TELUS International (Cda) Inc. (TIXT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today at the historic New York Stock Exchange for TELUS International's first Investor Day since our IPO 2 years ago. My name is Jason Mayr, and I lead TELUS International's Investor Relations and treasury function. It's my pleasure to welcome you here in the room as well as those tuning in live via webcast. Before we move into agenda speakers, I'd just like to direct your attention to the disclaimer slide. Today's presentation will contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please don't place undue reliance on them. We'll also be discussing certain non-GAAP measures that our management team consider useful in assessing the business. For more information, please look at our filings on SEDAR and EDGAR. With that out of the way, I'd like to introduce today's speakers. Joining us from Las Vegas, we have Jeff Puritt, President and CEO. Next, we have Tobias Dengel, President of WillowTree, a TELUS International Company. Tobias joins us from Charlottesville, Virginia. Beth Howen, our Chief Transformation Officer. She joins us from Austin, Texas. Vanessa Kanu is our CFO. She joins us from Ottawa, Canada. Next, I'd like to introduce 2 members of our executive team who both joined us from Denver, Colorado. We have Maria Pardee, our Chief Commercial Officer; and Michael Ringman our CIO. Marilyn Tyfting, last but not least, she joins us from Vancouver, Canada. She's our Chief Corporate Officer. Moving on to today's agenda. Jeff will begin with our company overview and strategic priorities followed by Beth, who will discuss our technology-enabled service offerings. Mike will then do a session on iLabs, our innovation hub. Tobias will then discuss WillowTree, our newest acquisition just closed last month. And then Mike and Beth will rejoin Tobias for a fireside chat on emerging technologies. Maria will then follow with our go-to-market strategy and why TI wins. And then we will have our first of 2 Q&A sessions. After a short break, Marilyn will join to discuss our culture and discuss our ESG focus, and Vanessa will then discuss our financials. Jeff will then have some closing remarks before we move to our second Q&A session. And just a little bit of housekeeping. Since we do have 2 Q&A sessions, please keep your questions for those sections, so we can stay on track time-wise. We hope you'll find today's session informative and engaging. And again, thank you all for being here. Without further ado, I'd like to now welcome Jeff Puritt, President and CEO onto the stage.

