DXC Technology Company (DXC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. I think we can get started, right?

Terrific.

Terrific. Yes. Yes, my name is Tien-Tsin Huang. I follow the payments and IT services sector at JPMorgan. And one of the companies I've covered over 20 years, DXC through a lot of different forms and companies coming together. So excited to have the DXC team with us: Rob Del Bene, CFO; Raul Fernandez, President and CEO. Thank you both for being here. And of course, wanted to pick Raul's brain on a lot of the things that are happening in the world. But I always have to lead with this, right? So Raul, you from a -- touching me in different ways personally thinking about, right, you're a vice chair, co-owner of the Monumental Sports & Entertainment world, which is my childhood the wizards or bullet. So I always have to call that out, but you also founded Proxicom, systems integrator that was being an e-com when I was working in banking that was a client. And then you guys took that public and was acquired by Dimension Data right around the time I transitioned to IT services. So in my head, I always think about that and that's why it's so important, I think, to be able to pick your brain and because you've been through a lot, including, right, a lot of different boards you've been on, including DXC back in 2020 and then you became the CEO in Feb '24, as I worked down?

In December, yes.

You've seen a lot. And so I did want to start with that, if that's okay. Just thinking about state of the union or how you see the world? I know you're making a lot of changes at DXC. I want to go through that, but anything to start with?

Yes. I think, look, if I step back and I look at 2025, I really do think it's -- people ask me like what period are we in? Are we in the first half, the second half of the AI game? I think we were still in training camp. 2026 is the beginning of the real game. Everything before 2026, the maturity of the tools, the number of tools, the subgranular nature of tools and the quality before, let's say, the middle of this year. I think an aha moment for me was Sora 2 and all the multimodal stuff that it could do that literally leapfrogged something that a week ago was like #1. And so the intensity, the speed, and frankly, the massive amounts of money that are going in here. I think one of the coolest things for us is enterprises and for entrepreneurs is the compute that you pay for, for whatever it is that you're asking for, a business plan, a code spec, the code, the code testing, a website to actually sell that product, you are not paying nearly what it cost. And so there's this massive subsidy going on where someone else is flipping the bill for making dreams come true. And so I think the cost -- total cost of ownership from being a risk taker has come down, the speed at which you can turn idea into something and then see if that something sells, has come down and sped up. And we're trying to take advantage of all those things internally as we find pockets of great legacy work that we have and we'll continue to have and find opportunities to use legacy as leverage to build something new. And that's how we came up with kind of a 2-track way of managing our business. Core track is the base business. Of course, it has a lot of AI in it every day. but they're not AI native products. They're not AI highly infused products. And they're -- and in the historical core business, it was more rates times hours or fixed price type of work. These are going to be SaaS-like recurring or reoccurring revenue streams. So we've organized ourselves differently. The governance structure for the fast track is very different than the core track. Each offering has picked with a very high bar. We're using this exponential framework, which is how we help our clients go from idea to massive scale and AI. And we've used it internally. Now we're using it in client engagements, and we're -- it's helping position us differently than our competitors. But in picking what goes in the fast track, we're making a bunch of bets that we think over the next 36 months will lead to about 10% of our revenue. And I still feel great about the portfolio. Like I said before, they're not all going to make it. But if a subset make it, it's a great foundation. And as we learn from that subset, we'll stack up the next set of offerings to bring out.

Okay. Well, that's a great intro. But before we dig into that, I had to ask. So you sort of mentioned AI in '26 and this overbuild. Is there any analogy or think back to Proxicom and e-com and how fiber was such a big CapEx in investment. Obviously, that evolved, but it opened up e-com and a lot of these great fun companies that piggybacked off of that shift. Is there anything to learn from that?

Yes. I think very similar dynamics where the massive infrastructure players were underwriting other things at that time, right, back to the beginning of the Internet. My company got paid by MCI to go build a secure marketplace, the first secure e-com space on the Internet. And they weren't building -- they weren't paying us to build it because there was a presumed value in that digital presence. They're paying us because they wanted the pipes to keep filling up and they wanted the pipes to continue to have more demand from these corporate clients. So things -- when these cycles kick off, there are weird economics, weird dynamics. We're living through that right now. But the bottom line is that the speed and pace in which innovation happens today is at an unprecedented level, literally days. And that's shocking in a couple of ways. It's shocking to an employee base where almost every job will get impacted. My job as a CEO will get impacted. I actually had my script that I wrote, and I used a digital twin voice AI product to record it. And my script was like one of the first AI products to do a public company earnings announcement. Now I'm taking in a step further. I've got a small model that I've built that has everything that I've done in the quarter, new products released, new assignments that I can reference and I'm going to see if we can write a better script than we can write. So I mean it does change every job, whether you're someone who's coding, whether you're someone who's building a business plan, whether you're someone that's reviewing a contract in law, a 1,000% impacting on every category.

