the benefits of our digital engineering expertise, we must also ensure that our global delivery setup in the backend is equally agile and scalable. And that brings us to our fourth change lever, global delivery. We have already revised our global delivery setup in Akkodis to unlock offshore acceleration. And this is new. Our global delivery centers act as a true extension of onsite teams, enabling seamless client integration and enhanced sales enablement.
We have also introduced lately a GDC-first solution process. This model delivers low-cost alternatives without compromising the client intimacy. It enables higher win rates and therefore growth as well as margin expansion, exemplified in two major and profitable deals signed in the last three months, proving that our new delivery operating model based on GDCs actually works. During the last two quarters, we've expanded into additional cost-efficient and cost-competitive locations in India, like Hyderabad and Pune. We're also strengthening our nearshore capabilities. As a result, specifically in India, I'm happy to tell that we've seen a 60% FTE growth year to date. And we're rapidly ramping up for our clients, in one example, achieving in six weeks what normally takes well over 10, thanks to the power of the Adecco Group's recruitment engine on top.
By the end of 2026, we will expand our offshore workforce from about 5% today to 15%. However, finding the right balance is and remains key. So I personally believe that no player in the ER&D market has yet achieved the optimal balance between client intimacy and margin optimization. Akkodis is poised to claim it. The right onshore and offshore mix is a major value lever, creating global engineering centers on one side while keeping client intimacy on the other side. Whoever gets this right will set a new standard for delivery efficiency and margin in the digital engineering industry, while keeping close to the clients, of course. And in Akkodis, we're doing exactly this. A major transportation ER&D outsourcing project for a French client shows our balanced hybrid delivery model, keeping key roles near to the client while moving about 40% of operations to nearshore.
This has delivered cost savings and scalability without losing the client proximity. It was the biggest deal we signed in Q3, all based on this fine balance. One thing to note here is that for Akkodis, the Adecco Group recruiting platform is a real growth multiplier and muscle, an incredible muscle to have, enabling rapid, high-quality team scaling. It's a unique asset compared to all of our competition that supports both speed and flexibility as we expand into Akkodis. As I said before, we are rapidly expanding our India GDCs, leveraging global recruitment and building specialized centers for our specific engineering needs of our client. And this brings us to the fifth and last lever of the change, Akkodis Intelligence, driving growth with human-centric artificial intelligence.
As with nearshore and offshore integration, we deliver Akkodis Intelligence in everything we do, combining the best of cutting-edge technology, innovation, and agility with strong domain know-how and talent of our people, always built upon the irreplaceable strengths of human thinking and collaboration. Our human-centric approach is very much aligned with the group's philosophy to ensure technology elevates the human potential. By uniting machine precision with human experience, Akkodis Intelligence helps organizations navigate through complexity and achieve scalable innovation at speed. Akkodis leverages over a decade of AI-powered solutions and competencies to deliver human-centric, responsible AI solutions. We already have a comprehensive suite of data analytics and AI offerings. Examples include Cersei, which I told you about earlier today, as one of the golden nuggets where we leverage AI to help solve crime faster.
Another one is the ProofTech tool suite, a comprehensive test automation solution suite based on AI, or AICore, our modular AI platform across industries for engineering. Now, our clients are often struggling to translate pilots into production and to industrialize their AI investments. And that brings me to my third point. Akkodis is placed exactly for this. It's well placed exactly for this industrialization. Often, our clients are unable to scale their AI investments and to really industrialize them. It requires both deep AI expertise as well as industry knowledge. And this is where we come in. Akkodis has the industrial knowledge, the process intimacy, and the technical prowess to deliver. And let me illustrate this with some examples of the value of our scalable AI solutions on the right-hand side of the slide.
Our AI innovations have cut production scheduling from days to seconds, accelerated software development, and saved millions through automation across industries like life science, banking, and IT. AI was the last change lever for Akkodis. So how do we know these change levers actually will work? Let's look at a proof point from France. France, as you know, is one of the most competitive and advanced markets in digital engineering, both for Akkodis and for many of our competition. Our French market is already advancing at pace to implement these levers presented today. This shows how transformation delivers measurable success and sets us apart from our main competition when executed well. In France, our sales transformation is underway with more than 60% of the sales population assessed and a roadmap to reskill or replace the rest by Q1 2026.
We are also driving sales via global accounts in aerospace and defense, as well as automotive, with global account managers appointed and focusing on increasing the share of wallet. In other words, in France, we are growing with our larger accounts. On top, we benefit from the power of the Adecco Group and strong Adecco brand in this market, obviously. Our practices in digital and engineering are well established in France, with all engineers mapped and skills assessed, including their career paths defined. A rationalized, repeatable, and attractive portfolio is in place, convincing clients, both existing and new ones. Lastly, we have established an offshore delivery mix using Romania, Morocco, and India to win deals and scale efficiently where required. The results? They speak for themselves. Akkodis France transformation delivered very strong results, in fact. Operational utilization and project margins both increased by 130 basis points year on year.
Global account management has driven 100% growth with major OEMs across multiple countries. Revenue grew organically by 1% for France year over year in Q3, outperforming the competition, and EBITDA margin improved to 6.4%, which is up 170 basis points from last year. France validates our scalable, repeatable model. This change agenda works. And if we execute it well, which we will, we can beat the competition and convince our clients, existing and new ones. Now, let me summarize the key takeaways and see how the run and change levers impact the profitability of the GBU in the midterm. First, we are delivering on the turnaround in Germany and the consulting and solutions business growth in the U.S. Second, we will focus on execution of the strategy and value creation plan to ensure its impact. And third, we have put in place a proven transformation trajectory showing tangible results already.