Good morning. Thank you all for joining us today, both those of you in the room in person as well as those on our webcast. I am so very pleased to welcome you all here today to spend the next few hours talking about my favorite subject and sharing the details of one of the most exciting technology services growth stories ever told. Yes, I drank my Kool-Aid many years ago. But in all sincerity, I really do believe that we have something quite unique and special here at TELUS International, and I'm hopeful that you'll all leave here today feeling the very same way. The TI of today is vastly different from who we were 18 years ago. We're on a mission to help our 650 clients as well as the next 650 or more to design, build and deliver next-gen customer experience is enabled by our caring culture and our human-centered yet tech-led solutions. We have a global footprint with 69 delivery and digital design studios operating in 30 countries, amplified further with the inclusion of our global AI community of over 1 million. As you would have heard on our earnings call last week, just last month, we officially welcomed WillowTree to the TI family. And including WillowTree, we now have even greater scale with 2022 pro forma revenues of $2.7 billion and nearly 75,000 full-time team members. We certainly have progressed a long way from our origins of just 1,500 team members in 1 center in the Philippines, supporting a handful of clients or as I like to refer to it, from the little lemonade stand operated off of my back porch. Over the next few hours, the team and I will discuss why we believe that TI is extremely well positioned to win in this rapidly evolving market. So let's get started. $750 billion in addressable market, one that is compelling, complex and growing fast. This addressable market has expanded meaningfully of late, and it would appear that even industry analysts are having a difficult time keeping up in calculating the growth rate. And what exactly does TI do in connection with this market? Well, my colleagues will be providing you with considerably more detail in this regard over the next few hours, but at a high level, I'll canter through some of them now. First, AI Data Solutions, a very topical area that we invested meaningfully in back in 2020 through our acquisition of Lionbridge AI. We've seen tremendous growth in this portfolio, and we're only just scratching the surface of the full opportunity here with generative AI use cases and AI productization, in particular, in what I would characterize as their early stages. Our AI community of over 1 million contributors substantially participate in the creation, collection, annotation and translation of billions of data points that make up the foundation of machine learning algorithms that AI depends upon. And this is applicable to a myriad of functions, including optimized search results, enhanced user safety, ever more accurate and reliable forecasting and predictions and so much more. Next, trust and safety as relevant as ever, given the massive amount of user-generated content and online interactions for which we believe we have a societal duty to ensure that it's safe, accurate and authentic. And it's only getting more complex every day. And our early investment in this space amplified by our significant acquisition of CCC in January 2020 really turbocharged our capabilities in this regard. CXM, or customer experience management, while seemingly a straightforward concept is anything but CXM done right, can delight customers and help propel a business forward when done poorly, can truly destroy businesses. And finally, digital IT is not going away anytime soon. In fact, it's quickly becoming a key differentiator for our clients. Our digital IT practice meaningfully enables our clients on their digital journey from strategy design to application development to hyperautomation. We have a deep, broad, scaled and differentiated capability across all 4 of these service lines and our ability to be an end-to-end provider differentiates us in the market. As I just highlighted on the prior slide, this market or more specifically noted here, these markets have very exciting growth trends. And TI is very well positioned within them and in line with or outpacing the expected growth rates. As I mentioned before, more to come shortly on our services from Beth, but I do want to just touch upon some highlights now. AI is becoming ubiquitous, pervasive across industries and functions and training data remains a key component of the value chain. Over the long term, as sophistication improves, we believe companies will gravitate to using both authentic and synthetic data, which is digitally created data for simulating real-world scenarios to underpin their AI models. At TI, we've been intentional and arguably prescient over the course of many years regarding the capabilities of new economy services we've added to our portfolio in furtherance of our overall growth strategy via organic and inorganic investments. As a result of our Lionbridge AI acquisition back in December 2020, we have AI enablement competencies of consequence, and we are better positioned than most to help enable this gold rush for years to come. It's like we're selling the picks and shovels. Evolving complexities in the trust and safety space around content types, keeping up with rapidly changing regulations and constantly growing user-generated content across platforms makes this a perennial challenge for clients. In the near term, we anticipate that the Metaverse will present a whole new dimension of challenges and keeping users safe and protected, requiring real-time moderation, 3D content moderation, event moderation, community standards enforcement, digital identity verification and more. And the CXM landscape is continuously evolving, and we expect this space to see the greatest transformation in the near term due to rapidly evolving technologies, particularly as more and more simple, predictable, repeatable interactions get automated because they can and because they ought to. It's both more cost effective and gives rise to a better user experience. Notably, TI is materially outpacing the market growth rate here. And finally, digital IT -- while digital IT is a massive and mature market, TI has engaged very deliberately here, focusing on improving experiences for our customers, for their end users and for ourselves. Notably, these are all highly fragmented market segments with many competitors, a few of whom are as uniquely positioned as TI with scaled capabilities across all of them to derive and deliver more holistic strategic insights. We've intentionally focused our efforts on and built domain expertise in industry verticals that have scale, growth and real challenges where TI can be a strong partner and solution provider. Since our IPO, we've also had an increased focus on banking, financial services and insurance, retail and consumer goods and energy and utilities. Our ongoing diversification efforts have helped us focus on clients with similar challenges, including a need to transform like pandemic-driven virtualization pivots, recession-driven requests for efficiencies and more. Having broad exposure to a diverse set of targeted industry verticals enables our resilience. For example, at the height of the pandemic, whilst travel and hospitality sector derived revenues were materially diminished, our tech and games business was flourishing. Now as the recession starts to bite and interest rate inflation and geopolitical uncertainty dominates the headlines around the tech sector, blue-chip comms and media, BFSIs and energy and utility companies are driving our growth by leveraging our transformation tools and capabilities. And speaking of comms and media, given our heritage and pedigree with our anchor clients to this day TELUS Corporation, our unique relationship with TELUS is truly symbiotic, with bidirectional benefits to them and to us. We enable their transformation and then we take the capabilities we've built, hardened and scaled by serving them on the road to serve other clients. And beyond just the service symbiosis, our TELUS heritage also is institutionalized in TI such that deeply rooted focus on profitable growth and premium services also rooted in team member and customer experience excellence is our foundation. Notably, TELUS' spend with TI has steadily increased. Last year, TELUS represented 17.3% of TI's total revenues were $427 million, which was up 20% year-over-year from the 16.1% of total revenues the year before or $353 million. Our recent WillowTree acquisition will enable us to support even more of TELUS' digital transformation journey, capturing and displacing more of TELUS' spend with our competitors and serves as a meaningful countercyclical dynamic during these uncertain times. Tobias, will be speaking more to this shortly. Importantly, TELUS has several unique assets that they're focused on growing, and TI has a front row seat to enabling, amplifying and accelerating this growth within exciting areas such as TELUS Health and TELUS Agriculture and consumer goods. We've already identified several really exciting shovel-ready, multimillion-dollar multi-month or year initiatives that we're starting to ramp up on. So having now telegraphed that AI is everywhere and coming to a theater near you soon, I thought it important to provide some incremental detail here and mercifully, Beth rather than me will provide even more detail in her comments shortly. Data management and data quality is about 70% to 80% of all work done across the AI value chain today. And it is the differentiator for us. Quality and timeliness is what our clients are really looking for here, and they tell us that others in the data annotation and labeling space are simply not meeting their expectations in this regard. They're often inviting us to undo or redo the poor quality of work of our competitors. With our unmatched scale in the crowd, we are uniquely positioned to properly represent diverse locales and cultures and reduce or remove bias in AI. More so, our machine learning-assisted labeling operations, we call Ground Truth Studios secured through our Playment acquisition gives us unrivaled annotation capabilities for computer vision. TI has highly sophisticated and proprietary tech that finds adoption with industry's leading pioneers of AI tech, including autonomous driving, in particular and is poised for future applications such as in the metaverse for scene recognition, visual localization, mapping, action recognition and more. TI has purposefully put together the combination of new economy services of AI and content moderation that I think go together, just like peanut butter and jelly. Despite significant technology advancements, harmful content is still making its way to consumers. We feel brands should be doing more. We have a unique value proposition here, and we're not alone in that view. Everest has acknowledged our capability and scale. Other than Accenture, no one else has what we have in this space. As you can see from the image taken from the Everest study on the screen here, this is a space that seemingly everyone wants to get into, but I suspect many don't realize just how difficult it is to do well at scale and on a sustained basis. There are many players in this space. It's very fragmented, and some participants are actually exiting in whole or in part. TI is not shying away. We see keeping the online world safe as a societal requirement and an exciting opportunity. TI holds a position of scale is 1 of only 2 providers with more than 10% overall share. And trust and safety isn't just content moderation for social platforms. Brands need a digital immune system to protect their users and safeguard their platforms across a myriad of interactions, including lenders and borrowers, guests and hosts, riders and drivers and more. Recovering lost trust is expensive. And this activity, including preventing and detecting fraud will be even more of a priority for brands as they establish and expand their presence in the Metaverse with new forms of content. Here again, TI is differentiated with our caring culture as the foundation of our holistic approach to our team members well-being, our digital first responders that focuses on prevention, containment, response and evolution across the team members hire-to-retire life cycle, including physical, social, financial, psychological and environmental well-being. We rely upon evidence-based practices and certified wellness professionals, and we hire for resilience. In many cases, TI provides a 12-month employee assistance program after team members have left TI. We're one of the only providers worldwide that does so. And this is something we strive to provide for all our digital first responders as location and regulatory environments permit. We have an enviable track record of anticipating client demand and agility to pivot to embrace new disruptive technologies alongside our clients. So I've used the word resilient a few times now in describing TI. I think there are a number of factors, both endogenous and exogenous that influence my view regarding our success to date, both industry specific and unique to TI. They include a focus on quality for clients, for helping our clients do better with less. This focus on quality helps to fuel TI's profitable growth strategy. We are purpose-built for resilience, resilience that has been tested and proven through multiple business cycles. Our service mix, investments in trust and safety and AI to bolster our heritage in CXM and digital IT is delivered across a complementary mix of targeted industry verticals. This continues to position TI well to not only survive but to thrive in what is a challenging macroeconomic environment. Two notes on this slide in particular that I'll highlight, continued investment in hyperautomation, reducing repetitive manual tasks, freeing up intellectual capital, focusing on innovation. This is a challenge faced by clients across every industry vertical, scalers and transformers alike. And this trend is resilient to the current economic slowdown as clients will continue to invest here to optimize their business. and diversified services and verticals. At TI, we're balancing or offsetting the slowdown in fintech with growth in traditional BFSI. The recent pullback in games is mitigated in part by the resurgence in travel and hospitality. And COVID fatigue undermining momentum in e-commerce is contrasted with the growth in retail and consumer goods activity. At TI, we have a remarkably resilient business. And our operating and financial performance, both today and tomorrow, as Vanessa will share in more detail after the break, proves that. Finally, in summary, I believe that we will continue to drive incremental shareholder value creation at TI through strong execution. I've often joked that 80% of a good strategy is execution. As we continue to successfully compete against Accenture and Deloitte, for example, we will continue to maximize our strategic partnerships and relationships with clients C-suite or Board members as that's where increasingly critical transformation decisions are made. And it's where a lot of the margin and value is created long term. That's also how providers can often bypass the RFI or RFP process with early engagement and executive buy-in. We enjoy fantastic relationships and tenure with our clients, and we're seeing a shift in our discussions to broader opportunities, including transformation of core experiences and other mission-critical functions now even more excitingly so with our WillowTree capabilities. Not surprisingly, adjacencies have been and will continue to be part of the guidepost around our expansion, whether it's service line or geography, organic and inorganic. And lastly, but certainly not least, we are targeting to 10x the enterprise value of TI over the next 5 years. As audacious as that may sound, here's why I think it's entirely doable. In 2016, when we took on Baring Private Equity Asia as a partner, the plan was to 2x the business in 5 years. At that time, we were about $500 million in revenue, approximately $100 million in EBITDA, and the enterprise value reflected in the Baring investment was about $1 billion. In 2021, when we IPO-ed, we had an enterprise value of about $10 billion. So we didn't just 2x the business, we 10x-ed it. So to get to 10x over the next 5 years may involve nominally bigger numbers. But the multiplier 10x is the same. And we're starting this leg of our journey with significantly greater assets than we had back in 2016. For example, a scaled AI and content moderation capability, more than 50,000 additional team members and an AI community of over 1 million, a transaction currency and publicly traded shares, a more senior experienced and expert leadership team, brand recognition and market awareness of our existence and capabilities and the list goes on and on. Indeed, I could go on and on about this, but instead at this juncture, I'll invite Beth Howen to take us through a more detailed discussion of our technology-enabled service offerings, and I'll be back later. Beth, over to you.