Fun. So you introduced fast track. So let's get into some of the changes that you've made. I think you entered it really, really well. I always like learning through examples. And so I think Core Ignite was the one that you guys specifically called out. And I think for those that are less familiar, right, Hogan has been around for a bit. A lot of companies we cover are built on Hogan. So you described it as an extension of Hogan and not a replacement. So can you just elaborate on that for the...

Yes, just so that people realize like this was an incredibly powerful piece of software that DXC owned, I think, back in the '80s. And it currently -- 1 in 2 U.S. households have deposit accounts that rely on Hogan, 2 in 3 U.S. card transactions are processed on Hogan. There are 300 million customer deposit accounts on Hogan, 6 out of the top 10 U.S. banks are on Hogan, and we have 275 million cards processed daily for 475 banks. So an incredible existing legacy old system, where adding new products or features, if you're a financial institution and you want to get into the business of issuing stable coins, well, it's hard to do on a really old infrastructure. So my guys came in, brought guys in from Fiserv and other places and they said, "Look, this is a -- we have a unique advantage here because we have technical hooks into the core Hogan product. We can expose things through APIs that no one else can do. Let's build a thin layer that allows banks to not have to change any of the infrastructure, but to add incremental next-gen services and be able to do that kind of on a menu-based system." So looked at an existing base of business had been ignored, had not been upgraded. In many cases, the banks already have derivative right uses on IP, but we still get paid some maintenance. And we said, let's build on top of it. And again, the cost of building this light layer is literally not in the tens of millions. It's in the single-digit millions. So the ability to get the right team that can move fast, they can write the product spec, they can test that with existing customers that can get a pilot at MVP really fast and then can scale it. That's part of the power of bringing in kind of new talent on top of legacy work that we're doing for existing customers.

And how long did it take to develop Core Ignite into what it is today and ready for deployment?

March to summer in terms of tightening up the offering and what it looks like from a product standpoint, summer to now and build and then in the beginning of the new year, we should be able to deploy on the first versions.

Okay. Yes. So we'll be able to track some of the performance there and attach on that. So how replicable -- you have some other assets. I know with insurance, you've got a big amount of share as a systems or record there. So what other Core Ignites are being developed?

I think, DXC, that's one where we have like multilayers of kind of proprietary hooks that all of us, whether it's DXC or any of our competitors, we sit in the middle of every workflow. We either help the workflow that exists today or we're modernizing an existing workflow. Workflow is the key to the AI future and understanding how it works today and then understanding the power of the tools that are available to you and how you can do an AI-led, but agentic team like solution and then ultimately a full agentic solution. It all comes down to knowing 2 things: workload and data. And we are super close to both and so our competitors. So I think we are winners in the long term in the AI world. Someone has to do this work. And an upstart that maybe has younger, fresher talent. They don't have the advantage I have, which is understanding how the existing customer does what they do. So that's a huge moat for us, if you can add new technology to it. In the past, we were known as a safe pair of hands for old technology. Today, because we have these new innovative super AI-centric lightweight solutions going to market, people are going, "Oh, that's not the same DXC." And that's also coming around with a whole new branding and marketing and positioning and color pallet and all that sort of stuff. So it's been kind of a buildup of content and then the look and feel and then the positioning. And then frankly, the people at the end of the day, it's having new people to energize the core base and the core business and really put us on an offensive front to create more pipeline opportunities. At the end of the day, our biggest issue is just turning around the revenue decline. And the biggest -- the easiest way to do that is to go after more things that are qualified. And for those more things that are qualified to convert into a pipeline that gives you positive growth. I mean we're getting to flat as our first goal, but then positive growth.

Right. So you own the core, you understand the workflows, which is really hard, I think, for the agents and others to really understand. So we've seen some consolidation for companies to solve that, but then you're building these extensions to bring it into something that's...