To bring it all together, here's our margin journey from 3.9% EBITDA to 7% to 10% midterm. As you can see, each lever in the run and change has an impact. Our specific sector plans, Germany's turnaround, and consulting growth in North America are key run priorities. Sales transformation, global accounts, practice and portfolio, global delivery, and Akkodis Intelligence are key in accelerating change. Combined, this builds a credible phased plan for sustainable margin expansion for Akkodis. We have what it takes to win in this market. Thank you for your attention. Let me now hand over to Christophe Catoir, President of Adecco. [audio distortion]
Thank you, Yuval. Time to talk about the change agenda for the Adecco GBU now.
As outlined earlier, the run agenda has been driven those last years by agile development of products, geographies, and also segment of clients with a clear promise to deliver a superior profitable growth, a promise that we have just started to deliver upon. The change agenda is driven by a unique opportunity to create a competitive advantage in our industry, to advance up the value chain, and here, this opportunity is about the emerging human-digital interaction at work. We expect this to be really impactful, as we will gain both more efficiency and more value for customers at the same time, so what's our current and future ambition here? First, building a very structured and seamless talent supply chain, combining the best of our tech stack and of our experienced colleagues all over the world, new business processes, and new points of focus.
Second, it means delivering a much more efficient service, faster, more cost-effective, and at a higher quality level. It's a clear expectation from our clients, but also from our candidates. It also means anticipating the future needs of the economy, gathering all the data in a single place, and based on the data, building employability proactively instead of reacting fast in front of scarce qualification with lower and lower fill rate. Let me explain the reinvention of our Adecco model. First, we have built a sequential approach with a unique methodology based on the standardization of repetitive low-value tasks on one side and based on our leverage for our global reach to reinforce value generation at a local level by our branch colleagues. Our clear ambition is to be more cost-competitive, but also to be more effective in terms of delivery and impact.
Our starting point was to design this methodology. First, we have collected a lot of information about our client expectation in a very structured way, defining what were the common needs and what were the emerging new requirements from those clients. I need to say that we have been strongly supported by the group and especially by LHH due to the intimacy built with lots of CHRO. We have clearly understood the common point, the common expectation. One, without any surprise, cost-effective service for that is transactional, first rule of the game. Second, faster service to meet the high level of volatility in our economy. It has been always true, but it's even more sensitive now and at least more robust approach talking about challenging positions such as attractive jobs or the one where there is a skill shortage.
The second part of our methodology after collecting those expectations has been to define the best way to adjust our delivery model in order to make sure that we are able to meet those expectations, and to do that, we have redesigned a set of new processes, global processes, aiming to standardize and digitize all the repetitive value tasks. We have also defined a set of simple operational goals, and you can see them on the screen. Cost of delivery reduced by 30 basis points, fill rate increased by 700 basis points to reach 90%, and consistent quality based on client NPS, as explained previously by Denis. To start, we have built scalable factories, onshore in eight major of our countries and nearshore, offshore in India, Poland, Mexico, and Morocco, using the same processes and technology with a clear focus on efficiency.
The leverage of the Akkodis learning curve has been instrumental in scaling up our factories at speed. We have selected then one factory, the U.K. One, in order to equip this factory with the best of our tech stack. I mean agentic and digital assets at the same time. This factory, combined with our local footprint, has enabled us to have a fully integrated delivery model. Learning in the U.K. means we have the ambition to replicate this model in a very harmonized way all over the world later, and I will share the agenda after. Why is the U.K.? Because it was our most mature factory where we had the opportunity to learn very fast and to be able to scale very fast also. What's the current status of this plan?
We have started to put in place this fully integrated model seven months ago, and that's the moment where we have put in place also our first agent, and let me tell you that we have registered impressive improvement on our delivery efficiency. One adoption is 100% when it would have been more challenging to put it in place in our 3,500 branches and on-site. Here, we are talking about one factory fully integrated. Second, customer satisfaction, especially the candidate one relating to interactions with agents, is really high, and our recruiters are really pleased about the time they have freed up because they can focus on what they love. I mean the quality engagement with candidates and clients rather than administrative tasks, which is an important component of the NPS of client at the same time and candidate.
There is therefore an important driver of both client and candidate satisfaction. Now, perhaps to be even more specific and granular, I would like to take the example of the first agent we have put in place in our factory in the U.K., and the goal is to see what's the return on the ongoing investment we are doing with AI agent when we have the scale. Our prescreening agent was the first to be released in April 2025, so this agent enables 24/7 exchange for candidates that apply to a job order. The agent manages interviews with each of those candidates following a flexible scenario. Indeed, contrary to a bot, the agent will adapt the question to each of the candidates based on its learning, past learnings, and its contextual intelligence.
The recruiters, as a consequence, will receive a high-quality prescreening candidate list and will focus only, but that's where the value is, on the shortlist to define what's the best candidate. This hybrid process has been put in place during the last seven months in the U.K., with numerous transactions, as you can see on the screen, and the learnings are very clear. First, you can accelerate your process significantly, and we know that the speed of delivery is a key component of the value we can generate for clients. You can interview many more candidates at the same time as you collect more data for each of those candidates. You can do this through the day and night, weekend, and vacation, which is really important, especially when candidates are still working.