Good morning. I am delighted to be here with all of you this morning to talk about TI's global digital portfolio, a comprehensive set of offerings and solutions designed to drive transformation, facilitate growth and enable scalability. With an aim to stay ahead of an increasingly digital world, this portfolio brings together cutting-edge technology, innovative ideas and an unwavering commitment to excellence. Whether clients are looking to modernize, expand their reach or simply improve their bottom line, our digital portfolio along with our world-class talent stands ready to serve their journey for growth and success. Our portfolio is designed -- thank you. Our portfolio is designed to support strategic markets aligned with the service lines of our business. AI data solutions, supporting companies to test and improve machine learning models via our global AI community of annotators and linguists, trust and safety, keeping our customers, their employees as well as our own team members safe and secure using content moderation systems. Customer experience and management, handling millions of customer care interactions annually. And digital IT, serving as the foundation across all business lines, taking ownership of the digital journey for our customers as well as our clients' customers, driving for digital transformation, harnessing the power of next-generation technologies and securing reliable operations of the systems used to deliver customer and employee experiences. Our comprehensive end-to-end capabilities places at the intersection of digital IT and Digital CX. You've heard us say that before. Our design, build and deliver construct enables us to support the multiple dimensions of stakeholder experiences to be an agile and responsive partner to our clients. Our design capabilities allow us to understand, innovate and create digital strategy to drive significant value into our customers' business. We build digital solutions that transform, modernize or reengineer our clients' businesses, leveraging the latest in tech for mobile, AI, automation, analytics, cloud and so much more. Through focus on positive customer experience, quality and efficiency, we deliver world-class services and solutions that go above and beyond and set the bar for excellence and engagement. To Jeff's remarks earlier, we are truly in an exciting period for AI-driven growth in competition and demand for services continue to accelerate. TI's AI data solutions is a leader in an ever-evolving, high-quality AI training data space. Our AI growth with long-term partners has been impressive and a great story alongside our complementary trust and safety and CXM services. We've accomplished that growth through the strength of our global contributor community and an industry-leading tech stack, and we continue to scale our investments in our proprietary tooling, to enable optimized data solutions and relevant workflows that are highly customizable in so many use cases. Our ability to service the AI value chain includes data collection, data annotation and data validation. Using machine learning capabilities, we are able to parse data and then apply that to affect decision-making, utilizing deep learning algorithms that can learn important features and adapt for AI to help solve problems with and without human intervention. We are passionate about the mitigation of bias in AI to a commitment in diverse and representative sourcing with extensive worker wellness and education efforts. Our diverse ever-growing AI community of contributors is unique and important and a true differentiator for TI. As AI training data requirements become more complex and the importance of diverse, de-biased, AI increases in visibility. We have one of the most specialized AI sourcing organizations in the industry. And what is most important to our customers as well as this global workforce is how we combine the best of TI's caring culture with a robust and effective recruitment and workforce management. Diversity, representation and demographic management is so critical to ensuring that we effectively -- pardon me, is so critical to ensuring effective bias mitigation in the data sets that train AI. And the deep experience we leverage to maintain and grow this community is a true differentiator for TI. Our community is highly segmentable by all demographic criteria, and we regularly build communities for our customers' AI initiatives to ensure a representative cohort across criteria such as age, skin tone, eye color, accessibility issues, socioeconomic and geodiversity characteristics. Ground Truth Studios, as Jeff mentioned earlier, is our state-of-the-art annotation infrastructure for complex computer vision applications. Ground Truth Studios is a combination of machine learning, 2D, 3D annotation tools, which are 5x faster than manual tools with advanced pipeline management software to help set up customized complex workflows in minutes and a sophisticated quality engine that enables predictable, reliable and consistent output. Our progressive machine learning teams use Ground Truth Studios to generate large quantities of high-quality labeled data sets for producing the most accurate predictions from their machine learning models, thereby reducing the time to market. Let's watch a short video now to further illustrate this platform. [Presentation]