And we're using them as customer zero first here. So we're trying everything first. We're then documenting that. We're sharing best practices for me. It's a great opener, if I'm talking to a CEO, let me tell you what I did with my SOC and agentic solution that got me 67% better accuracy, better throughput in terms of speed and allowed me to redeploy the human capital into other places. So lowering of cost.

So thinking for both you or for either of you, maybe, Rob, for you as well, just thinking about the incremental margins to get in 36 months, I think you said 10% of revenue is what you're aiming for. How about funding that? I mean can you do it at a reasonable incremental margin? I would imagine the model is actually accretive, but you still have to fund it to get there. So how does that work out?

Yes. So our -- so I'll take that one, Raul. I'll start. So the fund -- the products have been in development for some time, mentioning Core Ignite, but there in the GIS business. We have our new service delivery platform, we're calling Oasis. That's been -- could be considered a fast track initiative. We've got AI capability that's been built and will continue to be built in the insurance business. So in our run rate, we have a lot of the investment spending already. Incrementally, there may be more incrementally, but it's not going to be outsized or material in terms of free cash flow impact. So it's in the base. We'll continue to build on that. So as we gain traction in the market, it should be accretive.

Okay. Good. Anything I'm missing on fast track? Or should we...

No. No. I think if you -- look, you've got to work on the fast track, but then the core part of the business has to operate better. So a good example, we have the fifth largest -- we're the fifth largest in terms of certified SAP engineers, and we are not the fifth in terms of revenue generated by said number of engineers. So it's a very simple. We have to get the rates up. We got to get the fixed price terms up. We've got to get deal flow up. We have to be better coordinated with SAP, which we are being from top to bottom. We have to have integrated account plans. We have to have targeted key opportunities. So again, basics of running a practice within a professional services technology company. Ramnath coming from Accenture, looking at it and going, "Oh, my gosh, we are just so subscale, but it's not rocket science in fixing that." So it's about right people, right pricing, right new targeting of opportunities. There's clearly demand for it in the marketplace. We just have to go after the right jobs.

Yes. I think you said on the call that you're going to double your SAP practice.

That's right. That's our business plan, yes.

And so it sounds like you answered it a little bit there, but that was on my question list. Is it really just getting utilization up and getting the rate cards up and...

No, it's more work, more work. There definitely more work in us as a percentage of what we do versus our competitors, we're way underrepresented.

But you have the certified staff...

Oh yes, to do it.

That's the key, right?

That's the key.

So more work, meaning more sales.

More sales, yes, more opportunities, yes.

But you have the resources to have...

Totally have the resources.

So you mentioned, Ramnath. I think that was on my question list leading the CES business coming in from Accenture. We heard from Accenture earlier. What else can you share? What kind of initiatives is he putting into place? How quickly can we see some of the results, whether it'd be in CES or broadly speaking?

So he's got a really great appreciation of technical talent when he looks at our engineering talent, which has got an incredible pedigree and also a great referenceability, heavy in automotive, but also in other parts -- in other industries, really key players. That's, again, an offering that he thinks, based on his experience in other places, should be at a much higher level of appreciation. And when I mean appreciation, meaning gross margin, net margin. And again, it's positioning and targeting the right skills. It's also using some of the new positioning. So we invested in a brand-new team that came in and looked at the competitive space from a brand marketing value proposition and created now this new like offering in terms of how we're coming across, both from the brand standpoint, from the look and feel standpoint and definitely from the content standpoint, making technical things that are complex, understandable and referenceable is so key to standing out in our business because there's a ton of technical jargon, but if you can mix in, I can do the technical plus I know that here's the business value, and I happen to know your industry really well. So it's a great combination.

Got you. Okay. So thinking about Ramnath coming in and some of the changes, it sounds like -- I know you have a big SAP practice. You mentioned that you have a big ServiceNow. practice. So it doesn't sound like it's a resource issue. It's really...

More shots on goal.

More shots on goal, including putting more sales effort and things like that. Okay.

And more -- like we launched a sales enablement team that is specifically built to help them in the last mile, right, the last mile of the pitch, the last mile of the positioning, any other content, any other cross referencing we should be doing. So again, a function that wasn't there before, and we put it in place with our Chief Revenue Officer.

And is that a -- last one, is that a quick fix? I mean...

No, it's a fix over time.

So how do you value -- how should we gauge or hold you accountable for progress there?

