I think we're ready. Well, thank you everyone for joining us here today. My name is Maggie Nolan, and I'm the analyst here at William Blair that covers IT services, including TaskUs. I'm required to inform you that for a complete list of research disclosures or potential conflicts of interest, please visit our website at williamblair.com. So TaskUs is a digital-first outsourcer. They're focused on customer experience, trust and safety, and AI services. We're excited to have with us here today, Bryce Maddock. He's the CEO of TaskUs. Thank you for joining us, Bryce, and he's going to give an overview of the company, and then we'll do a little bit of moderated Q&A after that. Immediately after this session, we'll be breaking out for additional Q&A. That's in Room Jenny B, so we invite you to join us there, and with that, I'll turn it over to Bryce.
Thanks so much, Maggie. I'll start just with a general introduction of our business. We are a leading provider of outsourced digital services and next-generation customer experience to the world's most innovative companies. We support everyone from the world's largest technology companies, to Fortune 500 enterprises, to high-growth startups. To give some tangible examples of this, if something goes wrong with the meal you ordered in a food delivery app, there's a chance that you'll be messaging with our TaskUs teammates to resolve the issue. TaskUs customer experience teams support delivery apps in three-sided marketplaces, coordinating between drivers, restaurants, and hungry customers. On many of the world's largest social media sites, you rely on us to protect you and your families from offensive content, misleading advertisements, and foreign interference in our election process.
TaskUs Trust and Safety teams develop and implement content moderation policies for social networks, dating apps, and online job sites. If you chat with a Generative AI chatbot or take a ride in a self-driving car, that's us too. TaskUs AI Services teams help to produce and annotate the content that is used to build Large Language Models and develop the latest autonomous vehicle technology. Our work with these clients has grown our business to $924 million in revenue in 2023, and 23.9% adjusted EBITDA margins, making us amongst the most profitable companies in our space. 2023 was a challenging year for us, as increasingly cost-focused clients optimized workflows and shifted large amounts of work from our onshore to offshore locations. 2024 has started much stronger and is shaping up to be a very good year.
We are pleased that we beat our top end, the top end of our revenue guidance in Q1 of 2024 by $3 million, and we're pleased to share with investors that we now expect to return to year-over-year revenue growth in Q2 of 2024, and for that growth to accelerate in each subsequent quarter of the remainder of the year. But to share a bit more about TaskUs, I want to take you back to the beginning. Sorry, in 2008, my business partner, Jaspar, and I started TaskUs as a virtual personal assistant business, and this was our office. In fact, it was just the 2 windows in the upper left-hand corner of this building. We opened this office to support that virtual assistant business and struggled mightily in the first few years.
We couldn't figure out how to scale the business, so we pivoted to building teams of people to support some of our friends' startup companies. A number of those startups grew exponentially and turned to us for support in their, in their operational growth. We grew from 5 employees one year to 100 the next, 1,000 a few years later, and then 5,000 a few years after that. Today, we have nearly 50,000 teammates working in 27 locations across 12 different countries, supporting 200 of the world's leading companies. In 2024, we expect that all of our geographies, with the exception of the US, will grow revenue on a year-on-year basis. We have seen tremendous interest for our offshore and nearshore offerings, so we expect that growth to continue in the years to come.
Our clients rely on us for specialized services, which I'll go through in a bit more detail. Our largest service is Digital Customer Experience. Here we provide customer support and advanced technical support to businesses and consumers. From ride-sharing apps to video games to SaaS products, we provide the white-glove customer experience that leading brands are known for. The digital nature of the support we provide allows us to automate a greater portion of these interactions, to support multiple interactions concurrently, and to use support staff based in higher-margin offshore geographies. In our Trust and Safety business, our teammates moderate live content anywhere that user-generated texts, photos, videos, and live streams appear. We review posts from users and advertisers for most major social networks, who are the largest buyers of this service.
When we talk about trust and safety services, there's often an assumption that we're looking exclusively at graphic content, when in reality, the vast majority of the content we review is innocuous and far more nuanced. For example, we run multiple ad review operations, combating misleading advertisements, and we have a very large political ad moderation offering, which we expect to be very active in the upcoming election cycle. But trust and safety goes far beyond social media. We work with online job sites, reviewing job posts to prevent common scams, and dating apps to combat on-platform harassment. For a second year in a row, Everest Group named TaskUs a leader in their Trust and Safety Services PEAK Matrix.
