All right. I think we can go ahead and get started. Thank you all for co ming today. I h ave the pleasure of hosting Amdocs President and CEO, Shimie Hortig. Shimie, thank you for joining me today.
Thank you for the invitation.
Of course. I would like to touch on both some near-term and longer-term dynamics. But Shimie, since Amdocs is new for many investors, can you start by just telling us a little bit more about Amdocs' role in the global telco market and some of the support that you provide for your customers?
Okay. Good afternoon. For those of you who are not familiar with Amdocs, market leader in the telecommunication industry. We are providing mission-critical systems for more than 400 service providers all over the world. The largest one and the most significant one globally in more than 90 countries, in which we basically run and transform their business. We sit at the heart of the operation of the telecom service provider and telecom operators, supporting digital experiences. 3 billion customers are impacted by our systems on a daily basis. As a mission-critical systems, our customers rely on us to launch new products and offering for them, to manage customers, and to generate revenue for our customers. We have a unique business model, outcome-based business model, that on one hand is committed to innovation and to technology leadership.
On the other hand, we take full responsibility on everything that we do for our customers. From developing their products, implementing them in the customer's environment, migrating customers, and then running and supporting the operations of the systems in a long-term managed services agreement. We have a very deep and long-lasting relationship with our customers for many years. Recurring revenue, very high visibility, and high renewal rate of our contracts with our customers. Now with the agentic era, we see ourself as the primary partner for our customers for this journey, basically helping them to unlock the value that this technology can bring, and to generate the business value of reducing complexity, reimagining the workflows end-to-end, launching faster offerings to the market, and obviously reducing the cost structure.
Yeah. So we're definitely going to talk a lot about what your agentic vision is
Yeah
for the company, but one of the things I did want to touch on that you mentioned briefly there is your outcome-based business model. Can you talk a little bit more about that and specifically how that drives, in your view, part of Amdocs' competitive mode?
Yeah. Some companies are changing their business model lately. This is not the case for Amdocs. We've been forever, the 40 years of the company existence, we're always an outcome-based company. We're always committed to our customers and getting paid based on meeting KPIs, SLAs. Therefore, this was always the engagement. We are not a time and material kind of a company. We don't provide bodies or services. It's all outcome-based engagement. In today's environment, when it's more technology-led and not people-led and so on, then this business model is definitely the right model also going forward.
Okay, you talked a little bit about your excitement for the agentic era
Yeah
and what the long-term opportunity that this presents to help the telco industry. In your view, what does agentic mean for the global telco industry, and where do you think we are now on the adoption curve?
Yeah. I think for an industry, and we know this industry very well for many years, it is an amazing opportunity to fundamentally change the way our customers operate. We know the complexity, and we know how cumbersome the flows and the processes in the telco today, and we think that it is an amazing opportunity to change it fundamentally. The challenge right now is that on one hand, the technology can provide, there is a lot of excitement, and the technology is getting better every week, every day. But on the other hand, we do not see a lot of adoption so far by our customers. We see our role, and that is why we came with aOS, the agentic operating system, to help them realize the value and accelerate the adoption. Because right now, to your question, how far are we? We think that we are quite early in the journey.
Customers are mainly dealing with some experiments. They are implementing use cases. They are implementing some agents here and there. But in order to reach to the more long-term benefit of fundamentally change the way they operate the environment, we will need to move to the next level. Here comes aOS, and this is exactly the strategy that we have for our company for the future.
Yeah, we're going to talk a lot about aOS. But before we jump to that
Yeah
can we just talk a little bit about your longer term vision and more specifically, your stated four-pillar strategy for the long-term success of the business?
Yeah. The strategy that we outlined for the company going forward is based on four pillars, as you mentioned. The first pillar, we call it aOS, the agentic operating system. In this pillar, we see ourself helping and partnering right now with 400 customers that we have today all over the world to take them from where they are today to the future agentic operating system. In order to do that, we came up with aOS, the agentic operating system of Amdocs, which is the technological framework that basically includes everything that is needed, from products, services, tools, migration tools, in order to help customers start to realize the value of their agentic technology.
And we see ourself partnering with each and every one of those 400 customers and starting a journey, which we know, by the way, is going to be a different journey from one customer to another based on the preference of the customers, based on the starting point, but a journey that we start to realize the value of agentic. That's the main first pillar of our strategy. In the second pillar, we talk about expanding to additional vertical. We believe that the success that we have been having for many years in telecommunication and aOS, the agentic operating systems that we are developing and preparing right now for telecommunication, can be relevant for additional vertical. We're talking about high regulated industries that we can take everything that we do there and help this industry to transform as well, again, leveraging our agentic offering from telco.