I think the -- ultimately, as this stuff is coming into market, which, again, it's been in the last quarter or so that's coming to market, the size of our pipeline should grow. It is growing. And then ultimately, the conversion rate, which will be a public book-to-bill number, those things should trickle.

Yes. Well, you've talked about just to get into those numbers a little bit. You talked about visibility improving and getting into the third quarter, and you're looking for bookings to get better. Quality of the signings and things like that, anything interesting?

Yes, I think -- so let's break it down in a couple of categories, please. With renewals, key to renewals is a happy customer. So our outages and reported delays in SLA breaches, all-time record low. Our NPS scores, which aren't a great measure, all-time high. We're getting invited ahead of time for recompetes. So we have to keep the business we have and recompete the business we have. The key is bringing new ideas and new solutions and new parts of the company. And so that the recompete can be solid and you can win it, but you also open the door to having new things that we can build and deploy and share. So it's kind of a combination of items that will lead to a visible tipping. On any given day, on the 12-month rolling period, there's 70% of that 12 months that's booked. I need to get a bunch more, so that probably gets closer to 80%, then we can mathematically do a, "Hey, we can see flat in 2 quarters from now." But it all starts with more opportunities, the ones that you have already plus net new ones.

So what about the new loco side?

So Carnival Cruise Line is a great example, super competitive. We won it. We've now deployed. We're supporting them. We've transitioned from the other partner that was there before. And it's a great story, not just in technical skills to win what we want and to talk about what we do every day for the hundreds of thousands of passengers and crew that sail every day. But now, okay, what's the game plan to go to Norwegian, to Royal Caribbean, to company X, company Y, getting that proactive muscle in place, getting those people in place, getting the content in place, actually going off and doing it, all that's work in progress. But all those things, once you do them once and twice and they show success, they're highly replicable.

Got you. So how about -- I should have probably asked it earlier, just on the macro front, anything to share there? There's always questions around visibility and discretionary versus nondiscretionary spending. But you've also said to us in the past that the self-help initiatives are more important than the cycle or the macro for you. But do you feel differently now?

Yes. No, I still think we can generate more opportunities to compensate for any sort of softness within a segment, right, like consumer products, people that are highly dependent on consumer products and services that are maybe been pinched by tariffs or inflation or cost and it's having an impact on the customer base. That will lead to some pausing, but the anecdote to that is to have just a more massive book that you're going after that you can afford to have these positives, which we're going to run into.

Okay. Nine minutes left. Any questions from investors, happy to take them. Otherwise, I can keep going. I'm almost halfway done my questions. But, yes, Brendan, do you want to ask one?

Thank you so much both of you for going through all the stuff. I'll ask one on the financials on the -- perhaps the margins, I guess. Could you talk through like the spending philosophy and I guess you could call it, like operating expense allocation philosophy as it relates to the business lines, like where is a lot of this fast track spending located? And how can we expect to see like the margins unfold in the various different business lines?

Yes, the new content development is across all 3 of the segment -- business segments. And it has been in the run rate probably the longest in the insurance segment because we've been developing new product there at a robust pace since my entire tenure here. It picked up about a year ago in GIS and now CES is following. So there will be a bit of an uptick in CES, while it's in the run rate of the other 2 business units. And we'll, well, really -- from a margin perspective, we've been offsetting revenue declines. That's been the reality. So we've been really focused on driving efficiency, driving savings, especially in back-office processes and we'll continue to do that. But as soon as we're able to stabilize revenue, we'll start to see accretion because of that, because we're going to keep driving the productivity improvements, especially now as we deploy AI internally, we're going to continue to drive productivity.

And look, every function, I review every business function, I look at how legal is using AI, how marketing and communications is using AI. And every quarter, there's a step-up in productivity and cost savings. We created a movie that I played at the end of the earnings call, completely AI generated. I mean a fraction of the time that it would have taken 6 months ago, and the quality was just as good. So it really is impressive. And right now, again, everybody is in pilot mode. You still have headcount that was staffed against a different world and a fully AI tool centric world. So getting through that rotation is part of -- what I think is part of what '26 is that for all companies.

So the restructuring side then, I think it's been running pretty consistently. Could we see another a little bit more volatility there or not necessarily? What's sort of the outlook around...

I think it's stable levels since we are consistently turning over the team and shifting focus and skills. I think we're going to -- in the next 18 months or so, it will be consistent.

Just on the kind of revenue side of these fast track products, it sounds like next year is when most of that should come through. Is there any more detail you can kind of share about expectations?

