Welcome to the 2020 Annual Meeting for Innodata Inc. Our host for today's call is Jack Abuhoff, Chairman and CEO. At this time, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. I will now turn the call over to your host, Mr. Abuhoff. You may begin, sir.
Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the 2020 Annual Meeting of Stockholders of Innodata Inc. I am Jack Abuhoff, Chairman of the Board of Directors, President, and Chief Executive Officer of Innodata. Due to the public health impact of the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic and to support the health and safety of our stockholders, employees, directors, and other meeting participants as well, we have changed this year's meeting format to a virtual-only meeting format. Stockholders may submit questions at any time during this meeting in the space provided on the virtual meeting screen. During the meeting, questions from stockholders should pertain to the proposals being considered at that particular time. Stockholders wishing to ask other questions will be given an opportunity to do so in the general Q&A session following the meeting. At this time, I call the meeting to order.
There are three items of business on today's agenda: the election of directors, the ratification of the appointment of the company's independent auditors, and the approval, on an advisory basis, of the compensation of the named executive officers. I will act as Chairman of this meeting. Amy Agress, Innodata's General Counsel and Secretary, will act as Secretary of the meeting. I would like to take this opportunity to introduce Louise Forlenza, Stuart Massey, and Nick Toor, Directors of the Company. Also present is Rob O'Connor, the company's Chief Financial Officer. Mark Spelker, partner of our independent auditors, CohnReznick LLP, is also present, and he will be available to respond to appropriate questions during the general Q&A session. Mr. O'Connor has been appointed to act as the Inspector of Elections.
The Inspector of Elections has presented to the Secretary his signed oath as Inspector of Elections, and such oath will be filed within the minutes of today's meeting. The Board of Directors set April 8, 2020, as the record date for determining persons entitled to vote at this stockholders' meeting. We have a list of the stockholders of record as of that date, and this list is available for inspection during this meeting by any stockholder on the website used to access this meeting. The Secretary will present the affidavit of distribution of the notice of meeting and the accompanying proxy material and annual report, and report on the existence of a quorum for the meeting.
Mr. Chairman, I present a copy of the notice of annual meeting and proxy statements. An affidavit that copies thereof were duly distributed commencing April 21, 2020, to the holders of common stock of the company as of the close of business on April 8, 2020, the record date for the determination of stockholders entitled to vote at this meeting. There are represented at the meeting, either virtually or by proxy, 17,668,485 shares of common stock, 0.01 par value per share common stock, out of the total number of 24,459,359 shares of common stock issued and outstanding and entitled to vote at the meeting.
Each share of common stock is entitled to one vote. Accordingly, there are an aggregate of 24,459,359 votes entitled to be cast at this meeting, of which 72.2% are present virtually or represented by proxy. Accordingly, a quorum is present and the meeting is duly constituted and the business of the meeting may proceed.
Thank you, Ms. Agress. The report of the Secretary on the existence of a quorum is accepted. I direct that the affidavit of mailing be made part of the minutes of this meeting. We may now proceed to transact the business for which this meeting has been called. It is 2:06 P.M. on June 5th, 2020, and the polls for voting on all matters are open. All stockholders entitled to vote at this meeting have the ability to do so online. If you are a stockholder entitled to vote and have not yet voted, or if you want to change your previously cast vote, please do so via the website used to access this meeting. Please remember that if you have already voted by proxy, it is not necessary to vote again. The polls will be closed after we present all matters on the agenda.
The first item of business today is the election of directors. Four directors shall be elected at today's meeting. Those four nominees receiving the highest number of votes or shares present virtually or by proxy at this meeting will be elected as directors. The directors elected today will hold office until the 2021 Annual Meeting of Stockholders and until their successors are duly elected and qualified. As indicated in the company's proxy statement, the Board of Directors has nominated and recommends for the following persons as directors of the company: Jack S. Abuhoff, Louise C. Forlenza, Stuart R. Massey, Nauman Nick Toor. The company's bylaws require that a stockholder provide advance notice to the company of a stockholder's intent to nominate persons as directors. No such notice was received. Accordingly, I declare the nominations for directors closed.
However, it may be good practice to remind stockholders that they have an opportunity for such nomination. The second item of business being submitted to stockholders for action is the ratification of the appointment by the Board of Directors of CohnReznick LLP as the company's independent auditors for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2020. This proposal will pass if it receives the affirmative vote of a majority of the shares present virtually or represented by proxy at this meeting and entitled to vote on this matter. The third item of business being submitted to stockholders for action is the approval, on an advisory basis, of the compensation of the company's named executive officers. This proposal will pass if it receives the affirmative vote of a majority of the shares present virtually or represented by proxy at this meeting and entitled to vote on this matter.
The polls are about to close, so if you have not yet voted, please do so. It is now 2:08 P.M., and since everyone has had the opportunity to vote, the polls are now closed. The Inspector of Elections has delivered his preliminary report, and I will now announce the preliminary results. Based on the Inspector of Elections preliminary report, the four nominees for election as director have been elected as Directors of the Company to serve for the term expiring on the date of the company's 2021 Annual Meeting of Stockholders until his or her successor has been duly elected and qualified.