The candidates are very pleased with this methodology because they feel they can deliver much more about themselves, AI agent as time. And at the same time, they get a faster answer from the recruitment process, and they can even build more intimacy with the recruiter when they are shortlisted because the recruiter has less administrative tasks to manage and can focus on the candidate. Now, and that's, I would say, the rule of this game. This growing efficiency can be reflected in both improved productivity and reduced delivery cost because it's exactly what we are looking for with this U.K. factory. First, the agent delivered a 21% time savings on low-value tasks. And for what has been managed in terms of agentification and hybridization of tasks, 160 basis point cost of delivery savings. This example illustrates perfectly what we call our new Adecco model, leveraging AI.
Before, our delivery model was constrained by the availability of our candidate, but also by the number of data we could collect from candidate and client at the same time. Now, we can collect much more data about our customers. If I take the example of the candidate, we are talking about five times more data in our database for each candidate following this process. On top of that, the data are based on conversation and resume. So it means we have also the opportunity to have more contextual insights, like motivation, like cultural fit, and some additional criteria. And it gives a very powerful matching. And believe me, powerful matching is the key word. It's a key word because it's more inclusive. You can have an enlarged set of criteria and give a chance to more people instead of the traditional hard skills you have on a resume.
As a consequence also, you have more candidates to propose as a shortlist to a client, which delights him to get the choice to find the best of them. This Adecco model, at the end, is very beneficial. Beneficial for Adecco colleagues, again, time, because productivity gain is part of the story, for sure. And it allows our recruiter to do the job. The reason why they are joining Adecco, I mean, to dedicate time for the last-mile management, but also to anticipate the needs of the economy, building employability in order to anticipate the potential scarcity. It is also beneficial for our growth agenda due to a better fill rate and at the same time to amplify our social impact with this inclusive recruitment process. You have understood this Adecco model is driven by efficiency and performance as much as the technology itself.
Probably the most important lesson learned from the U.K. is this integrated approach has also delivered a first wave of very structural improvement for the U.K. and more broadly later as we will scale. First, we have cut our time to fill in half. Again, speed of delivery is one of the key expectations of the market. As a consequence, in this very competitive market, we have increased our fill rate by 700 basis points. What does it mean? We have a better fill rate, so additional revenue with the same level of cost. So it's a very strong lever for extra revenue, but it's also productivity gain at scale. Now, after this experimentation during seven months, we are ready to gain the full return from this reinvented business model, and our milestones here are very clear.
First, we will continue to plug new AI agents in this fully integrated model in order to get more efficiency with more orchestration of those agents. That's the first step. The second step, which has been already started, is to scale it up in some other factories. So we have started in France to implement the first AI agent in Q3, again, as an integrated process. And we will continue with our offshore capability in Q1, which gives access also to all of our small and medium country to this new defined Adecco model, more efficient, which was also a driver of our investment. By the end of 2026, the ambition we have is to have more than 50% of our transactions managed through this very efficient new Adecco model.
Now, let me show you a short video that summarized what I've shared with you so far about the talent supply chain. And let me tell you that's the video we present to our clients in order to convince them to go further with Adecco. Let's have a look at the video.
Behind every thriving company is a heartbeat, a rhythm, a chain of people perfectly in sync, ready to move, grow, and deliver. In business, timing is everything. And people? They are the pulse. That's why at Adecco, we've built a model to move as fast and as smart as your ambitions: our talent supply chain. What's behind it? All our existing local delivery capabilities, such as the local hubs and on-sites, but optimized. Our offshore hubs in Morocco, India, Poland, and Mexico are more than global reach.
They're powered by advanced technology, guided by real-time data, and driven by the intelligence of both AI and people. Our talent supply chain uses technology-adjacent agents to let our recruiters concentrate on the human component of their job. From 24-hour fill times to 100% fill rate commitments, we optimize hiring costs to make you more competitive. This is hiring at the speed of business. This is more than recruitment. This is your workforce ready to perform. Join some of our global clients already thriving in this new future of work and benefiting from the features of the talent supply chain, including optimized local delivery capabilities, global reach with offshore hubs, technology-enhanced recruitment, real-time updates and efficiency, scalability and competitiveness, and a future-ready workforce. Because at Adecco, we ignite the spark where talent meets ambition. Momentum becomes mission. And tomorrow arrives today.
After this very instructive video, I would like to conclude. I would like to conclude by saying first, I remain very confident on our ability to continue to gain market share and to do that in a more profitable way. Based on both the talent and the experience of the leaders and the teams we have in the Adecco, but also the quality of the agile development of our products, geographies, and segments of market. But you have understood that on top of this run agenda, we have started to reinvent our industry model, leveraging the human-digital interaction of work for large accounts, and this powerful talent supply chain is really a competitive advantage, I would say, an agility advantage. Both agile management of our mix and agile management of our delivery model have demonstrated the opportunity to better leverage our growth momentum in our EBITDA performance.
As you can see on the screen, Q3 has been a testimony of that journey. And believe me, we want to accelerate on this agenda. Counting on a highly experienced and skilled team deeply involved in our change agenda makes me very confident on the next chapter for Adecco. I would like to hand over now to Gaël to speak more about the change agenda of LHH. [audio distortion]
Before our break, I shared how LHH is leading the market in two of our core solution areas: recruitment and career transition. Let's now focus on the solutions that are driving our next phase of growth and reinforcing our ability to be a partner to our clients across the full talent journey. We have been building a strong talent development pillar that helps companies address today's skills challenges.