Great. Moving on to trust and safety. We have 2 primary categories within our robust trust and safety offerings. Content moderation to protect brand reputation and fraud prevention to ensure online safety. Our digital first responders review and moderate community-generated content, including text, images, video and audio to ensure compliance with rules and regulations. Included in this offering set is ad moderation to protect our clients' brand to verify ads for site platform compliance and adherence to advertising rules. We support our clients' community management best practices, whether that's proactively protecting the community against suspicious or fake accounts or growing their user base via positive brand interactions to build loyalty. When it comes to social media and content moderation management, location and context are key. For a true understanding of what's appropriate, cultural, regional and sociopolitical nuances must be taken into account as well as local governmental regulations for managing and removing online content. Fraud detection is a set of activities undertaken to prevent money or property from being obtained through false pretenses. Our Know Your Customer offering is used to reduce the risk of fraudulent transactions with controls that may include the collection and analysis of basic identity information, name matching against a list of known parties, determination of risks in terms of propensity for illegal intentions for the business and monitoring transactions against expected behaviors. We help organizations meet their compliance obligations for money laundering activities. Throughout the customer life cycle, we can increase the Know Your Customer offering documentation, enhance our verification programs, leverage advanced analytics, including 360 views of customer data and much more. Our offerings protects, e-commerce and online marketplace growth by ensuring a safe place for all user transactions. Customer experience is where it all began for TI, and it remains our largest service line to date, supporting our customer experience management, managed services and learning excellence offerings across all verticals. We are a leader in the Everest Group Community Experience Management Services peak matrix and in their top 5 for telecom and media as well as technology and fast growth. In addition, we were named Digital Customer Care Services Leader by IDC for transforming service delivery with automation, AI, cloud platforms, omnichannel and self-service. Our focus on continuous improvement and innovation ensures that we stay ahead of the curve and deliver the best possible experiences. Whether it's through the use of cutting-edge technology, sophisticated data analytics or highly skilled and motivated customer care teams, we are dedicated to providing the highest levels of customer satisfaction. Our experience and expertise in customer care allows us to provide a range of customized solutions tailored to our customers' business needs and goals. We understand that no 2 businesses are alike. So we work closely with our clients to understand their unique challenges and requirements. This allows us to develop a customized approach that aligns with our overall business strategy and delivers measurable results. Whether a client is a startup, a scale-up or a large global brand, our offerings and solutions are purpose-built to support their customer care needs and drive positive business growth as well as resilience. Moving on to digital IT. The strategic design and research capability was brought on as part of the WillowTree acquisition. This team was charged with a very simple mission: bring a human-centric design approach to our clients' digital products. This group has been a core differentiating component of the WillowTree business. As this team has not only composed of technology experts, but come from a background of PhDs in sociology and psychology to understand human behaviors in order to build and design better products for our customers and their users. Our business process engineering teams use a collaborative data-driven approach to optimize business processes. This team works closely with our hyperautomation experts to identify areas where automation and transformation can maximize efficiency and increase value to lead to improved business outcomes, increase competitiveness and higher levels of customer loyalty. With thousands of our team members providing application development services and quality assurance testing all around the globe, we support multiple application languages such as Python and JavaScript and feature industry best practices such as DevOps, shift left and agile methodologies. Once again, our capabilities here have grown significantly with the acquisition of WillowTree for native mobile applications, websites as well as other digital product development. For clarity, WillowTree's focus is to design and build select systems of intelligence, front-end analytics through strong product innovation and aviation. While TI's digital solutions, design build and deliver select middle and back of the application stack, systems of integration, intelligence from an operational analytics and data processing perspective and more foundational systems, leveraging our global delivery network. Our broad portfolio includes the AAA trifecta of analytics, artificial intelligence and automation, which we combine to support some of the world's largest and most disruptive brands helping them service valuable data insights and identifying opportunities to implement effective automations, including intelligent assistance and robotic process automations to realize material process improvements and efficiencies. Our digital workplace services team of experienced professionals are providing support to over 100,000 of our clients' employees. Through our omnichannel technology, our best-in-class support services that are efficient, highly responsive and secure while fostering a positive and engaged employee experience. The foundation of our private and public cloud offerings are built on proven scalable and secure cloud architecture, providing the assurance of high availability, reliable and optimized data environments required for quality customer care experiences. This includes our extensive mainframe services, offering proven performance, security and comprehensive compliance, including the payment card industry, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountabilities Act as well as the federal financial institutions and examinations council standards. Secure reliable operations is a foundational element for a quality customer or employee experience. I'd like to just briefly go over a couple of case studies to further illustrate our capabilities. This first use case using the TI Intelligent Assistant platform for a large consumer robot company. An agent assistant bot was configured to provide team members with easy access to information needed to answer questions, concerns and complaints from customers. This implementation focused on how to improve the KPIs as they were scoped at the beginning of the project. In this example, we wanted to make sure that we ensured each customer's experience was successful in terms of resolution and quality of service as well as to give our team members the support they needed to complete the tasks in all of the workflow paths as well as to reduce the learning curve for any new hires. The consistent use of this digital coworker facilitates the generation of reports aimed at improving its performance over time. We were able to successfully improve the average handle time by 28% and improved the quality of service by 37%. The next engagement was for an American multinational retailer alongside TELUS Health. TI worked on a real-time integration of the front-end customer experience with the customers' pharmacy operations. We've replaced the client's legacy system with our TI CC360 Pharmacy Interactive Voice Response solution, which is cloud-based. It enables more effective and efficient operations for the client's 331 pharmacy stores spread across the Canadian market, handling more than 450 concurrent calls for a total of more than 35,000 calls per day. What lies beneath those numbers though is the improved patient experience. With enhanced security protocols such as dual authentication, patients can check the status of an existing prescription, fill a new or an existing prescription. They can actually be transferred to speak to the pharmacist in a specific store. Meanwhile, built-in emergency procedures allow the system to easily redirect the caller to a pharmacy of a different store if their original store is impacted in some way. Apologies. Our last use case this morning is for the American Cable Company. Many of TI's digital solutions are created in our iLabs environment. iLab serves as our R&D, our innovation engine. For this customer, TI leveraged our heavy capabilities in AI and machine learning to develop a workforce management solution. In this solution, we delivered forecasting and prediction, workforce scheduling, lead management, time and work data collection as well as task and activity management. This solution drove a 90% accuracy metric for forecasting, narrowed appointment window times from 4 hours to 2, as well as drove a 7% improvement in first call resolution. In summary, I hope that this conversation has provided you with an understanding of the depth and the breadth of our global digital portfolio. We continue to grow and expand on our offerings and our capabilities to ensure that we stay ahead of the forefront of an ever-changing digital world. Next, I'd like to introduce Mike Ringman, our CIO. He's going to further discuss our innovation engine, iLabs.

