Hey Brendan. All right, we're gonna get started. Thanks for everyone for joining. My name is Tien-Tsin Huang. I'm the IT Services Analyst here at JP Morgan, really happy and grateful to have Martin Schroeter here, CEO at Kyndryl, to join us and have a fireside chat. I've taken a lot of questions from the investment community, Martin, we'll go through them over the next 30 minutes or so, thank you for being here. Means a lot to me.
Thank you, Tien-Tsin Huang. Delighted to be here. I appreciate it.
I know how busy you are, a lot of demands on your time. I'll be efficient, thinking about how to start the conversation, Martin. I know you're always on the road, you're meeting with clients, you're talking to CEOs, you know, CIOs, boards, what have you. You guys touch a lot of IT estate across large enterprises. What are you hearing from those counterparts that I mentioned? What's been changing? How are you changing the strategy to address what you're hearing on the ground?
Yeah, it's a great question. Good afternoon, everybody, thank you for joining us here in person. Brendan, nice to see you. I guess there are some, what I'll call, kind of long arc themes that are evident in nearly every customer conversation.
Okay.
A little bit different, and as you said, well, we run, you know, we run a lot of workload, regulated workloads, right? We're in mission critical, so the way we feel things is a little bit different than some others. Let me go through sort of what I see as the kinda consistent themes with our, with our-
Yes
customer base. First and foremost, both cybersecurity and resiliency remain top of mind. Even, you know, even today with AI starting to have a bigger and bigger impact on how the world works, that is not going to change the focus on cybersecurity and resiliency other than to say it's going to go up another notch.
Sure
again, right? The idea of securing yourself, but more importantly, the idea that you can be resilient, which regulators have now taken up in different parts of the world, European banking, for instance. Cybersecurity, resiliency, a long arc theme where we play already and is going to continue. The second I would put into the sort of the context of all of the new innovation that's coming out, we'll just throw AI as the sort of one of those things.
AI and all of the technologies around it really lead to a discussion around modernization. AI, you know, one way to think about AI metaphorically is that there is now this shiny new bullet train that can go 200 miles an hour, but most companies still have tracks that were built for the 30 mile an hour era. To modernize to get ready to use that AI takes a lot of work. Our customer base is keen to figure out how to modernize, recognizing that these are not systems that you can take offline and modernize them and then bring them back up, right? This is very much a run, transform, run world, which is what we do, which is what we do very well.
Security resiliency, still top of mind, modernization, still top of mind. We get into what is ever increasingly difficult. There's the sort of the geopolitics. The reason it's important, particularly in what we do, is, for instance, in many parts of the world, the idea of sovereignty is top of mind. You cannot have a discussion with a company in Europe, most parts of Asia, South America, Latin America, without talking about sovereignty. Sometimes it's data sovereignty, sometimes it's AI sovereignty. The idea of sovereignty is making the world more complex again.
At the end of the day, sovereignty for our customer base is really about control, and how do I make sure I understand the status of my systems today, and how do I make sure that I'm building something that will survive whatever the geopolitics are of the day. For us, again, it translates to a more complex IT estate, a more hybridized estate. We're seeing, in fact, an increased interest in private clouds just because of the sovereignty issue alone. We have all of these sort of, I'll call them, again, long arc trends. They're not going to change. Cybersecurity and resiliency is going to be important for a long time, forever. I mean, we could probably say forever.
We know that there are always going to be systems that need to be modernized. Yes, today it's driven by AI, it's driven by new data technologies and we don't know the geopolitics. Again, given the role we play in the world, when our customers are looking to modernize, they also want to be able to modernize for something that's gonna give them comfort for the next four, five, six years and adaptability that they need. I would put those three as the big sort of themes. In any given region, it could be a little bit different. It may be weighted a little bit differently, but those are the big three themes that you cannot meet with a customer without being ready to talk about.
Good. No, that's a good, that's a good summary. I think on the call, I think I just jotted it down as you were calling it out, Martin, you described some of these extended decision cycles due to some of these same things, sovereignty. I think you also talked about AI choices and some of the regulatory complexity, which you could argue maybe is part of the whole geopolitical piece. We talked about this a little bit before we started, right, Martin? How much of this is just the new normal? I know we've been waiting for inflections and pivots and changes in discretionary spend, but how do you see the change that could trigger up or down?
So-
spend?