We are the only provider developing both human and technical skills under the Ezra and General Assembly brands. Ezra and General Assembly are successfully scaling with exceptional year-on-year revenue growth and very solid margin levels. I mentioned we were elevating our positioning in the recruitment space. As a complement to this, we have also significantly expanded our executive solutions across the full talent lifecycle. We have now a broad portfolio dedicated to executives, from executive search and interim management to mentoring, coaching, as well as AI upskilling and career transition, all tailored to executives. And finally, we're starting to expand our HR and talent advisory capabilities to answer the increasing demands from our clients to address their broader and more complex workforce challenges. Like executive solutions, advisory also reinforces our relationships with CHROs and other senior HR leaders. Together, these high-growth engines are helping organizations create agile, future-ready workforces.
And they position LHH for continued growth and margin expansion. Let me now give you some highlights on Ezra and General Assembly. Ezra is the world's second-largest digital coaching provider, delivering human-first, AI-powered coaching. In this era of AI, companies are increasingly investing in human skills because they understand that critical thinking, problem-solving, adaptability, and collaboration are absolutely critical to successfully execute change and transformation at scale. We have expanded our offering from scalable one-on-one coaching to targeted skills development, scaled assessments, and more recently, leadership development. Our approach blends behavioral science, human coaches, and advanced AI tools. For example, our AI-powered coach, Kai, offers 24/7 coaching support, building on sessions with our human coaches. And today, 75% of Ezra's clients have deployed Kai as a complement to the human coaching.
And that way, our clients get the reach, the speed, and the measurable change they need at scale across their organizations, from individual contributors to managers and executives. It's these human skills that empower companies to remain agile, handle disruption, embrace new technologies, and keep their performance strong, even as everything around them is changing. And we continue to drive significant growth in Ezra. Since 2020, we have delivered almost a million coaching sessions and now support nearly 1,000 enterprise clients across more than 100 countries. And our quality scores are outstanding. Our growth comes from new clients and also from existing expansion with our current accounts because they see material performance impact. In our work with one of the world's largest banks, the leaders we coached had an 18% uplift in productivity compared to the peers that weren't coached. And that's transformation that shows up in P&L.
Let's now take a look at General Assembly. What you see here is General Assembly's AI Academy, a modular enterprise-wide training portfolio built to serve every part of an organization. Companies now understand that AI will reshape every function, and this creates an urgent demand for role-based AI training. General Assembly's AI Academy meets this need through three distinct learning tracks: executive education to help leaders champion AI adoption and drive transformation, role-based tracks tailored to functional needs from engineering to marketing, from HR to finance, and foundational AI training for all employees to build essential literacy in data and AI. Our programs are expert-led, hands-on, focused on real business outcomes, and tailored to the specific AI tools used by each client. These are key differentiators in the market.
This approach is driving strong demand across both Fortune 500s and SMEs, with engagements accelerating as clients move from pilots to full-scale rollouts. So now, let's watch a short video on how we're helping organizations close the AI skills gap with our AI Academy.
AI is changing the game for everyone. Companies and their people are working fast to keep up. General Assembly, an LHH brand, helps companies build skills for today's world. New tools matter, but what really counts is how well you use them. That's why we created our AI Academy, a flexible program for everyone, whether in a tech-focused job or a non-technical role. From senior leaders to team members, in today's workforce, every employee needs the know-how to succeed in an AI-first environment. We're a trusted partner to Fortune 500 companies and governments across the globe.
Our award-winning courses are taught by real-world practitioners who live and work in the roles and skills they teach. Our expert instructors guide learners through curriculum built around current industry use cases and practical applications. Our courses outperform asynchronous alternatives, lead to higher completion rates and knowledge retention, and consistently receive exceptional quality ratings. And because developing AI skills is absolutely essential for the future success of every company and the careers of every professional, we make AI upskilling a core part of everything we do at LHH. We include AI upskilling in our career transition programs. And we've just launched the AI Leadership Transformation Program, which brings together AI curriculum and human skills coaching to give leaders the confidence and skills they need to guide teams in an AI-first environment.
We're also combining AI upskilling with our recruitment services so companies and new hires have the right skills for today's jobs, and they're ready to keep growing together from day one. AI innovation is here to stay, and the companies that invest in skills development alongside technologies will seize the opportunities of tomorrow and define their industries. General Assembly's AI Academy helps leaders and their teams the future-ready skills needed to turn technology into a lasting competitive advantage.
Let's now look at how our unique coverage of the full talent journey enables us to deepen our client relationships and drive growth. Our clients increasingly see us as a trusted partner to solve their biggest pain points and build agility across the professional talent journey. In 2022, 48% of our strategic accounts partnered with LHH across three or more solution areas.
Since then, we have materially accelerated the depth of our client relationships. Today, 75% of our strategic accounts see the value of having a single partner providing multiple solutions. And the impact is clear. As these relationships deepened, our NPS has jumped by 62%. And the revenue from these clients is up 15% year-on-year. We have a strong track record of offering market-leading solutions. And our clients increasingly recognize LHH as the only player able to connect the dots, combine our suite of solutions for increased impact, and provide actionable insights that cut across the talent lifecycle. And that is why the dialogue is shifting. LHH is increasingly seen as a true partner, building workforce agility in a more strategic and connected way. LHH's strength is clear. It's our unmatched portfolio of solutions across the talent journey.