Thank you. Thank you, Beth. So talking about continuous innovation and our iLabs organization. iLabs is TELUS International's investment and research and development teams where innovators, researchers and visionaries collaborate to explore emerging technology. We take on problems that are both defined and undefined while focusing on what matters most to our customers. We work with clients through a co-innovation model. We then iterate the process as we partner for success in growth. iLabs is dedicated to our pursuit of materializing new ideas, developing next-gen solutions, products, accelerators and keeping up with market trends. Think of iLabs as an incubator or accelerator with the goal of devising novel ideas that can disrupt and complement our overall company objectives. Through DevOps and agile development practices, we were able to quickly convert these solutions into live engagements. We operate and deliver in a collaborative manner, ensuring a faster time to market than traditional delivery methods. iLabs projects center around AI, including virtual assistance, RPA and analytic technologies. In addition, we have focused on process innovation and digital enablement, recruitment and training. There's really 2 areas that are the secret sauce to our innovations: our co-innovation model and our cognitive AI suite. Our co-innovation is our collaborative approach to innovation where TELUS International and our customers work together to create new solutions or products. It requires a mindset shift where the customers are seen as partners rather than just buyers of products or services. By working together, both parties can leverage knowledge, skills and resources to create better products and services and achieve shared business objectives. One of the key elements of co-innovation is managing knowledge across organizational boundaries. This means that both parties need to be transparent and sharing their expertise, ideas and insights. Joint innovation and commercialization activities are also crucial as they help to create a shared vision and sense of ownership. Another important benefit of co-innovation is the ability to gain quicker insights into shifting market and industry trends. By working closely with customers, we can better understand their needs and preferences and adapt quickly to changing market conditions. This helps increase with the agility and competitiveness and creates a more customer-centric approach to business. Finally, our co-innovation model also provides networking opportunities and executive alignment. By working closely with customers and partners, we build strong relationships that can lead to new business opportunities and long-term partnerships. Executive alignment ensures that all parties are aligned on goals and objectives, which helps create a more efficient and effective collaboration. Some examples of products that have come out of our co-innovation model are our intelligent insights platform that Beth had mentioned earlier. Working with a large North American telecom, we help deploy several bot platforms across various lines of business. However, those bots operate independently from one another and there is no oversight for them. So you lack vision in 2 things like ROI or your total bots effectiveness across the workforce. We worked together with this provider to create our Intelligent Insights platform and have now productized and are taking it to market. iLabs has also created solutions that we later adopted internally within TI. One of these examples is where iLabs created an automated data loading platform that integrates directly with various data warehousing solutions. This platform allows for a rapid, near immediate integration of data from multiple sources and customer systems. Let's look a little bit at our AI suite, our cognitive AI suite. First, let's understand the subtlety of AI here. Cognitive AI is AI that mimics human behavior to solve complex problems. Or put another way, AI by itself is designed to make decisions for you while cognitive AI allows you to help make decisions for yourself. AI has been a priority focus for iLab since its inception. This slide represents our full suite of cognitive AI capabilities. We have invested in building a wide gamut of services from voice and text to images. These AI accelerators form the building blocks and can be used in any combination to enhance or expand or even simplify our environment, as well as develop next-generation solutions. Any one of these capabilities can be deployed as a standalone on a customer premise, disconnected from the Internet if need be and does not depend on third-party providers. In addition, we've leveraged APIs across our platform to allow us to integrate into other AI cloud services as need be. Let's take a look at a few examples where TI has leveraged these capabilities. Sentiment analysis, as an example, has been in existence within TI for the past 6 years in various forms. Currently, we use context aware sentiment and can expand into other languages or domains. Our natural language processing capability, which allows machines to understand the meaning of sentences as we speak, you need to be able to extract various natural language processing items such as entities and slots. We have leveraged this capability to triage tickets, route tickets to the right person, prioritize and automate and several environments. Our investments here are the foundation for our omnichannel bot platform. Image processing is another example where we've started to productize that around our safe product set. And most recently, we're expanding the AI capabilities there to detect human emotions as well. In addition, using AI as an add-on to traditional ticketing systems like Salesforce and ServiceNow, TI has been able to digest, analyze, escalate, summarize and present IT solutions directly to experts and in many instances, solving the problem with no human intervention. Fraud prevention as well. Analyzed several points across our community management platform for data labeling to come up with a risk score for our crowd-based business. And finally, analyzing live telemetry data and figuring out potential problems within a client's network and proactively engaging with customers to offer them soft-touch solutions, preventing churn. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Tobias to talk a little bit more about our WillowTree team.