Yeah, I think that the things that I identified and on both on the call, and again, I've put sovereignty back on the table. This is now the new reality because every company operates within a legal framework driven by the country that they're in. That country is responsible to a citizenry, et cetera. You know this as well as anybody. Again, given the role we play and what we do, this is the new norm of decision-making. How do I make sure we sign contracts five, six, seven years? How do I make sure that I have the flexibility I need with the partner who I really need who can lead me into that new world? I would say, to use your shorthand, I would say that is the new normal.
How do I really think about where I want to be for the next four, five, or six years? There are always in the minds of our customer base, all customers, you know, all enterprise IT runs on a business case, and a lot of those business cases are driven either by productivity or growth. That tends to be more fed by macro. Is that the new normal? Well, this macro will change again. Right now, people I think are feeling like, "I really need to be in AI. I really need to figure it out for my company, which means I need to make investments in modernization." That can also change again in the future, right? As the promise of AI starts to be realized more and more places, I think we'll see that shift.
As we sit here today, 99%, I'd like to say all, but I won't use the superlative. Nearly every business case that we help our customers build on AI is productivity driven. Productivity driven. To give you an example, we agentified, I'm not sure if that's a verb yet or not.
Sure
We introduced Agentic AI into one of our banking customers', KYC, know your customer, onboarding process. We will save them 30%, 40%, we'll make it a lot faster for them. That's how they did their business case. They also believe very strongly, though, that they were able because they were able to take the time in their KYC process to onboard a customer from, call it 25 days to about 25 minutes. They believe that, yes, they built their business case on productivity, but that will lead to more growth. I think as we prove to our customers, as our customers prove to themselves that it's not just about productivity, there will be more and more of a growth component coming to AI.
It, you know, AI, again, has to be the technology works, but you have to get your employees ready for it as well. You have to get new ways of working. Again, I go through all of that because while there are things that are part of the new normal, sovereignty as an example, new technologies are always gonna be coming in. There are some that are driven by macro, and we'll have to see how AI starts to prove itself in real use cases as it makes the shift from being, again, nearly entirely productivity driven to being growth oriented as well.
Okay. Yeah. Well, the models are improving. You gave a good example. You also did mention that April was a good sales month with a couple of deals closing, and so that was promising. I don't know, was there a moment maybe where things got more clarity and you saw activity happen in April? I'm just curious how we should interpret that.
Yeah. Look, I think I'll tell you how I interpret it, right? A couple of things. We did see a number of deals move a little bit to the right as we came out of the last quarter, out of the end of the fiscal year. Not a surprise. Again, because of the nature of what we do, because of the many, many, many constituencies involved, regulators, employees, management, CIO, et cetera, because you have to bring all these together at a certain time, it's never a surprise to us if a decision gets moved by sometimes it's by hours, sometimes it's by weeks.
In April, we happened to close a bunch of deals, and we actually got more, again, closed that will close for the year. We did have a very good start to the signings year. As you and I have talked over the years, you know, we've always been focused. After we went through our focus accounts process, and we were very focused on engineering a decline and getting certain content out, we've been focused now on making sure that the signings number exceeds revenue over time so that, you know, we can get back to a consistent level of growth. I, again, I feel pretty good about the where we are now and what we've already gotten done in the quarter.
I look at our pipeline, and our pipeline is already better than it was last year at this time. It's a pretty good mix of new content and existing customers and entirely new customers as well. A good start to what is every year an important year, but a good start to a very important year for us.
Good. I know you and Lori and team and now Harsh have always said, right, don't spend too much time focusing on signings. Of course, the quality of the signings do matter. Now that you've been through some of the cycle and you mentioned the pipeline is good, is it safe to say the quality is what you're looking for, whether it's book-to-bill or gross profit book-to-bill, short-term, long-term?
A few things. The short answer is yes, I'm pleased with where the pipeline sits, and I'm pleased with it for a number of reasons. We have, I think, been very focused and you know this, we've been very focused on improving the fundamental profitability of Kyndryl, and I think we've made a lot of progress.
Yeah.
Additionally, I think the agentic world and our own experience with agentic suggests that we have really two things going for us within our business model.
Okay.
One is that, you know, because we're really kind of an outcome-based services business, right. We have to deliver uptime, we have to deliver resiliency features, we have to deliver security features. We've proven over the last four and a half years now that as we automate things, that, you know, yes, we have to deliver some savings to our customers, they're looking for productivity, but we also get to keep some of that ourselves.
What I think is exciting for us in this more outcome-based business model is that agentic can help that quite a bit. We have, as we sit here now, 1,370 agents in the infrastructure. This is not the agents that our staff build to help them perform their jobs. These are agents in the infrastructure making us more productive.