It is built specifically for professional talent and designed to address the complex, high-stakes challenges all companies need to solve in this era of AI, and as part of the Adecco Group, we can offer the most comprehensive portfolio of talent solutions. The strength of this position is materializing in our financial performance. We have delivered six consecutive quarters of consistent share gains across our solutions, driven by robust client demand, and we're now seeing revenue momentum that confirms our ability to deliver mid-single-digit revenue growth going forward. At the same time, we're continuing to deliver strong EBITDA margins that are moving towards the top end of our corridor at 9%-10%, so to summarize, LHH stands out as the platform to build future-ready executive and professional talent. We have created a player that is strongly differentiated in the market.
and our ability to connect the professional journey is what drives our performance and delivers the agility advantage our clients need. With this, let me hand back to Denis. [audio distortion]
Thank you, Gaël. Let me now sum up the change agenda that you've heard. Our plan to innovate and transform the business. We have a strong path to double-digit margins in Akkodis from the business value creation plan. Adecco is deploying its talent supply chain, its digital platform, AI and agentic AI to capture efficiencies and growth. and LHH's coaching and skilling businesses have been positioned to enjoy rapid growth. All of this positions our group extremely well to embark into the future. Now, let me take you back two years. What you've heard about AI today is a result of our strategic vision to pioneer human-centric AI, to ensure that AI augments human potential.
Caroline, Christophe, Yuval, Gaël have outlined the part of our AI strategy that enhances our services. Two years ago, we also created a vision for the next frontier of AI. To answer the most pressing question all CEOs face today, how do you concretely embark on the massive AI wave which fundamentally combines a digital and a human workforce at scale? That question is present in every CEO's mind at the moment. And they don't know how to answer it. Because let's face it, the disruption of AI is not easy to absorb. We see today that for our clients, simply adding more AI workflows and adding agents is not creating value. So, two years ago, we realized that we needed to think differently. And we decided to create an AI-powered tech company to answer this particular pressing question that I was mentioning.
It is essentially about reconfiguring workforces for the intelligent era, and we have created AuPotential, a joint venture with Salesforce. We are building a new tech company which brings together the power of a leading HR company and a leading tech company. A new company with an AI-powered platform and architecture to provide these answers, the answer to that pressing question, systematically and at scale. The Adecco Group has a 90% share and Salesforce 10%. Even though we are at an early stage, we have already very strong interest from more than 300 major global enterprises, and we are ready to scale. We'll be raising strategic capital for this in the next few quarters while keeping the majority control.
The value for the Adecco Group and for our shareholders is the opportunity for AuPotential to create massive value for our clients, for the clients of AuPotential, as it shows the path to leveraging AI at scale and be a channel for the services of the Adecco Group. This is also an opportunity for shareholder value creation from a market-making AI-powered tech company, a startup with the backing of two established market leaders. Gregg Shoemaker, CEO of AuPotential, is with us today to share more details. He was the Chief Operating Officer of Adecco, leading our AI transformation and has led several startups before he joined the group. He is with us today before he relocates this week to the HQ of AuPotential in San Francisco.
Hey, everybody. As Denis said, we've been working on this problem now for two and a half years.
Just a little bit of background. So we are headquartered in San Francisco, the center of the AI universe. We now have a team of about 30 core people with backgrounds in AI, scaling multi-billion-dollar tech businesses and leading global enterprises. We also have an amazing group of advisors from companies like Amazon and Google, Salesforce, Walmart, some large private equity and venture capital firms, as well as entrepreneurs with multiple billion-dollar-plus exits. In addition, being born out of the Adecco Group and in partnership with Salesforce, we have incredible access to CEOs and C-suites of hundreds of global companies. This has given us insights into both the challenges that these companies face as well as opportunities to co-design with them solutions that address these problems at scale.
So today, I'm just going to share a little bit of what we've been learning over the last couple of years, as well as where we're going as a company. So as you all know, we are living through one of the most important transitions in the history of work. AI is advancing at a pace that we have never seen before. Yet its most profound impact will not be measured in AI model benchmarks or even raw intelligence. It'll be measured in the work that humans do, the opportunities that we have, and the systems that govern how both humans and AI evolve together. For a company like the Adecco Group, whose mission is to help millions of people find meaningful, productive work, this moment carries both a responsibility and an extraordinary opportunity. See, we are among the last generation of leaders to manage purely human workforces.
The next frontier is hybrid, I'm certain of it, humans and digital capabilities working together, not in competition, in configuration, and this is the future that AuPotential was built to enable, a future where humans' human potential is strengthened and not diminished, but there's a problem right now. Despite trillions of dollars being invested in AI capacity, enterprise adoption is falling behind. This is not because organizations lack ambition or access to powerful new tools. Today's leading models can reason, they can plan, they can integrate into workflows at astonishing levels. The real problem is that enterprises don't know where or how to start to introduce AI at scale, nor do they know how to redesign their workforces for hybrid performance. AI companies treat the world as a list of tasks that could easily be automated. But what we know is work is messy.