First of all, we're super excited to be here. We closed our deal on January 3. So this is week 6 of our adventure together. So what is WillowTree? WillowTree is a digital product consultancy. So what does that mean? It means we help our clients build digital products. And there are a couple of words here I would really focus on to think about what we do. One is mission-critical. We help our clients with their most mission-critical needs, and I will talk about that in a second. The reason that's so important is because it means our clients are primarily outcome-focused or time focused for building an app for the Super Bowl. Super Bowl is not going to move, right? So it's about quality, and it's about time lines, less about cost, which I think is really, really important. Two is we bring together end user experiences. So we like to say we work wherever humans interface with machines. The reason is that's a really hard place to operate. You have to have a great strategy. You have to have in terms of product requirements, needs, you have to fulfill a business requirement. You have to meet user needs at the end of the day, you have to have extraordinary design and then you have to have highly performing engineering. And doing all that together, is really, really difficult. And so that's where we operate. At the end of the day, we bring a Silicon Valley mindset to some of the largest, most admired brands in the world. That's how we like to think about ourselves. So I'll give you a couple of examples. AB InBev, long-time client, we help them build the software that their folks in the field, their distributors have servicing restaurants, bars, convenience stores throughout North America fulfilling the mission-critical goal of keeping us all supplied with beverages. CBC is a long-term client. There we build with them their streaming platforms, bringing hockey to our Canadian friends. Fox, another long-term client. We support everything from Fox Sports to FOX News, FOX weather, the TV stations. This has been extraordinarily positive weekend for us. There was a new record set in terms of concurrent streams for North American sports on Sunday night that we were part of, which was a great story. And I think hopefully, some of the teams taking a break right now after a long weekend. Manulife, we help them deliver highly proprietary and sensitive financial information to their distribution network. Marriott, we help their salespeople sell and support large events like weddings and corporate events. And then finally, Pepsi, over a decade working with Pepsi, everything from innovation around bots to deliver chips to college dorms, another mission-critical operation. SodaStream is their bottleless solution. Obviously, that's a big topic in the world right now. But in airports campuses, you'll see that SodaStream brand out there. And everything you do, how you buy soda or water is going to be through mobile applications. And again, going back to the Super Bowl, we work with them on their Super Bowl Halftime Show last year to great success. So hopefully, that gives you a little bit of a flavor of the kind of work we do. The number I'm proudest of and that's most important to us on this screen is the 80% employee engagement. In the tech industry, that number runs about 75%. We compete every day for our employees against Google, against Meta, against Amazon. And so giving folks an incredible place to work, an incredible experience is foundational to the service that we provide to our end clients. which brings me to TI. TI and WillowTree share that focus on employee experience. And you're going to hear a lot from Marilyn later on how the combined company does that but it's critical to how we retain the best talent in the world. When we went down the road last year of looking for a partner, a home, we studied the history of transactions in this space, and there are transactions that worked and there are transactions that have not worked. We created a checklist based on the factors that we could see, here's what ensures that these kinds of deals are successful in the long term. And so one was a diversified client network. So part of our combined goal was to get into new clients. TI brings over 600 clients to the game, WillowTree, over 60. I can count on one hand how many of those we share. So there are extraordinary opportunities to bring our services to each other's clients. Two is global scale. We are early as WillowTree, in our scaling mission. We wanted to find a partner who's seen this movie before and can help us short-circuit our growth problems as we grow in the number -- in thousands and thousands of new employees over the coming years. Three, culture alignment. This might be the most important at all. Culture is a very squishy word. Everyone uses it. Ultimately, it's how human beings interact with each other. And how TI interacts with his teams and how WillowTree interacts with its teams are very, very similar. We have different service lines. But at the end of the day, we're in the same business, hiring extraordinary human beings, leveling them up over time, keeping them around for a long time, making sure churn is very low. That's a critically important variable for all of us that we measure because if you have high churn, your clients are going to be super bummed out because you're constantly putting new team members on projects have to be retrained, et cetera. So that is something that TI and WillowTree share very foundational. Premium was important to us. We knew we would enter a relationship with someone that had different service lines, but it was very important that they were also premium, right? You can't marry a Chrysler and a Mercedes. It does not work. You have to have that same premium positioning and both of us within every service line we operate in, operate at the premium level, the high price level, the high margin level but extraordinarily differentiated outcomes for our clients. And then finally, complementary capabilities. A lot of deals get done in this space where people are adding a line of service that they already have. They're just looking for scale. That ends up in turf wars. It ends up in a lot of complicated relationships. It ends up in a lot of executive turnover. It is almost impossible to imagine a more complementary set of capabilities than what these 2 companies bring together. We literally going into it, had almost no overlap in terms of the service lines and capabilities. And that's allowed us to hit the ground running and really help each other right out of the gate. And so you've seen this slide before. Beth showed this slide. I just wanted to highlight here the pieces of what is coming together here that WillowTree is bringing to the table. And so we have historically focused much more on the design side and the build side, right? And so as Beth mentioned, we have PhDs that are trying to figure out what should be built, what do consumers want and how do we optimize that. We have an incredible design studio that I would put against anyone in the world against IDO, against huge, et cetera, et cetera. And then we have front-end engineering capabilities, native applications, front end of the stack, that, again, I think are second to none in the space and marry incredibly well with the middleware and back end and scaling capabilities that TI brings to the table. And finally, we have growth marketing, which allows us to help our clients get users back into the website, back into the app again and again and again after we've built them these great products and really as part of our evergreen strategy on how do you keep these relationships going with our clients for a very long time. When you look at this, you kind of come to realize that consumers demand excellent user experiences from the largest brands in the world. And those can be websites, that could be an app, that could be a chatbot, that could be a call into customer service. Any of those things, now everyone -- the term of art is omnichannel. Consumers demand that, brands have to deliver it. TI has no chinks in the armor. We deliver everything that consumers, end users want for our clients there are not a lot of companies on this planet that can say that. And so we're off and running. We are 6 weeks into it, and we have already explored, and I will say, almost closed relationships with TELUS -- what we call TELUS, the grandparent. They have major initiatives around the connected home, major initiatives around health and ag that we will, within the quarter, be putting teams on the ground to help them with. And that, from our perspective, is a very, very rapid timeline that going into this, we all aspire to, but we can tell you it's actually happening. Second is cross-sell. As I mentioned, there's 650 or more combined clients, we are targeting those very quickly based on relationship need, et cetera. We've had multiple meetings with clients where we're explaining to them the new TI capabilities on the WillowTree side, the new WillowTree capabilities on the TI side. And again, within weeks, certainly by the end of the quarter, we will be seeing results and revenues from those efforts. And then finally, landing new logos together. In Jeff's slide, you saw the list of competitors and especially on digital IT services everything is coming together in that space, right? You saw companies like Cognizant, like Accenture, but also companies like Publicis and WPP, everyone is going to this place of digital products. Our clients are issuing RFPs to have single partners and single solutions across their entire stack, and we are uniquely positioned to win those engagements, in the long term and be the partner of choice for the world's largest brands. So I wanted to take you through an example of how this all works in practice. This is an airline experience, and I think an airline experience is easy to explain because we all live it. Many of you may have lived it this morning or last night. It tends to be non-optimized. And so I think it's a good way of talking about this. So first of all, at the very front end, we have the technology and the service line to actually help sell, right, to get users engaged at a given time with a hyperpersonalized message now is the time to buy your ticket to the Bahamas for vacation. That is our growth marketing stack. It's the fastest-growing part of the WillowTree business before this transaction. Number two is purchase flow, purchase flows life or death for most clients. There is a 20% reduction fall off in the funnel for every second in delay in purchase flow, right? And so part of that is performance. Part of it's design. We've helped a client -- a large cinema chain reduce the number of screens it takes to buy a ticket from 7 screens to 4 screens. We've helped the bank reduce the amount of time it takes to open an account in an app from 10 minutes to 2 minutes, right? These are completely life-changing metrics for our clients in terms of what the falloff is and the throughput is. Next, you need digital experiences, day of experience in the case of the airline, you need an easy check in, you need to know your luggage made the flight. You need to be able to change your seat. That is the delight moment when we can support the brands that we're working with. And then things go wrong, right? So a big part of what we're focused on right now is voice. One of the reasons we did this deal is because we believe voice is the future. The first step in voice is going to be a lot of AI-enabled voice support. But at some point, you're going to not be able to get everything done that you want within the app or the website, and you're going to need to talk to a human being. And that's where the magic of this relationship comes together. Because today, when you have to call the airline, it is an operation from health. You are dreading it in the airport. The second, you realize you have to do it, your heart sinks because you know you're going to be on hold and then you're going to have to authenticate yourself. And then you're going to have to tell someone, why you're calling. We can solve that problem with one tap from the app, you're going to be connected to a live human being when necessary, and we're going to real time be transferring the history. Jeff, I'm sorry, your flight out of Vegas got canceled. We see for 10 minutes, you've been trying to rebook a flight and it's not working. I've got some options for you. I can see what you're doing. You're pre-authenticated. We know what your problem is, that -- this is omnichannel, right? And this is why from the WillowTree perspective, we are so excited about the deal is because we are uniquely positioned to bring this to our clients. We, as consumers, we don't look at, well, this is American Airlines. This is their chatbot. This is their human being customer support. This is their app. It's just American Airlines, right? And we are going to be uniquely positioned to help American Airlines fulfill that omnichannel positioning over the next 5 to 10 years as the industry as a whole moves to this type of service level. With that, I'd like to invite Beth and Mike up for a fireside chat. We thought it might be a little cold. It's not as cold as we thought it might be up here in New York. But to do a little fireside chat to talk about some of the hottest topics in tech. All right. Got the fire going.