A majority of the shares present at this meeting virtually or by proxy and entitled to vote on the matter voted in favor of the ratification of the appointment of CohnReznick LLP to act as the company's independent auditors for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2020, and accordingly, this proposal has been ratified. A majority of the shares present at this meeting virtually or by proxy and entitled to vote on the matter voted in favor of the approval, on an advisory basis, of the compensation of the company's named executive officers, and accordingly, this proposal has been approved. We will file the final report of the Inspector of Elections with the records of this meeting. We expect to report the results of voting on a Form 8-K to be filed with the SEC within four business days of this meeting. That concludes the business of the meeting.
The meeting is now adjourned. I now invite you to ask any questions you have regarding the company and its business. To stay compliant with SEC regulations, our responses to your questions will be current through May 14th, the date of Innodata's earnings call and filing for the 10-Q for the first quarter. Please follow the instructions provided on the virtual meeting screen to submit your questions. The first question we have is from Tim Clarkson, and Tim has asked, "How are gross margins on future business likely to be? How much of your new business are in the United States? And what issues could stop Innodata from succeeding in AI?" Tim, thank you for those questions. I'll take them each in order. First, how are gross margins on future business likely to be?
Looking at the business that we're now bidding on, what we see is that there will be, well, I'll start with price. There will be a range of price, and price is typically a function of complexity, so there's certain low-level, low-complexity work that will have lower prices, certain high-level complexity work using AI for complex document analyzers, chatbots, image recognition, work like that will demand a higher price. The important thing is, I think, on the cost side, we can align our costs to the market prices, and that will be a function of what we're looking to do, which is to shift from one-off services to repeatable solutions to be more efficient, and within each of these kinds of work that we're doing, we're creating annotation and extraction platforms where there would be much lower incremental cost, and the best gross margin would be achieved.
Create repeatable solutions for each of those ranges. We believe we will tend to navigate to the more complex requirements, which will demand higher pricing, but we'll be aligning our cost structures to, and our responses are our solutions to those price points in order to sustain the kinds of gross margins that we've been obtaining, either that we've won or that we're actively bidding on and in discussions about, is in the United States, and that's chiefly a function of the way we've deployed our marketing and our sales since we began earnestly pursuing a lot of this new business in late last year. We think that we're going to continue with that focus and deploying sales executives in Europe as well, but for now, it's mostly US. Tim's third question, "What issues could stop Innodata from succeeding at AI?" Tim, I think that's a great question.
I think there are a couple of things that we're trying to do right. I think in terms of what could stop us from succeeding, I think first, if we fail to pursue and align ourselves to the right AI use cases, we could fail. We believe that the right AI use cases are true data-driven intelligence use cases, not just automation, and that we see as we move through the hype cycle of AI and people start to understand where it works and where it doesn't work, where it works and where the best value is obtained is where AI acts intelligently and helps people make important decisions with data, and that's what we're going to be lining up against. Second thing that occurs to me is we could fail if we're not leveraging technology appropriately.
There are a number of competitors in the market for AI data preparation services that don't approach the problem as data engineers as we do, but instead approach the problem as crowdsourcing, as inherently a resource-gathering problem. We approach it as data engineers, which means we leverage technology. We use AI to create AI training data, and we spent three years developing AI. That AI, we now market as AI catalysts, which can be used in order to annotate data more efficiently and more accurately. That's an important step for us. I think, lastly, the thing that occurs to me is we could fail if we fail to conserve the right things about who we are, and we fail to abandon aspects of our business that may no longer be relevant for these new markets.
So I think the important thing for us to conserve is everything that enables us to win on data quality. Data quality is so important to training AI because if you feed data to AI engines, if you're training AI with poor quality data, you're propagating those errors. Those errors will fail projects. The work that we're bidding on, we're winning because of data quality. And I believe we're the best in the world in terms of high-quality data engineering. And that's a function of technology, process, and people. We're going to conserve that. That's critically important. Now, what we may abandon is some of the constraints that we've had in the past. A constraint we've had in the past is thinking that we have to work in physical environments. We have to work with locally owned data centers. We have to work in set geographies.
I think one of the positives, one of the opportunities that may result from the COVID crisis is we're seeing that we can selectively abandon some of those constraints. That will enable us as we move away from local data centers, as we expand our geographies, as we stop thinking in terms of physical facilities, but think about the ability to work remotely. That will create a much more scalable opportunity for us.
So I think the key there is to not failing in that respect is to leverage everything that we are and have been, everything that enables us to create data that is virtually error-free historically for companies like Apple and Amazon and Bloomberg, Hancock, the Bank of New York Mellon, and to leverage that, but also selectively abandoning things that may not be relevant as we proceed to execute our plans in the future with a view to being more scalable. Thank you for those questions. I'll pause for a minute. If there are any other questions that anybody has, please enter them into the virtual meeting. I'm not seeing any other questions being asked. So I'll take this opportunity to thank you all for attending today's meeting. Thank you for your continued interest in Innodata.
We're very excited about where we're going and what we're doing right now. And we look forward to reporting to you our progress as we move through the year.
This now concludes the meeting. Thank you for joining, and have a pleasant day.