On the pricing models, we're currently testing different things that are more value-based and less X times Y because they are reoccurring cloud-based products where we think we can create a win-win either on a per transaction or per event basis with the customer base. So the good news is we have flexibility. We've got some good input from a pricing standpoint. People came from different pricing backgrounds, mainly SaaS consumption background. So that's where you'll see it.

Yes. So it will develop over time. And we're now in the insurance market, we're in the market with our AI capability today. In the other 2 segments, we're in pilot mode with the initiatives that Raul is describing, and we'll see that develop over time. So we're hoping next year to be able to unveil metrics.

I mean the prospects, Raul, of this breaking the P times Q and the linearity of revenue and bringing in subscription services have been talked about in the sector for a long time. Do you feel like we're starting to actually see a shift towards subscription or other forms?

I think you have the ability to build things today at such a faster pace that -- and at much lower cost. Again, we're not paying for all this compute that we actually are all using today. It's -- it will allow you to launch a new revenue stream and I think be super different than the existing revenue streams. And I think part of it is also how we manage our people, right? So there's a higher degree of empathy, there's a higher degree of being very forward. Every town hall, I do in every meeting -- in every location that I go to, I get a question about AI, "Is AI going to change my job?" And I remind them that everything they did to get the job they have today to be sitting in the seat that they sit today, the education, the proactive curiosity, the teaching stuff to yourself, the hustle, all that is still super relevant in AI world. Maybe even more so because the easy work is going to get done. So hustle, curiosity, trying things, learning things, turning around, all those attributes got people, their first jobs or the jobs that they have today. All those attributes will keep you there if you lean into them. But it's a big threat. I mean it's -- I've seen technology that I was talking to some CEOs in Asia. And Sora 2 came out and they're in kind of that business and he goes, "Well, it's first time my product teams have been like set back for a second like, wow, that was fast, and that was really good." So the best of the best are getting pushed. We're the beneficiaries as practitioners and as consumers of all this stuff, we are the beneficiaries. And I can't imagine the amount of power that I really use prompting some of the stuff that I work on, but it's -- I'm not paying for it.

Sure. So does it create more tension with some of the software ecosystem with some of these tools and whatnot that you're developing on top of Hogan? Of course, you were already there, was running the core, but you also have other best-of-breed providers that are providing point solutions against it as well. So does it create more tension?

No, not yet, not today because we have such a legacy point of view where we can be very specific. We can structure our solutions to be very deep in the weeds as opposed to a generalized availability of a set of tools or products that then you have to go customize for your workflow or your particular industry. We're kind of working from the other side up. And we have great partnerships with all of the scale -- hyperscalers with all of the cloud providers, and we've got good diversity with regards to where our clients are at, whether it's AWS, Azure, ServiceNow, then abroad, big themes. Our sovereign clouds and sovereign AI and private AI instances, those are big themes that are actually in the Middle East, have been present for many, many years. And now you're starting to see companies that are moving in that direction as well.

So organic, can you do a lot of this work on the fast track side organically?

Fast track side has to pass an exponential bar of value impact, time, money, speed. And so we're trying to keep a pretty good definition of what fast track is really high impact. And then core track is just normal tech that just needs to normally work better, faster with more accuracy.

So could we see DXC dabble more in buying product and tools on the acquisition?

I think we can have customized solutions that again leverage us. I think on the acquisition front, we're still not a well-oiled enough machine where I have confidence that I can plug something into this part of the company and then it's going to scale. That's still work in progress. I think '26, there'll be some areas where we go, okay, I'm confident that, that is going to be a good use of potential capital, but it's going to be small. And I'm going to want to make sure that the system is ready to accept it and then really accelerate it beyond its stand-alone value.

Okay. Good. Any last question? Happy to take one more? So just to close it out for either of you, just thinking about as we evaluate next year and everybody is looking for KPIs, but what are you most excited to for us to track? What should we be paying closer attention beyond the headline?

I think our net new logo story is a good story that's developing and getting better. And the fact that we're getting opportunities on the back of innovative AI work, we're getting in the door. And the fact that once we're in the door, we're actually competing and winning is super exciting to me. So one of the things seeing and talking about our net new customers that are some of the best players in the world in their particular categories. That's going to be fun.

Very good. Perfect. Really appreciate you being here and spending some time with us.

Thank you so much.

Thank you both.

Thank you.

Thank you.