Yes. It's good. [Indiscernible] warm up here. Awesome. So we thought we would have a conversation with you about some of the things that we believe are top of mind given the stories we're all seeing and reading in the news today. We thought we would give you some answers to 3 really important questions, we think. So the first question this morning is ChatGPT and other similar generative to IT tool -- AI tools, a threat or an opportunity for TI. Mike, why don't you kick it off?

It's a great question. I think there's a lot of buzz out there, especially right now around ChatGPT, Google recently announcing their Bard solution as well. And when you first glance, you take a look. Hopefully, everybody has gone in and tried ChatGPT. I used it to help write a lot of my year-end evaluations for team members. So very excited there. But I think really, when you start to think about what the foundation of GPT is, they've really brought together a great knowledge base on the backside. And then they have this massively scaled natural language processing engine on the front end. And that's really what makes it exciting for us. So if you look across those 2 areas and you think about TI's ability to help annotate, help keep that knowledge base up to date, help those AI systems learn. I would look at OpenAI as a perfect client potential client for us given our capabilities there, given our capabilities around trust and safety. In addition, we've had so many clients start to reach out to us and say, what is -- what should our strategy be around ChatGPT? And I think when you look at -- when we look at TI and say, we are a premium provider. We are not here to solve the simple tasks and ChatGPT helps those organizations really get there quicker. What do you think Tobias?

Yes. So we -- there's ChatGPT, obviously, that's underpinned by the GPT engine and similar engines out there. It was funny this morning on CNBC, they had a commentator who said that the first jobs that are going to get eliminated by chat GPT, GPT, are software developer jobs. And I was thinking, he's partially right, but largely wrong. And the reason is we are using these tools today in our software development practices and they're awesome at eliminating a lot of the rote work. So for example, for a client right now, we're working with them on a SQL database, we've actually trained the GPT engine to understand the scheme of the database, which now allows us to use natural language queries against that database versus writing code to do all this. The codes written by GPT. And in fact, which would -- it takes weeks out of our process, which is awesome. But what to ask, how to ask, how to get the right answer, that's still largely a human activity and will continue to be. Another example is in our design process, right? We've trained GPT to -- we've uploaded examples of great wireframes for clients. And then now we can ask GPT to create wireframes and based on what it's learned from us, and we're kind of training our proprietary model, it can create the wireframes, which again takes weeks out of the process. Which is awesome because it's taking some of the most rote basic work out of the process. So the person that -- the commentator that said it's eliminating work, they're right. But what they are not focused on is the fact that for most of our clients, the backlog of work, of features, et cetera, that they have on their project is measured in years. they have 1 to 2 years of backlog. And I'm sure in all of your companies, you have an endless list of stuff that needs to be fixed on the website, fixed on the app, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the great thing is this is all going to allow the velocity to increase, the velocity of design and the velocity of development and the list will just get longer and longer. So it will make life better for developers, better for designers because they can focus on the more creative parts. And I think designers and developers are just one example of how all these technologies are going to allow human beings to focus on the more interesting side of the equation.