Large organizations are far more complex. They have unique interdependencies, constraints, business logic, regulations, customers, and human judgment. Enterprise AI is not a tooling challenge. It is a workforce design challenge. And without a system to orchestrate humans and digital workers together, even the largest AI investments risk becoming stranded capacity. And this is where AuPotential comes in. For the past two years, we've been building infrastructure that no consulting firm, no software company, and no AI lab has attempted at this scale. We started with the Global Labor Graph. This is a living, dynamic model of nearly 2 billion workers across 10 million companies. Think about all the tasks, the workflows, the skills, the outcomes behind all that work, the economic patterns that determine how work should be configured, capability mapping across thousands of AI builders, live telemetry data from agent builders like Salesforce, soon to be others.
This is not a normal data set. This is not a taxonomy. This is the economic graph of human work. It's updated continuously. It's grounded in reality and now capable of incorporating digital capabilities as they continue to evolve and generate performance data. It gives the world something that it's never had before, a context layer that shows with precision workforce configurations and where hybrid configurations outperform human and AI alone. Now, once the Global Labor Graph reveals where opportunity exists, we convert these insights into something deployable. We call these Units of Potential. A Unit of Potential is a reusable, quantifiable workforce configuration that blends work that humans should do, work that AI can actually do, real-world constraints, and an expected economic outcome. These Units of Potential are then the building blocks of the hybrid workforce. They turn abstract promise of AI into concrete, deployable configurations.
Most importantly, they can be measured so we can compare configurations and surface the ones that maximize the most value. This is how hybrid work stops being conceptual and becomes operational. And finally, there's the allocation layer that we've built. At the center of this system sits the Chief Potential Officer, or the CPO, as we call it. The CPO, we believe, is the first digital executive designed specifically for this AI era. It is the logic engine for human and digital workforce design. It's the system that generates and evaluates these units of potential. It's the interpreter of enterprise constraints. And it's the interface that any major AI platform in the world can plug into. Large language models provide the reasoning and the raw capability. The CPO provides the truth, the context, and the economic priority. Together, they form the operating system for how work gets done.
Now, to benchmark performance in this new era, we've come up with another term we call Return on Potential. This is a dynamic metric that answers a simple but very critical question: how effectively is this organization converting combined human and digital capacity into outcomes? Return on Potential shows where talent is underutilized, where AI might be misallocated, where hybrid teams outperform, and where the next wave of productivity will come from. It becomes the index markets can use to evaluate real transformation and not hype. As an example, JPMorgan estimates that to earn a reasonable return on current AI investments, AI builders will need to generate an incremental $650 billion in annual revenue by 2030. So to evaluate how realistic this might be, we analyze the AI investments and the workforce configurations of 1,900 of the largest global enterprises.
These companies represent 100 million workers and over $51 trillion in revenue. Now, across these companies, we identified $12.5 trillion in collective what we call full potential, or the value that could be unlocked through the optimal orchestration of human and digital capabilities. Perfect world. But despite nearly $40 billion invested in AI over the past two years, these enterprises collectively generated no measurable return on potential. So to put this scale into perspective, if these 1,900 companies out of millions realized just 1% of their potential, they could create $125 billion in new enterprise value. This is the size of the opportunity and the gap that we are designed to close. So here is where the Adecco Group's strategic advantage becomes undeniable. The Adecco Group already deploys millions of humans into real work every day, every industry, every geography, every job family.
When you combine the group's global delivery and talent infrastructure, AuPotential's Global Labor Graph and the Unit of Potential engine, and the digital capabilities from leading AI platforms such as Salesforce and soon several others to come, you get something that does not exist today. It's the first fully integrated system for designing, deploying, and measuring hybrid workforces at scale. The Global Labor Graph becomes the clearinghouse for work, intelligence, and outcomes. The Units of Potential are the deployable units. The CPO becomes the orchestration layer. The Adecco Group becomes the fulfillment engine, placing both human and digital workers where the demand is the highest. This turns the Adecco Group into a market maker for hybrid workforces. Together, AuPotential and the Adecco Group will do a few things. We will accelerate AI adoption based on real business value, not hype.
We'll redeploy free human capacity into higher value work. We're going to treat AI not as software, but as a new class of digital worker that is onboarded, governed, and earning trust over time, just like humans. We'll give enterprises measurable economic pathways to capture return on AI, and we'll position the Adecco Group as the global distribution fulfillment layer for the world's next generation of work. By aligning the Adecco Group scale with AuPotential's workforce intelligence, we unlock a more productive, a more resilient, and a human-centered global workforce. Thank you.
Say good afternoon. Welcome back from the coffee break. Alongside the simplify, execute, and grow agenda, our financial strategy has been to drive value creation with a focus on maximizing absolute EBITDA and free cash flow and on deleveraging through six levers.
To maximize absolute EBITDA, we have successfully delivered sustainable market share gains while optimizing pricing and mix to achieve healthy gross margins. We've balanced growth and profitability through granular management of selling capacity, consultant bench, and delivery resources, driving productivity that was up 8% year on year in Q3. We've significantly reduced G&A expenses by EUR 174 million in real terms, and we continue to manage them tightly, with G&A costs accounting for just 3% of revenue in Q3. To maximize cash flow, we have continued to manage working capital with discipline, achieving a DSO that is consistently best in class. Further, we've optimized capital expenditures to align them with depreciation. While there's further deleveraging to go, we have a clear path to be at or below 1.5 times by the end of 2027.
Now, with this said, you know that my time at the Adecco Group is drawing to an end, and Valentina Ficalora has been appointed as the group's CFO effective January 2026. Valentina is a proven leader with deep knowledge of our business and strong financial and strategic acumen. She's been part of my global finance leadership team, most recently leading financial planning, controllership, and strategy. She's been my deputy for the past three and a half years, and so she's been deeply involved in developing the financial strategy that I've just presented. Her appointment is a testament to the strength of our talent pipeline, and it underscores our commitment to continuity, and I am highly confident in her ability to take the group forwards, so please welcome Valentina to the podium.