We think that the time is now. This is the right time, the industries are changing. This is the opportunity for Amdocs to expand and to bring all the value that we have for additional industry. The third pillar talks about new growth horizons. We are facing right now a lot of opportunities for new growth opportunities on top of BSS, OSS, and aOS, on top of going to additional industry. We are seeing right now a lot of challenges and new needs that were never there before for our customers, again, all coming from the agentic era, that we are solving for customers, one customer here, one customer there. We are just solving it on the spot, and we want to look into it and identify at least two, three offerings that we can commercialize and go and sell it globally as another growth engine for the company.
Again, these are opportunities that did not exist before, and now with the agentic era is coming to life, and we are looking for way to make it a growth engine for the company. That is the third pillar that we are going to focus on. The fourth one is internal transformation of the company. We want to see ourself as quote-unquote, "customer zero" of everything that we are offering right now for our customers. For that, we need to transform internally. We are accelerating the internal transformation. We are adopting agentic SDLC processes. We are implementing agentic operations. We are changing the way of working, more builders, less enablers, flattening the organizations, a lot of other changes that we do in the company in order to able to support the growth strategy. One, two, and three will not happen without us transforming internally as a company. These are the four pillars that we see and that will take us in the next several years.
All right. I definitely want to go into a little bit more detail on the agentic operating system.
Yeah.
Really exciting opportunity for the business. You've generated a strong level of initial customer interest here. One of the things you mentioned in your earlier answers was about where we are in the adoption curve and how we're very early innings. In that note, when we think about aOS, what should investors watch for to distinguish from early-stage experimentation to a more durable commercial adoption opportunity?
Yeah. We are quite encouraged from the fact that we already have 10 customers that are using and acquired the aOS platform and already implementing and started to see concrete value from implementing aOS. What we do like to see, and this is the next phase, that th ose initial engagement with customers around aOS will evolve to some meaningful journey with the customer in which we are targeting together with the customer to fundamentally change the way they operate. That's the next level of adoption of aOS. We're happy to report that we have some initial examples of customers that started this journey in a meaningful way. The last example that we shared about a month ago in August is Liberty Latin America. This customer basically decided to go all in with Amdocs.
They handed over the entire IT of Liberty Latin America to Amdocs and asked us to take the full responsibility to transform leveraging aOS and to get them all the benefit that they would like to achieve from the agentic era, much better support to the business, faster launch of products to the market, and not less important, to reduce significantly the cost structure. So they went all in, outsourced the entire IT organization to Amdocs, and asked us to leverage our aOS to help them transform the organization. We believe that there are going to be many other customers that will do the same, mainly Tier 2, Tier 3 customers, not the leading one in the world, but definitely the Tier 2, Tier 3 customers, because they are under a lot of pressure to generate savings, to generate acceleration of the support to the business.
Not all of them has the right talent and capacity and budgets in order to make it happen. Those type of customers will partner with Amdocs in a significant way. Other customers will probably define a different journey or a joint venture or any kind of partnership with Amdocs that will help them realize the value of the agentic era. So what you should see right now is customers moving, and Liberty Latin America is a great example of a customer that is moving to a meaningful journey, trying to fundamentally change the way they operate. That's the phase that we are right now, moving from initial engagement to a meaningful long-term, journeys with key customers.
You brought up the Liberty LatAm deal. What was it about that deal that was unique and made them ready to move from a defined project to an end-to-end transformation, especially in the early stages that we are in?
Yeah. I think it is first and foremost, aOS. They got really excited from the technology, from the capabilities, what we are able to demonstrate to them. This created the main differentiator compared to competitors that came with maybe concept of more for less or other ways to help them reduce costs. But, what really triggered the differentiator was the technology and aOS, that they got very excited. The other thing that you see is that there is a lot of pressure, and it is not just in Liberty Latin America, it is everywhere with all our customers, from the board, from the CEO office to the CTO and CIO, to accelerate. To accelerate the benefits and the potential of AI. What CIOs and CTOs are doing today is not good enough for the board, not good enough for the CEO.