This recognition reflects our continued progress in articulating and delivering our vision of Trust and Safety, combining a hybrid solution of humans and AI to detect and remove harmful content. Additionally, for the first time, we were named a leader in Everest Group's Financial Crime and Compliance PEAK Matrix, which is a testament to the strength of these solutions that we have seen our fintech clients, in particular, begin to turn to us for in recent years. At TaskUs, we've been supporting the development of AI applications for over a decade. Over that period, we have transcribed and annotated millions of audio clips to create the technology at the foundation of models like Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri. We outlined and tagged millions of images of street scenes to build the tech that has taught autonomous vehicles, like those from Waymo and Cruise, to drive.
Every day we're seeing more and more of these applications in our daily lives. Often, when people think about artificial intelligence, there's an assumption that this relies solely on super smart computer scientists who are writing code that enables a paper to write itself or a speaker to understand what you're saying. But that's far from the whole story. Building effective AI applications requires large sets of data, which must be created, collected, and annotated by human beings, and these data sets are used to tune AI algorithms. Particularly exciting for our business is generative AI. Here, we're witnessing a fundamental shift in the technology landscape, and we're now supporting the development of multiple, large language models, including the leader in this space.
Earlier this year, we were again named a leader in Everest Group's Data Annotation and Labeling PEAK Matrix Assessment, making TaskUs the only BPO provider to be named a leader in all three specialized service categories. We are not only supporting the development of generative AI, but building our own generative AI applications to deploy for our client operations. Earlier this year, we announced Assist AI, our knowledge assistant, which is built on our TaskGPT platform, and we've made this tool freely available to all TaskUs clients. We believe that these technologies have the potential to be incredibly powerful when trained, maintained, and integrated into our clients' operations. TaskUs is very well positioned to help clients leverage generative AI and other automation technologies in their customer experience and other operations.
We recognize there's a lot of fear about the impact this technology is gonna have on our industry. To date, we have not seen any material reduction to revenues from clients directly leveraging Generative AI to automate processes that we currently support. Where we have seen efficiency gains, clients have allocated more complex workflows to our teams. Meanwhile, the development and maintenance of these technologies have increased demand for our specialized services. We're playing offense here, supporting our clients' automation efforts while capturing a larger and larger share of their demand for Generative AI services. And so, in summary, we know that this technology is gonna have a transformative impact on our business in the years to come, and we believe it creates significant opportunities for us, and that those opportunities will more than make up for the impact of successful automation efforts.
Ultimately, our business model remains the same, which is delivering a well-trained combination of technology, talent, and global delivery capabilities to our customers. Outside of that, if you ask our customers why they choose to work with TaskUs, you'll hear three reasons: We're experts in their specific industry. We know the nuances of high-growth tech and understand more traditional businesses, and have developed verticals that focus exclusively on areas like ride-sharing and food delivery, social media, video games. Second, our culture and the way we care about our people is incredibly aligned with our clients' culture and a belief that by treating our teammates properly, we're able to attract and retain talent more effectively than the rest of the industry. And finally, in an industry which is increasingly consolidating around a multiple large, very large players, we remain an agile and specialized service provider.
We're able to respond to our clients' needs much faster than some of the larger and more bureaucratic companies in the space. Our focus on the digital economy allows us to segment the space into these target markets with teams of experts in each market. Out of approximately 200 global clients, we have four of the Magnificent Seven tech stocks. We have the largest players in the social media industry, the world's leading global on-demand delivery apps, the world's number one audio and number one video streaming services. As you can see here, our sites look a lot different than they did 16 years ago. We design office spaces that are vibrant and energetic. This is a picture of Greenhouse, which is our 10th site in the Philippines. We've created an environment in which employees want to come to the office.
We have on-site gyms, daycare facilities, clinics, and lunch that's offered for free in our Philippine operations. Ultimately, this creates a very engaged workforce, which delivers better results for our clients. In 2024, we're focused on four key levers of growth. First, in a market that's growth has slowed, we recognize that we must take share from our competitors, and I'm happy to report that we've been very successful. In Q1, we took a double-digit million dollars worth of revenue from multiple competitors. Next, we're successfully leveraging and cross-selling specialized services to our client base, resulting in the percentage of clients utilizing more than one of our specialized services, increasing by 10% year-over-year. Third, we're diversifying our client base into enterprise clients, focusing particularly on banking and financial services and healthcare clients.