Right.
Making us able to automate things, allowing us to deliver higher quality services. Again, as we introduce more and more agents, yes, we're gonna deliver a value prop to our customers that's really meaningful. I mentioned the bank example. We also have proven that we get to keep that as well, some of that as well. When I look at the pipeline, I'm excited about the content in it because it is increasingly making more and more use of our own agents. It's making more and more use of our own automation, which again, we've proven we get to keep a piece of. It has a bit of a mix to it that I'm really pleased with.
One is, as we've invested in more and more capabilities, we've been able to expand the scope with our existing customers. As you said well a few minutes ago, you know, certain signings mean a lot to growth, and certain signings could just mean you've renewed something and that's not gonna change the trajectory. It's good you got it renewed, you didn't lose it, but you're not changing the trajectory. It's always been important for us as we've reoriented to growth to focus on expanding those relationships and expanding the future revenue growth opportunities for us. You know, in a place like the U.S. where sovereignty is not at all an issue, right? We never slow a discussion down about sovereignty in the U.S.
We got the U.S. back to growth already last quarter, and they've got a good growth profile ahead of them. Some of that's driven by new content within our existing customer base, and some of it's driven by new customers who, you know, they are now more and more increasingly comfortable with us as a services provider.
Many of them would have either had a little bit of experience with us with one of our hyperscaler partners, or more likely, they've have a little bit of experience with us in the consult side, but now that can turn into a much more robust, bigger, more substantial managed relationship. Pipeline's bigger. It's got a good mix. It's going to increasingly take use of our own agentic, which allows us not only to deliver a great value prop, but we get to keep some of that as well.
Is that the answer to the phasing of the year when we think about first quarter being the trough and second half having some acceleration?
It-
To the phasing?
Yeah, it's some of it. Some of it is certainly driven by the pipeline.
Yeah.
You know, we've also made a decision to take a bunch of cost out of our business. From a profit perspective, the first quarter absolutely will be the trough. That will then start to pay back already, you know, second quarter and obviously second half, and then give us a big lift into next year. From a revenue standpoint, the short answer is yes. Our timing of looking at deals and when they were signed and what our pipeline looks like says second half will be the stronger half relative, well, within the year. First half a little bit slower, second half a bit stronger.
Good. Okay. We'll get into some more of the details, but I think, you know, when people are submitting questions for me to ask, the IBM piece did come up, you know, quite a bit. I know that's a part of the story and the visibility. Just remind us there with the commercial dynamics. I know that's putting pressure on revenue and signings, but it's not impacting profits. That's very, very clear to us. Just tell us about the visibility, and I know you've called out a 3-point headwind in the charts. How do you see that, those lines behaving, let's say, in the next two to three years?
Yeah. We did. All your data, you always get your data right.
You can present it to us.
We did expect that by now, if you had asked us a few years ago, you know, "What's the long-term impact?" Again, focus accounts, our goal was to remove a lot of the hardware and software content from IBM and have them go direct, and again, hugely successful. It's a part of what's allowed us to improve the profitability. We would have expected now that customers would make sort of a consistent set of decisions, which would basically, we would have thought it would have eliminated the headwind. Our experience last year was that, no, it's much more complex than just that. It doesn't take a big number of customers.
You know, two or three customers say, "You know, instead of getting my mainframe and my software through you, even though I understand why it might be more appealing, I'm just gonna buy direct. I want a relationship with the, with the owner of the IP." Again, for, as you said, well, yes, it's a signings and a revenue headwind, but no impact to profit because we have no ability to mark up their mainframes. We have no ability to mark up their software. We would have thought it would be behind us. It's not behind us as we enter this year, given the choices that customers made last year. We see another 3-point headwind.
Over time, it has to start to diminish because, you know, when we were first spun out, our hardware and software bill to IBM was about $4 billion, and last year it was under $2 billion, just under $2 billion , right? We've taken a lot out. There's probably a few more customers I would assume this year who are gonna say, you know, make a similar decision. "I'm gonna go buy my hardware, software directly from IBM." We're completely cool with it. It will over time diminish. It does, as you said, well, it makes the story a little bit more complex, I think, than what some people would like, which is, well, just what's the headline growth rate and what's the growth rate?
For us, you know, we printed last year down three, and the IBM piece was about a 3.5-point headwind. On the things that really mattered to us, we had, you know, some growth for the full year. This year we, you know, we guided to down two to flat, and with, again, a similar 3-point headwind. We're kinda guiding to, you know, to up one to three, kind of in, again, outside the content. We'll have to see again how customers start to make that choice.