They are pushing them to accelerate, and the push to accelerate and to get a quicker return and quicker outcome and benefits from that is accelerating the discussion with Amdocs on how Amdocs can help in a meaningful way to accelerate the entire process. So these are the two main reasons, the need to accelerate the benefits, plus the excitement from the technology and aOS that we shared with them.
You have positioned aOS as a potential growth catalyst-
Yes
for Amdocs. What, in your view, needs to happen with aOS specifically to move you beyond your historical, roughly low to mid-single-digit growth profile to something that accelerates via your aOS engine that you are positioning here?
Yeah. I think the acceleration in our implementation of aOS is highly dependent on how quickly the industry is going to move forward. We already see in a matter of few months that they are moving for experiment and trying to do things here and there, something more meaningful. This next phase is happening, but the key is going to be how aggressive the industry will be in trying to implement and get the benefit of the agentic technology. If I compare it to other technological shift, major shift that we supported our customers in the past, it reminds me more the days of the digital transformations, in which we saw a much faster acceleration. All our customers wanted to move fast to become digital-first organizations, and therefore, we saw a lot of acceleration in our growth because our customers were moving fast.
We saw that the cloud journey and the cloud transformation will also accelerate our growth. In this case, it happened slower. Again, it all depends on how aggressive our customers are going to be in their desire to start to realize the agentic value. We would like to think about it more as the days of the digital transformation rather than the cloud, which was moving a little bit slower than what we expected.
That is an interesting point then. When you think about the opportunity from aOS, which carries the most execution risk, proving the technology, driving, accelerating customer adoption, or converting that adoption into revenue?
I think it's going to move very quickly once the customer will make up their mind and start to move faster. The adoption, the decision. Right now, some of our customers are still evaluating options and not sure if they want to go option one, option B, option C. The minute they will make a decision that they want to push forward, you will see the acceleration. The acceleration and the adoption of the technology, which I think we're getting a lot of good feedback, so we're not concerned about the technology or the feedback on the technology. It's very positive. I think it's the strategic decision that just experiment here and there is not good enough. If they really want to transform and change the way an operator or carrier is operating today, they need to do something meaningful.
This will be the trigger that will accelerate those journeys all over the world.
How much of the opportunity, in your view, comes from expanding your share of customer IT spend versus actually changing how the work is delivered and priced as the aOS adoption scales?
Right now, in all the discussion, the growth that we will see is coming mainly from expanding the footprint that we have today. Today, in the domain that we're focusing on, BSS, OSS, the Amdocs footprint is usually give or take a third on average. Different customers, a bit less, a bit more, but give or take, we're about a third of the spend of our customers. We believe that right now when everyone is looking to transform the entire BSS domain end-to-end, they will look to give us a bigger piece of the pie and help us transform and help them move faster. The days that, on top of the Amdocs systems, our customers build more and more systems and layer and layer and layers of systems and became a very complex and very cumbersome ecosystems are not going to work for them in the future.
We will take a bigger portion of the pie, and we will help them transform and help them reduce the cost and improve the time to market. That is the plan.
AI should allow Amdocs to perform existing work more efficiently. How do you ensure that productivity becomes financial leverage for the business rather than revenue pressure?
Yeah. One of the goals that we have, together with our customers, is to help them reduce the cost. When you look at the cost, it is not necessarily just the Amdocs cost, it is the entire cost of the entire BSS domain. Again, Amdocs is just a portion, let us say a third of this entire spend. If they want to realize the value, we need to show them how they can shrink and reduce significantly the total cost of funding their BSS and OSS ecosystem. Definitely any engagement will include the reduction in the total TCO of our customers. A win-win engagement will allow Amdocs to increase our share and to grow while we are providing them the total TCO reduction for our customers.
We can only do it by what we said, internal transformation, in which we know how to do things better, cheaper, also internally, and definitely share it with our customers. We believe that there is definitely a win-win model here, that our customers will benefit from that. We will benefit from that. It is not the first time that we are having this kind of discussion with our customers. Now we just have a better lever and a better technology that will allow us to achieve it faster.
Okay. Let's talk a little bit more about Pillar II and III
Yeah
of your strategy, which is new vertical as well as new growth horizons.
Yeah.
Can you go into a little bit more detail on each of those, the drivers behind the vision for those two pillars, and where you think Amdocs is positioned to be differentiated within those?