We signed multiple deals with these enterprise clients in Q4 and Q1. And finally, we are actively deploying generative AI tools to support the delivery of our services to those clients. Despite our confidence in returning to revenue growth, we have maintained our financial discipline. In late 2022, we embarked upon a multi-year efficiency program, which has saved us over $20 million a year, and this helped us to maintain our strong margin profile and deliver over $130 million in free cash flow in 2023. This year, as our growth rates ramp up, we're staying disciplined, and we expect to again generate between $120 million and $130 million in free cash flow.
In 2023, we earned an Adjusted EBITDA margin of 23.9%, and nearly $130 million in adjusted net income. Our balance sheet is incredibly strong. Our leverage ratio at the end of Q1 was just 0.4x, giving us the strength, and given the strength of our ongoing free cash flow generation, we have been actively repurchasing our own shares. Through the end of Q1, we repurchased more than 12 million shares at an average share price of just over $12. In addition to this, we believe prudent M&A can support the development of our platform. We're interested in acquisitions that would enable geographic expansion, expansion of our specialized service offerings, and entrance into new vertical markets where we believe our existing capabilities and clients will lend themselves to cross-selling opportunities.
Our pipeline here remains active, but we're staying disciplined, looking for cultural fits, and synergy opportunities. In closing, we are a leading provider of outsourced digital services. We've emerged from the challenges that we faced in 2022 and 2023. On our most recent earnings call, we increased the low end of our revenue guidance by $25 million for the year, and we're now confident that we'll return to growth in Q2 of 2024 at any point in our guidance range. We also expect that our growth rate will accelerate in each subsequent quarter of this year. We're encouraged by the strong momentum we've seen to date from our sales and operational teams, and we generally have very strong visibility into our near-term revenues.
We've guided to a midpoint of $231 million in revenue in Q2, and an Adjusted EBITDA margin of 22%-22.5%. At any point in our full-year guidance range, including the investments we're making in capacity expansion, we expect to generate between $120 million and $130 million in free cash flow. With that, I'll sit down for some questions.
Awesome. Thank you, Bryce. That was a great overview. So hopefully everyone has a good flavor for what the business is. So maybe the right place to start is to talk about what's actually going on in the business today.
Yeah.
2023 was pretty, disruptive for the industry at large-
Mm-hmm.
TaskUs experienced some variability in that year as well, but 2024 seems to be showing some signs of stabilization.
Yeah.
Can you kind of walk us through maybe some of the dynamics that you experienced last year? Which of those are falling off over the course of this year, and what gives you confidence in, you know, the guidance that you laid out, which points to accelerating growth over the course of the rest of the year?
Yeah. So for us, it started in 2022. We had gone through this period of exponential growth, growing top-line revenues in 2021 by 59%. And in 2022, we saw clients get much more serious about reducing their spending, both on internal operations and on external outsourced operations. Those conversations took place in sort of throughout the course of the year. They involved shifting large amounts of work we were doing in the U.S. to offshore locations. So to quantify that, at one point, we were on a $300 million revenue run rate in our U.S. business, and that's U.S. delivery. And now this year, we expect to earn about $100 million from our U.S. delivery. So we lost about $200 million a year in business just from moving work onshore to offshore.
We also saw substantial investments in automation, not Generative AI automation, but just better process design, better applications, contact containment, and probably an acceptance of more risk from some of our content moderation clients. So that's what led to the 2022 and 2023 landscape. This year, it feels like among all of our large customers, there's a recognition that they've cut about as deep as they can, and in some cases, too deep. So all of our top 10 customers, we're seeing revenue that is either flat to up. The growth rates among those customers, they can vary. We have a number of customers that are back to growing at double-digit growth rates.
I don't think we're gonna see the exponential growth that we saw in 2021 again anytime soon, but I feel very, very confident about our ability to return to high single-digit growth.
So maybe talk a little bit more about that top cohort.
Mm-hmm.
because you have seen some strength there. Maybe from more of a long-term angle, what do you think the opportunity is there with those large accounts? Is there more wallet share for you to pick up?