Other than us, estimating the IBM impact and the length of time, other than that, I'd say that the rest of the business is kind of performing the way we would have thought it was already a number of years ago. We're kind of on track with where we thought we would be.
Yeah. Okay. No, it's a good lesson. We'll, you know, focus on it more ex the IBM piece and, like I said, the profit story is different than the revenue and the signing story. Okay. No, thanks for going through that. Let's, time is going quickly. Consult. Let's talk about Consult. That was a, you know, double-digit grower for you in fiscal 2026. You exited at a lesser rate. What's assumed in the 2027 outlook? Is it hard to replenish growth in Consult?
The way we built our guidance, let me start there.
Please.
You know, we do need Consult to continue to grow, but we can actually deliver the revenue, the - 2 to flat, again, with the IBM headwind. We can do that if Consult is growing, you know, sort of low double-digit to even high single-digit. We still make it, right? We didn't want to overly rely. Yes, we're of course, if you ask the Consult team what are their growth targets, they're far in excess of anything I've just imagined. We also had some uncertainty around all the things we talked about. What does macro really look like? What does the sovereignty discussion really look like? We don't need it to grow at the same rates it has been growing.
Look, it's much bigger obviously than it was when we started, so the dollar amount that it lends is a similar dollar amount even though the growth rate starts to slow. We see, and we hear from our customers an incredible demand profile around, again, the things we do. The idea of modernization given the challenges our customers have is very real, very top of mind, very front and center for them and, you know, in each of the examples I've used, like the banking example and agentify, and we have similar examples in government where we've done this with the government of UAE. We just announced a deal with a state government here where we're gonna modify their DMV system.
Each of those has a consult component to it and then a run component to it. Consult's still a very important growth factor for us, and Our guidance is not built on it growing like 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%. It really just has to continue to perform on a consistent basis. We see the pipeline for it. We're pretty comfortable. Right now we're pretty comfortable with what we see in order to deliver the guidance.
Good. Good. Then on the managed services front and the underlying assumption there, should we assume any kind of lockstep or?
The managed services.
Okay
component, we see, I'd say, two things. One, it is where the IBM-.
Yep
impact sits, right?
Yep.
And since it's, you know, 75% roughly of the business, it has a, you know.
Outsized
outsized impact on it, right? Outside of that, you know, we've said now for four and a half years since we were spun, we said that over time, because of the shape of the backlog we inherited, we're gonna go have to rebuild that backlog. We're starting to get to the point now where managed services is stable, right? We don't need to get back to growth yet, but it's stabilizing, and over time it is a growth opportunity.
I think the work we do around managing, you know, more than half the world's outsourced mainframes and managed mainframes, that's ultimately going to be a growth vector for us. Low single digit growth, but it can be a growth vector for us. I see the managed business as stabilizing and starting to come back, and over time, this will be a growth part of the business as well.
Okay, good. Hyperscalers I think has been a big growth driver. Obviously, you give a lot of great statistics around that. The penetration rate is higher, Martin. I'm trying to think about, you know, what's the next leg of growth on the hyperscaler side?
Yeah.
Are you doing something differently to spur growth or?
So-
amplify growth?
There is still a lot for us to get done here, right? Again, if I step back and I look at the sort of the big picture, IBM was $4 billion of our spend, down to under $2 now. Hyperscalers were basically zero when we were spun out because we didn't have relationships.
Yeah
with them. Very quickly, I think the team done a phenomenal job of building what is essentially a nearly $2 billion business, right?
We sort of crossed that. It's not a vitally important sort of statistic. They're not related necessarily, except by what it tells us about what our customers think about us, which is, I believe we've repositioned the business now to very much be part of our customers' future as opposed to just part of their past.
Yep.
We see future growth with hyperscalers really coming in two ways. One is we have a lot more customers that we have to penetrate still here and, you know, most every one of our customers has picked a hyperscaler, sometimes two. Many of them have commitments that they need help with how to consume that over time. We still have a lot more to penetrate within our customer base. Importantly, because, you know, we have, just so it's clear, you know, we're not taking the consumption of the hyperscalers' content and moving that. That's not what we're counting as hyperscaler business. We're talking about the services we've built around the hyperscalers that our customers need in order to run workloads on a hyperscaler cloud.