Yeah. The idea that we can expand to additional vertical is not a new idea at Amdocs. We've been looking into it and examining it and looking into it for quite some time. The concept is very straightforward. If we know to be successful in telecommunication, and we know how to help our customers to transform, and we know how to transform an emission-critical system, and we're coming right now with aOS, the agentic operating system for telecommunication, there's no reason that we cannot take the same benefits and the same playbook and everything that we do in telecommunication and try to help additional industry to transform. And we are not talking about becoming a horizontal company. This is not us. We are very focused on one vertical.
In our plans right now, we're talking about one additional vertical that we're going to be specializing and focusing and go deep in this industry. But we want to become and leverage all the experience that we have, all these years in telecommunication, bring it to this additional industry, and help this industry adapt and realize the value of the agentic opportunity. The time is now because of the capabilities and the opportunities with the agentic technology. We think it should happen now. However, it's a midterm, long-term play. We don't think that we are going to conquer the world in this new vertical so quickly. But over time, as long as we bring more value and more capabilities that we knew how to do very well in telecommunication to this new industry, I think we can help customers in this new industry.
From our perspective, it's a growth engine because we are starting from a very small footprint. We don't have a lot of business there. For us, every engagement is going to be an upside. So on top of the growth that we plan to have within telecommunication, we want to see another growth engine coming from additional vertical, over time, again, leveraging everything that we know how to do well in telecommunication in the new vertical. The third pillar is talking about opportunities that we see right now that are completely new. Everyone is looking right now about a lot of opportunity. Many startups are coming up every other day trying to leverage the agentic technology.
We have the benefit that we see a ll these opportunities, and we see all these challenges and all the needs, the new needs that our customers have today, and we are solving it for them. We are solving it today, so we can solve it for AT&T in the U.S., or we can solve it for PLDT in the Philippines, or we can do it all over the world, but we are familiar and we are aware of these new challenges. Some of them is something that you can replicate, that you can take to market globally. We need to package it, we need to productize it, and then we can go with this solution and sell it globally.
We are looking right now to incubate some of those ideas, and out of them, we believe that it's enough that two or three are going to get a lot of good traction globally, and we'll start to sell it, and then we're going to have another growth engine for the company. So one growth engine is aOS on steroids for telecommunication. The second one, in terms of growth, new markets, new customers, trying to replicate what we do well in telecommunication, and that's the new vertical approach. The third one, new ideas and new needs that we know how to solve that can generate growth for the company. One, two, and three should hopefully bring us over time to the accelerated growth that we would like to achieve.
And when you think about the new verticals pillar
Yeah
how do you think about driving customer adoption in an industry where you are the new entrant? Obviously, when we look at telco, you have
Yeah
tons of referenceability in the space. Customers know you have long-term, established customer relationships. But when you're breaking into a new vertical, obviously, that is all not existing at the time. So how do you think about going from customer 1- 50?
Yeah. So first, when we get to a new industry, we'll have to get some incumbency. It probably is going to include some type of an M&A, because we will need to get customer base, we will need to get some basic knowledge, good technology to begin with. And then we want to try to bring to this industry something new that they haven't experienced so far with the current providers that they have today or the current vendors that they're working with them today. It's the unique business model of Amdocs. It's something that's quite unique, combining product and services, which is something that we don't see happening in many other industries. We're going to try to bring aOS, the agentic operating systems, and show them that things can be done differently.
The accountability model, in which we are basically committing to outcomes, not time material like other SIs and so on. We are going to come with the accountability model. We are going to commit to migrations, to timelines, to budget, and try to deploy the same business model that we did very successfully in telecommunications. This is going to be something new that this new vertical, they do not experience it today, because this is not the way they operate right now. So we believe it is going to be something refreshing, that will create demand and excitement in the new vertical.
Okay, I also want to talk about Pillar IV.
Yeah.
Which is-
The internal
becoming an agentic organization through internal transformation.
Yeah.
Can you tell us a little bit more about that, and why that is important for the future success of the business?
Yeah. We are on this journey for quite some time. It's more than a year that we are implementing internally in the company. We are accelerating everything that we have done so far. I mentioned the agentic SDLC, so want to change fundamentally the way we run our development processes. We're implementing agentic operating capabilities to transform the way we run our operations for our customers. Changing the structure of the team, the way of working. We need to show our customers that everything that we are suggesting to do for them with aOS and all the new ideas that we have about the agentic transformation, we lead by example. We do it first and foremost internally within Amdocs. They get a lot of confidence.