Yeah. Well, first, all of our largest customers continue to grow their business. And while those growth rates may have moderated somewhat, we're still talking about revenue growth in the low double digits. And so there is a component of the business that just sort of grows in line with the customer's business. There's also investment in new initiatives. So at our largest client, we continue to expand across the globe. We now expect to be supporting them from five different countries by the end of this year, and are picking up incremental share both in their investments in incremental Trust and Safety services and in their Generative AI initiatives. So new initiatives are also driving growth in those customers.
So you talked about the four initiatives to reinvigorate growth. I think it was maybe the second one, the opportunity to cross-sell.
Yeah.
Can you talk us through, you know, what that opportunity really is? How does this come about? Is there a typical starting point in a relationship, and what needs to take place, in terms of the customer relationship, but in terms of also your operations in order to enable more of a cross-sell function?
Yeah. So the typical entry point for our clients is the Digital Customer Experience business. This is not universally true, but for the most part, it's something that I think people are very familiar with outsourcing and, and doing so at scale. We have then gone on to identify other areas of opportunity based on our clients' specific needs. So, the Trust and Safety business emerged from a recognition that there was an explosion of user-generated content, and that the social networks and dating sites really had no way of protecting themselves. These companies initially built large in-house teams that from a cost perspective, just were unsustainable.
So we made a huge investment in building out a Trust and Safety team, a team of experts who came from the social networks themselves, and also making a big investment in the wellness resources that are required to support that workforce. We have over 100 counselors on staff around the world. We've got a team of PhD researchers who have redesigned our entire employee life cycle for those teammates. Those buyers now, the Digital Customer Experience buyer and the Trust and Safety buyer, are generally the same person inside these large enterprises. The AI Services, and I should say that we have other services that we've spun up to support that.
So we have our learning experience service, which is essentially instructional design and outsourced training, and that's very useful to these organizations that are scaling out those operations. The AI service business is a different buyer set. Typically, there you're selling into an engineering organization that's working on those the latest sort of generative AI projects or autonomous vehicle projects. And so that has been a little bit more of a challenge in terms of the cross-sell. But I think as our organization expands, we're gonna need to learn how to sell into multiple buyers within the same company.
So you talked a lot about, you know, the different clients that you are trying to sell into throughout the presentation. It's clear you've had a historical focus on tech companies, disruptors, digital native-
Yeah
... companies, but you're looking to diversify that to some degree. So when you think about the next couple of years and where growth can come from, what's the cohort that you're focused on? Where are the best opportunities, either by service type, by end market?
Yeah. Well, inside our core, core customers, which are the, the high-growth technology clients, we're looking to sell more of our services, and we've done a very good job of that. As I said, the, the number of clients who are using, you know, two or more of our specialized services increased by 20% year-over-year in Q1. There's then sort of two other areas where we're looking. There's the world of big tech. We're supporting four of the seven Magnificent Seven stocks today. The multiple of those relationships are in the single-digit millions. So we've gotten in, we have proven ourselves, and we're scaling up. And, we, we believe that we can grow those relationships into the double-digit millions over the course of the next year.
Then finally, we're looking to establish a more stable foundation of revenue that's maybe a little less exposed to the gyrations of a high-growth technology cycle, and that's why we're focusing on enterprise clients. For us, that's an entirely blue ocean opportunity. We think we can go in with the digital-first approach to operations and disrupt a lot of the entrenched established sort of corporate BPOs that are supporting those companies today. And we chose healthcare and financial services just because we see the demand there and the cyclical trends over time as being kind of in our favor.
And so, I mean, the disruptors that you focused on previously, they were growing so fast that they kind of saw and knew and understood the value proposition first. But do you feel that these more traditional enterprises that you might be going after now, especially with all the developments in AI over the last year-
Yeah
... plus, maybe need you more now than ever?
It's the value proposition is definitely different. So, you know, when we were selling to high-growth technology companies in the early years, it was very much around like, we do this right, our operations look like your operations, our culture looks like your, your culture. And we were able to outcompete the other BPOs quite easily on that because they generally hadn't done a very good job of establishing themselves as good cultural stewards of their employees. In this endeavor into enterprise clients, the value proposition is very different. Here, we're going in with a technology-led value proposition that says very directly, and whether this is true or not is another question, but what we're saying is: this digital cohort of high-growth technology companies has driven massive efficiency into their operations through the application of talent and technology.