We have security services and resiliency services and data services that's really the, what makes up that nearly $2 billion of revenue. Because those are the platforms on which they're growing. Those are growing workloads for us as well. Not only are we sort of still underrepresented across our customer base for that content, but they are attached to the growth vectors that our customer's on. That's where their incremental dollar is going. That's why, you know, the, the message that we've been clear about is that that's why we feel like we've repositioned to very much be about their future, not just about their past.
Yeah. No, I like that phrasing. It's helpful to think about it 'cause Yeah. Well, let's come back to it.
Yeah.
I thinking about hyperscaler, more room for penetration, you also talked about private cloud. You know, the sovereignty piece makes a lot of sense on why you're seeing more private cloud. What are you advising your clients there with respect to private cloud, hyperscalers? Obviously, there's consequences on, in terms of growth and how you staff. What does that dynamic mean for you?
Yeah. What we're seeing in our customer base is an increased interest in private cloud. Sovereignty is part of the driver. Some of it is around just wanting to make sure that they can answer a regulator's question. As you move certain workloads onto a cloud, the key question from any regulator, it's gonna be a little reductive, but the questions the regulators ask are, you know, where is your data right now? Like exactly where is your data right now, and who can see it? Who has access to your data? As workloads have moved, particularly, systems of engagement workloads have moved onto public clouds, that's a little bit easier to get your head around.
It's a little bit easier to answer those questions and some of those workloads aren't regulated, like let's say a banking system or an insurance business. What private cloud allows you to do is not just take advantage of the innovation cycle and delivery of a cloud-
It also allows you to put more regulated kinds of workloads because you have the control, and you can answer the questions. Then on top of all of that, you can be more confident that in three years' time or four years' time, or five years' time, that whatever the geopolitical environment is, your private cloud will probably be okay.
Sure.
It's multifaceted, but we do see an increased interest again in private cloud because it's around control, and You still get many of the innovation delivery features that you would expect out of a public cloud. Keep in mind from a cloud perspective, the public clouds are delivering a lot of innovation. AI is a good example. For customers to really consume it takes a lot of work, right? You probably can't keep up at a, at too fast a pace with all the innovation that's being delivered, and therefore a private cloud can suit your cycle time.
I see.
for innovation as well. Yes, increased interest in private cloud.
Yeah. From an economic standpoint, implications to Kyndryl?
Look, for us, anything, complexity is our friend here, right? We really get paid for two things. We get paid because our customers trust us, and we get paid because we can help them manage their complexity. To the extent that any of our customers decide that for certain workloads, we can see why we wanna put them onto a public cloud, take advantage of that, and for other workloads, we wanna build a new private cloud, take advantage of that, anything that adds to that complexity says they need Kyndryl more. All of these things tend to be a tailwind for us.
Okay. Good. Let's Less than seven minutes left. Let's do workforce rebalancing then. It's just to make sure we hit that. I know that you mentioned that, you know, you're dealing with lower involuntary attrition and that was a part of it. The question I have is just that versus seeking efficiency, what was the motivating factor to arrive at the level of workforce rebalancing you announced?
Yeah. It's not one thing, it's multiple things, right?
Okay.
We did, and we talked about this already coming out of the third quarter, our attrition rates dropped dramatically. I don't think it was just us, I think it was a more of an industry-wide event. Attrition for us has been our friend. We've been very successful in our Advanced Delivery initiatives to free up people-
Right
To reskill them, and then put them back in, into the business. In order to put them back in, you need a seat, and when attrition is your friend and people are moving and turning over, you have plenty of seats from which to choose. When attrition dropped, now there were no open seats, right? Look, it's, it's part of it then is, well, we do have, we do sort of have control of our own destiny, and we don't need this level of delivery resource given how successful we've been at automation.
We'll just make it an investment, and we'll, you know, we'll reduce our labor costs in w ithin the year, it's kind of neutral-ish at the bottom line, but next year it'll deliver a big benefit to us. That's part of it. Secondly, I'd say that, you know, we're always looking for ways to be more efficient. When we were born, when we were spun out four and a half years ago, it was a very heavy staff place, and we've been successful in reducing what it costs to run the place. You know, early on when we were on the IBM systems before we came out through the TSAs.
Yeah
We, you know, we made a decision to go all cloud, you know, no mainframes. We've taken big steps to improve how we operate, but there's always new ways to operate. There's always new ways to be more efficient, part of this is also us operating more efficiently. Some of it's driven by attrition or lack of attrition and our ability to find new ways to deliver and very successfully implementing Advanced Delivery initiatives, and some of it's just by our desire or need and our ability to cost less to run the place.