Thank you, Coram, for these words of introduction, and good afternoon.
It's really a pleasure to be here, and I look forward to meeting all of you in person in the near future. Throughout today, the group has outlined our agility advantage and then strengthened run and Accelerate Change priorities in detail. In financial terms, the agility advantage is expected to drive market share gains, deliver a 3%-6% EBITDA margin through cycle, achieve a 6% in a supportive economic environment, and deliver the balance sheet. Going forward, my priorities are to continue driving the financial strategy Coram introduced with a focus on maximizing absolute EBITDA and deleveraging through the six levers. Let's start with market share gains. As shown on the left, the group's relative revenue growth has outperformed its key competitors for three consecutive years, including a strong 375 basis points gain in Q3 2025. How has the group done this?
On the right side, we provide some key levers: a strong sales win ratio of over 50% over the last 12 months. Within this, as the right side chart shows, alongside strong client retention, there is a substantial level of gains in purple, where we have improved share of wallet, as well as new clients in blue. This pipeline provides the group with a very healthy incremental revenue opportunity. Digital platforms and deep analytics are driving improved fill rates and sizable multi-country client wins. Notably, 43% of deals won this year are for services spanning 10 or more countries. Aligned incentives, strong performance management, and agile management of sales capacity are further securing a better balance between revenue and EBITDA growth.
On the next slide, you can see how the group is constantly optimizing pricing and mix to achieve a healthy gross margin as it continues to shift towards higher value services. The left-hand chart shows that in 2019, just over one-third of the group's gross profit was generated from services other than flexible placement. Today, around 50% of gross profit comes from higher value solutions. Over the coming years, the shift towards higher value solutions will continue, driven by Adecco's expansion in outsourcing and MSP, LHH's expansion in coaching and skilling, and Akkodis' expansion in consulting. At the same time, the group's strong pricing discipline has supported margins. The middle chart shows solid improvement in Adecco's bill pay rate spread from 2019 to the last 12 months. Put together, as the right side shows, gross margin in flexible placement has improved by 35 basis points between 2019 and today.
Despite recent market challenges, particularly in permanent placement, the group's gross margin has improved by a stronger 50 basis points between 2019 and today. Turning now to productivity. The left chart shows Adecco's direct contribution for selling FTEs since 2023. Through agile capacity management, productivity at Adecco has been broadly stable. Management in LHH recruitment solutions have similarly protected productivity through meaningful headcount reductions. The middle chart shows how Akkodis has consistently delivered strong utilization rates, although current levels are shy of 2023's 93%. There is some pressure in Akkodis Germany, partly mitigated by strength across the other parts of the business.
As a result of actions taken to protect productivity during a period of challenging market conditions, carefully balancing the growth opportunity and profitability, the group is leading the recovery in the market and seeing sharp improvements in productivity, which in Q3 was up 8% year on year. Looking ahead, we will go further. Adecco now has 13 centralized hubs supporting 75% of GBU revenues, which serve large clients. Here, we introduce industrialized processes, digital tools, and AI. Already, about EUR 10 billion in revenue flows through Adecco's talent supply chain. The talent supply chain method has, year to date, reduced cost to serve by 30 basis points and improved fill rates by 700 basis points for Adecco's largest 25 clients.
We can further enhance efficiency as we embed AI and agentic AI in our processes, for example, the Recruiter GenAI Suite that both LHH and Adecco use, or for engineering work in Akkodis. Alongside AI, Akkodis is expanding its offshore workforce, targeting 15% by the end of 2026, to optimize bench costs. Turning now to our next lever, G&A costs. In 2022, we committed to EUR 150 million of savings in run rate terms by mid-2024, and after that, to sustain G&A expenses below 3.5% on revenues per annum. We exceeded this ambition, delivering EUR 174 million of savings in real terms and have capped G&A costs below 3.5% of revenues over the last 12 months. Looking ahead, there are pockets of incremental savings for the group to take advantage of.
In particular, we are expanding global business services, which provides support to finance, HR, and customer services for North America and onboarding additional functions such as legal. We expect to unlock scale benefits, driving improvements in delivery and productivity through automation and AI. To date, global business services has achieved a EUR 23 million savings run rate. We have strengthened procurement with total contract value savings of EUR 130 million to date on a five-year basis. Across the countries, we also expect further G&A savings in 2026 from Adecco France and North America. Let's now focus on working capital management and CapEx. We constantly optimize working capital. The left side shows the strong correlation between the group's net working capital and revenues. Throughout the cycle, year on year, net working capital movements are consistently below EUR 200 million.
We have achieved this in part through tight management of DSO, which, as the middle chart shows, is consistently best in class, and the group's capital expenditure run rate is now over EUR 50 million lower than in 2022, supporting free cash flow generation. The group's financial ambitions are reconfirmed today to drive revenues by taking market share, supported by investment in faster growth segments and solutions. The midterm ambition is to achieve an EBITDA margin around 6% in a supportive economic environment. We plan to continue delivering strong cash conversion, targeting 90% or more through cycle, and we are firmly committed to a net debt to EBITDA ratio at or below 1.5 times by the end of 2027, absent any major macroeconomic or geopolitical disruption.