We've got the ability to do the same thing for you. For us, if we can help one of these large enterprise financial institutions or healthcare institutions improve their efficiency by 10%, 20%, 30%, it's all upside because we have no business in that market today, and so we're not cannibalizing our own business. I think we're better positioned than the traditional players to go after that market because there isn't this, you know, innovator's dilemma of cannibalizing our own business.
... And so, you know, for within the context of one of the trends that drives that is Generative AI-
Yeah.
-for your business as a whole, if you think about the three segments, you know, CX, Trust and Safety, and then obviously AI Services-
Mm-hmm.
Where is AI having an impact? Is it different impacts across those different three buckets?
Yep.
Where do you think you can be more innovative and develop more solutions going forward?
Yeah. The sector everybody talks about is customer support, and there we have seen we have deployed a number of tools on our internal operations. So if you think about the impact of generative AI here, there's the generative AI application that will touch the customer. They'll chat with a you know, ChatGPT-like chatbot. We're not interested in that side of the house. I don't think we really have a right to compete. Our clients are likely to build that technology themselves or use their CRM provider to do that. Where we've got a massive opportunity is on using generative AI to streamline our own operations. We have our TaskGPT platform. We're giving away this knowledge assistant called Assist AI. It's essentially a private LLM.
We train it like we train a teammate on all of our clients' private content, and the teammate then can use that in a question-and-answer type of format to get the information that they need to support their customers. So, you know, we've got a number of other applications. Call AI listens to calls and does the post-call summary. Prompt AI actually takes inbound customer contacts and will suggest a response to our teammates. So I think that those tools are gonna position us to drive efficiency into our operations faster than the competition. In this environment, I think we will see share shift to us. We have not figured out the economic model yet.
At this point, I believe we're in a land grab moment where we need to establish ourselves as the technology and talent provider to these companies in terms of applying generative AI to their operations. And what we've seen historically has been, there's always been about a 5% rate of automation every single year. That's gonna uptick with generative AI, but I think we'll see the same thing happen that has happened historically, which are new work types become outsourced. We have a client, 1 out of 200, have really done a great job of applying generative AI to their customer-facing operations. We saw a 20% reduction in Tier 1 contacts.
But that client, revenue-wise for us, will be flat from 2023 to 2024 because they've given us more premium Tier 3 support to take on. So that's Digital Customer Experience. Inside Trust and Safety, we're experiencing very strong growth. I think Generative AI is a tailwind here. Not only do we have the support of Generative AI companies, so we've got teams of people that are doing red teaming of models, trying to provoke models to produce inappropriate responses or images. We've got a team of people that are doing content moderation of user-generated prompts. So that is fueling demand, but also in an environment in which everyone has access to these tools, we're seeing an increase in user-generated content, deepfakes, and so that's fueling demand for the Trust and Safety business.
Inside the AI service business, we haven't done as nearly as good enough of a job in my view. This year, we've been impacted because two of our largest clients in the social media and autonomous vehicle space have reduced spending on certain initiatives that we were supporting. We've seen the emergence of private companies in this AI services space that have done a phenomenal job, and one of our strategic initiatives for this year is to catch back up to them. Fortunately, with our largest client, we have gotten the privilege to start supporting their new generative AI initiatives, and so I think there will be a lot of growth there.
So on the example in the CX space in particular, you talk a lot about culture. You've said that, you know, the economic model has to settle in still, and we can certainly-
Yeah
... appreciate that. But have you gotten any kind of early indication of how the employees are receiving this, what this means for you in terms of talent management over a multi-year period?
Yeah, I mean, you know, so I think the initial perception is obviously one of, I think, the same thing for everybody. It's sort of interest and also fear. Like, what does this mean for my job? But wow, this thing is actually fascinating. And so, we have, separate from the initiatives that we have launched, we've seen employees actually begin to use these tools in their workflows themselves because they make them much more productive. So I actually think it's an exciting moment for all of our employees.
The simple, repetitive tasks will be automated, as they have been in the past, and we'll actually be able to move up the value chain, investing and training our teammates on new skill sets, and as a result, be able to pay them more, charge our clients more in a virtuous cycle where everybody wins.
Very good. Well, happy to see the start of the year that you guys have had, and looking forward to seeing what happens next. We'll continue the conversation in Jenny B, if you'd all like to join us there. Thank you for attending, and Bryce-
Yeah.
Thank you for sharing.
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.