Staying with the workforce then, Martin, just I know it's a I'm not looking for you to pre-announce anything, and I know it's always a difficult subject to talk about publicly. Just your thoughts on workforce longer term in general, in not even just AI, but everything we've talked about. There's so much change that's happening, and I know retraining and recertifying is a big part of the playbook. As you're thinking around the workforce and where you wanna be, changed at all since last, I guess, last year that you were here when I asked you the same question?
We have one year now under our belts of understanding how, for instance, agentic can be used, right, in our own. I mentioned we have 1,370 agents.
Yep.
unique proprietary agents in the infrastructure. As you know, they spin themselves up, and they spin themselves down, so we could have 10,000 agents working. Those 10,000 agents are helping our teams collect the data, interpret the data, compare the data with all the data we have. Over time, everything that leads up to making a decision could change. That's the most inefficient part of what we were doing anyway. The decision-making doesn't change. We still have, you know, person over the top to make sure that as we adjust an infrastructure, as we learn about what's happening, that decision-making stays the same. It's still a person who has to make decisions. Do we automate things? Yes.
We automate things after we're very comfortable that our engineering experts on a particular customer in a particular industry on a particular workload are very comfortable letting a machine do some of this. It's only the stuff that leads up to the decision that's changing, and that's making our teams far more efficient. I'll give you an example. Many of our agents are focused on root cause analysis, one of our agents is very focused on when a problem occurs in the infrastructure, this agent, instead of having our engineers who used to have to do this. By the way, I should say, and this I'm sure it happens in JPMorgan the same way.
If there's an incident in the infrastructure, everybody gets on the Bridge, and the half of the team that represents the infrastructure says the applications are the problem, and the half that represent the application say the infrastructure is the problem. That's every Bridge call I've ever been on for forever.
That has gone away now because we actually have an agent, agents who are out now collecting all the logs from the relevant systems because they monitor everything. They're comparing those logs to what we've seen in other instances.
Good call.
You get to root cause instead of in 30 minutes or 45 minutes or one hour. You get to root cause much, much quicker. The engineers that sit on top of all this are still the ones saying, "Okay, now that we have all this data, can we really focus on what the problem is? What's the course of action?" It is making us more efficient, but it's making us more efficient in the lead-up to the decision. The decision still needs the deep engineering expertise, the knowledge of the systems, the playbooks, the ways of working. All of that is still sitting within our teams. I would say our teams feel like they're getting better supported now by the AI because they actually have data faster, and they can make progress faster.
That, for us, allows our customers to think about, you know, Can I move a little bit faster? Because I can get things, I can fix problems faster, right. It's sort of reinforcing for our customers to know that our agents can help our experts get them going faster, get to the bottom of it, so they're willing to try a few more. They can try some new innovations. They can lean in a little bit on AI or some other new innovation.
Good. We have, what, 45 seconds left or so. Always trying to think of a good closing question. I was debating a bunch of different ones. We talked about a lot of different things. This sector's been under a lot of pressure, a lot of questions around geopolitical, AI, everything you've talked about. You're in a, you know, managing estates, it's much more stable. What do you think? What could change investor sentiment in your mind that you're excited about sort of giving us some data points to reveal?
Yeah
Say, "Hey, you know, things are actually moving in the direction that we planned.
Well, the more time I spend with our customers, the clearer it is to me that the role we play in getting them ready for the future and modernizing them is a very important role. They can't do it without us.
Sure.
We are in the trust business, so they do trust us to run their infrastructure for them, and they are increasingly trusting us to take them into the future, and not just run their past. Again, I see that in the pipeline. I hear that from our customer base. We just signed, it was now a couple of weeks ago, I think, we signed a very big relationship with the Bank of Luxembourg.
Right.
They put out a press release. We put out a press release. I think it's emblematic of the way the important companies in industries like banking and insurance and all, the companies that really make the world work, it's emblematic of how they think about what we can bring to the table and who should they partner with for all the complexity they're faced with. I go through all of that because I think in the agentic world, in the AI world, it's moving toward us. It's not moving away from us.
In the AI world, in the agentic world, it's about your infrastructure, right? The can the tracks support the speed of the train? It's about data. That's what we do. That's what we've done for a long, long time. Again, we are the ones who help the, who bring the steak to the sizzle, right? If today's sizzle is AI, we're the ones who are gonna make that work.
Good. That's a good way to end the conversation. Martin, thank you for the time.
Thank you, Tien-Tsin Huang. Always a pleasure.