At the GBU level, we expect each business to deliver within its margin corridors: 3%-6% for Adecco, 7%-10% for Akkodis, and 8%-11% for LHH. The LHH margin corridor is increased by 1%, reflecting strong recent performance. The bottom chart shows that achievig a 6% EBITDA margin midterm requires volume uplift, pricing and mix benefits, productivity improvement, and incremental G&A savings. We can also see the path to 6% from executing the strengthened run and Accelerate Change agenda across the GBUs. The run pillar includes an uplift from the turnaround of Akkodis Germany and Adecco US and strong local execution to profitability grow key geographies and sectors, such as Latin America in Adecco and defense in Akkodis. It also captures benefits from continued expansion in higher value solutions, including career transition in LHH and outsourcing in Adecco.
These actions will drive margins to the middle of the group's corridor. The change pillar will further support us in achieving the 6% ambition. It includes anticipated benefits from Akkodis' value creation plan, Adecco's use of the talent supply chain, digital tools, and agentic AI to drive efficiencies. And it includes the successful scaling of Ezra and General Assembly in LHH. Let's talk now about the group's cash flow and financing structure. The group generates solid cash flow across the cycle. In 2024, operating cash flow totaled EUR 707 million, with a cash conversion ratio of 109%. Not shown on the chart, in Q3 2025, the group's cash conversion ratio was 110%, and we anticipate solid cash generation in 2025. The group benefits from a robust financial structure. We have strong liquidity, including an un-drawn EUR 750 million revolving credit facility.
80% of debts have fixed interest rates, and there are no financial covenants on any outstanding debt. The group has low interest expenses, with full-year gross interest expense guidance of EUR 75 million. The recent rating change from S&P has a very limited impact on financing costs of around EUR 4 million in 2026. The group will repay the CHF 225 million bonds at maturity and is in the process of refinancing the hybrid bond. Finally, our bond maturity profile remains well-balanced. Let me now talk about leverage. At the end of Q3 2025, net debt was EUR 2.7 billion, EUR 220 million lower year on year, and the group's end Q3 leverage ratio was three times. On an underlying basis, strong cash generation and EBITDA improvement in Q3 2025 reduced the group's net debt to EBITDA ratio, excluding one-offs, by 0.3 sequentially.
The group is very confident it can bring the net debt to EBITDA ratio to 1.5 times or below by the end of 2027. There are a variety of levers at our disposal to reach this target. The group's base case assumes modest revenue growth, driving operating leverage and EBITDA margin uplift. If, for example, growth does not materialize, the group will offset this by adjusting sales and delivery capacity to the market environment to drive margin improvement because we have inherent flexibility in our workforce that we can take advantage of, as we have done in the past. Let me be clear. We are very confident we will deliver and that this will not require a change to capital allocation policies, including our dividend policy, which we will now turn to. We confirmed the group's capital allocation policy today.
First, to fund organic growth at attractive returns while maintaining our commitment to an investment-grade credit rating. Second, to distribute dividends to shareholders applying a 40-50 payout ratio on adjusted EPS. This dividend policy was introduced earlier this year. The group believes it is better suited to a strongly cash-generative and cyclical business. It has been put in place to accelerate deleveraging and increase financial flexibility. Moreover, it better balances growth investment that supports the group's strategic shift towards higher growth and margin markets with direct contributions to shareholders. Third, we consider bolt-on M&A opportunities where it accelerates the group's strategy and creates value. And finally, once delivered, we look to return excess capital to shareholders via buybacks. Let me now conclude.
In financial terms, our agility advantage is expected to drive market share gains, deliver a 3%-6% EBITDA margin through cycle, achieve around 6% in a supportive economic environment, and deliver the balance sheet, and we are laser-focused on each lever that supports the outcomes we want to maximize absolute EBITDA and deliver on deleveraging. Thank you for your continued trust and partnership, and with that, we will briefly get the stage ready, and then the executive committee will return so we can begin the Q&A session. Thank you. [audio distortion]
It's time for some closing remarks. I want to really thank you for your questions. It's very helpful also to us, so let me wrap things up and tell you that, as you could see, we have proven our ability to execute on the plan we presented three years ago. We shared with you two years ago.
We have executed rigorously. We have gained share over the past three years. And we can do that because our markets are fragmented. So no matter what the economic environment, we can always run faster and gain share. With the power of our agility advantage value proposition that resonates very well with our clients, we aim to reinforce our market-leading position. All this is built around delivering customer value with innovative end-to-end talent and technology solutions and strategic workforce management. It encompasses a technology and AI roadmap that drives superior client and candidate experience at scale. As an example, you heard that our platform already supports over EUR 10 billion of revenue and will continue to grow.
We've taken a pioneering approach to human-centric AI and agentic AI and digital platform across our business lines, such that agentic AI in the Adecco GBU will cover more than 50% of revenues by the end of 2026, and further, as you could guess from this new mindset, we have a laser-focused, execution-driven operating model, and this is done to operate together with a very strong team, to run and change priorities across our GBUs, and I think you've heard a lot of the good things that they are doing, so put together, the group is really strongly positioned to drive enhanced financial performance and value creation for everyone that is listening to us, particularly, of course, our shareholders. This brings us to a close. Thanks a lot for having been with us today here in London.
Thanks a lot to all of you who've been watching our Capital Markets Day. It means a lot. Your presence means a lot, so thank you very much, and for those who are here, safe travels home. Thank you.