I think it's very hard, it doesn't make sense that you can come and suggest to your customers to do things that you don't do internally within the company. We want to lead, we want to be the first one to show them how it can be done, and we're going to do it internally within the company, within our company. Then I think customers will get more confident and secured to go on this journey that will help them also do it for themselves. It goes together. The internal transformation and the growth opportunity that we have goes, in our view, hand to hand, and we have to lead by example.
Why, in your view, is Amdocs better positioned to lead an end-to-end transformation in the telco industry over a systems integrator, a hyperscaler, or even the customer itself?
Yeah. The transformation that we are leading for our customers is in the domain that we are the number one expert in the world. This is our area, this is the area of expertise, the BSS and OSS domain. This area is something that we have cumulative knowledge from 40 years of running mission-critical systems in this domain. We're not trying to tell our customers, "We're going to lead you in the agentic era with your ERP system." We are not saying, "We're going to do it for you on your HR systems." We're not saying, "We're going to do it for you in the network." These parts, other people can help them, and other people are better than Amdocs to support them and to help them transform. We are focusing on the domain that we are the market leader.
There's no one better than Amdocs that knows the domain of BSS and OSS, has the context, has the data, has the knowledge, has the expertise, and can leverage the technology in order to help them accelerate this journey. So in the area that we are the experts in the world, we think there's no one better than us to help them lead the way and get the benefits from that.
As foundation models become more capable and less expensive, something we've heard a lot about already early on in the conference, which part of the aOS advantage becomes more valuable, and which part becomes easier to replicate, in your view?
Over time, it's becoming obvious that the models will get better and better. The key for success is the context, the knowledge, the know-how. Without it, those models will not generate any credible mission-critical system and will not be able to help our customer to transform. The key differentiator of Amdocs is this know-how, the product, the data, the context, combined with the improved capabilities of the models can give you the best outcome. Therefore, our moat and our differentiator is becoming more and more obvious as people try to start to realize that it's all about the knowledge, it's all about the context, it's all about the people that can actually transform mission-critical systems.
Otherwise, it's extremely complicated for someone from the outside to come and pretend that they can transform and replace mission-critical systems that are running at the heart of the telecommunication without the 40 years of experience and knowledge in this domain. We think it's a stretch. It's something that we believe that has a very small likelihood of happening.
As engagements become more outcome-based, what determines how much of the value created accrues at Amdocs versus accruing at the customer, especially as the customers become more efficient?
Yeah. Again, I think we touched it before. Everyone realized today that it has to go together. The best outcome is not about each one of us optimizing his own portion. The customer is optimizing his own portion, we're optimizing this, and there's so many people that needs to optimize. It's not enough. The real breakthrough will happen in the end-to-end flows. When you look at the entire BSS and OSS, and you're trying to transform the entire domain and replace it with a new aOS, a new agentic operating system, this will give the big revolution that we are trying to bring to our customers. Otherwise, everyone will continue to optimize its own domain. It's not going to give the benefit that our customers are looking for.
All right, great. As we come up on time here, I'd like to finish with a high-level question. In your view, what is the hardest part of the Amdocs investment case for you to explain to investors today? Or said another way, what, in your view, about the Amdocs investment case is most underappreciated?
First, we get very good feedback on the strategy. The four pillar strategies resonate very well, with investors, with analysts, we get very good feedback. Everyone agree on the concept, everyone agree that we came up with the right strategy. What is difficult these days is that all the software company and all the IT services company, it doesn't matter what you do and what you are, everyone was brushed in the same color, and everyone has a big question mark. Are you going to be successful going forward? Is AI going to disrupt you? Are you going to come up and emerge as a winner? Are you going to be a loser? Right now, it's very hard to compete and to confront this general notion that everyone was brushed, it doesn't matter what you do.
It takes time to explain to investors the moat that we have, the fact that we are dealing with mission-critical systems, the fact that we're entrenched with our customers, the fact that we always had outcome-based company, the fact that we have long-term agreements with customers, with good visibility, deep knowledge that only us can leverage right now. There will be huge opportunity right now to help our customers leverage the agentic technology. It's a process. It's going to take time to explain to investors. The best way to do it is, the proof is in the pudding. We need to start to show results, and we need to start to come up with more wins like Liberty Latin America and more aOS adoption of customers.
I think that over time, investors will start to realize that it's not just a good strategy on paper, that we have good progress, and we are executing well based on this strategy.
Great. We are at time. Shimie, thank you so much for joining me on stage today.
Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Thank you.