Great top-up. So on to our next question, Tobias. How will multimodal voice interfaces transform user experiences?

Yes. So voice is getting better and better based on a lot of the same AI and ML technologies that support ChatGPT, right? ChatGPT is the hot thing right now. Let's see in 6 or 12 months, if we're still talking about ChatGPT. But the technology that underpins it is changing, and I don't want to overstate this, but it's changing the world. And one of the ways it's going to change the world is it's going to make voice really, really good voice experiences. Voice was the fastest adoption of any tech in human history faster than the smartphone itself. The problem with voice and why it hasn't really transformed our relationship with machines and devices is because we're still using it wrong, right? The reason we're using it wrong, like any new tech, it takes a long time to figure out how to actually make it worthwhile. I remember I was at AOL in the mid-90s. And like Time magazine on the Time website on AOL or the time are on AOL was a PDF of the magazine. And they were like, this isn't really working for us. And so it took a while to get to evolve what the web was to what it is today, right? And the same thing is going on with voice because we haven't really understood what's -- what works well with voice and what doesn't, what works well with voice, why do we want voice? It's so much faster than typing. It's 3x as fast as typing. So we want to transmit to our devices. What we don't want to do is listen to our devices or listen to anyone, but especially our machines. And so the example I always use, I want to be able to tell the Domino's app, order me 2 large pizzas, 1 with pepperoni and sausage and 1 with the works, but no anchovies. What I don't want is Alexa or Siri to then repeat that order to me because it takes 45 seconds and now I wish I would just order it in the app because it would have been faster. What I do want is to tell Domino's app, this is what I want and then it to show it to me on the screen real time as I'm talking, and then just to say, confirm, you've already got my credit card information, I'm pre-authenticated. Boom I'm done. Now I've taken a pizza ordering experience that currently takes 45 seconds in the app, and I can do it in 5 to 10 seconds. And anyone who's been around the digital ecosystem is when you can take that much time out of something, it will be life changing. And so that's why we're so excited about voice and specifically multimodal voice. The other advantage that TI brings to the table, right, is that when things get screwed up, you can then talk to a human being. One of the big problems with all these digital experiences right now, like take curbside restaurant ordering at McDonald's as an example, is if that order gets screwed up how do you fix it? Like who do you call? You can't call the local McDonald's -- and so fixing that problem is the promise of this combined company. Beth?

Yes. So I agree Tobias. And I think that multimodal voice is really going to revolutionize, right? It's a more natural, it's a more intuitive way for us to all interact with our applications, whether they're mobile, web or whatever. But I think one of the big things in addition to speed is navigation, right? Voice is really going to change how we navigate. If you use your mobile app today and whether you're going to your bank application and you're trying to order checks, instead of having to click 50x to figure out where on the app you go to order checks, you can just tell your phone to order checks. To your WillowTree Air, American Airlines' duplicate airline, when you are -- and we've all had this experience you have your preferred airline, but sometimes stuff happens and you have to fly on a different airline. And when you go to that airline and you try to figure out how to change your seat, how to order your meal, how to find your bags or whatever you don't know how to navigate through that app. And so instead of spending the time to click through 50 or 25 clicks to find out maybe you can find the information, you'll be able to use the little microphone button and just tell it what you want to do, and it speeds your whole process up I think the other thing it does is it really, really help with people with disabilities or folks who struggle with traditional input methods, they'll be able to use voice in a way that they haven't been able to use it before.

Maybe you've noticed the posters around the room. My favorite one is too safe, said no one ever, which I think is just a critically important theme for us all right now. Beth, how are emerging technologies going to support or disrupt the trust and safety ecosystem?

Yes. I think it's really going to -- emerging technologies are going to significantly erupt content moderation systems. It's the AI and the ML enabled components that are really going to change how we moderate our content. Not only are we going to be able to use those technologies to build automations to remove harmful content or to find harm for inappropriate contact faster. We'll have -- we'll be able to analyze large amounts of data faster for data insights. But I think we all have to be really, really cognizant of the fact that while AI and ML enhance content moderation, enhance customer experience, enhance a lot of our technologies solutions across the board. There are raised concerns about the ethical and legal concerns around some of that technology, right? There's concerns around algorithmic bias. There's concerns around freedom of expression. There's concerns around the accountability of the automated decisions or answers that you're given from AI, right? Companies have to really invest in data. They have to invest in the technology. They have to invest in the expertise to train these models so that we have, over time, over the next 10, 20, 25 years, have improved experiences and there's generated trust with some of that technology. But I think in the interim, while we should take advantage of the automations, the enhanced speed, the enhanced assistance that these technologies bring. We have to make sure that we're using in a very responsible and a very ethical way in not only our technologies but in our human interactions as well.

Yes. I think too, when you think of content moderation, one of the important areas that a lot of the AI and machine learning don't take into account today as well is the context of the situation, the context of what that post is, the context of what is the person is trying to convey and so I think when you look at TI's business and we're in that trust and safety area, context is always going to be an important thing because what may be important in North America may look and feel very different in the Asia Pac region or in Africa as you're starting to understand what the context of that overall communication is going to be. So while AI is definitely going to help and take a lot of the friction out of that moderation, I think the context is always going to be an important human element there or at least for the foreseeable future.

It's those nuances that humans can judge, right? Machines or AI today cannot do the interpretation and make the judgments that humans can make today. So we still, again, go back to the ethical and responsible use of those technologies.

All right. Thank you. We will have a Q&A session later. So if you have follow-up QA, please ask us later. With that, we'll ask Maria to come up, talk about our go-to-market. Thank you.

Good morning. And thank you. That was a great fireside chat. I'm Maria Pardee, TI's Chief Commercial Officer, and I've been in the role for 2 years. I'm excited to be working here I'm leading our lead-to-cash organization, which includes all of our customer relationships, our new logos, our presale support and our bids and proposals organizations. Our client list, I think you've seen a few of them. I'm going to talk a little bit more about others. Our client list is the envy of the industry across all of our service offerings. And it is a privilege to be working with the team that advances our position in the marketplace every day. We wake up every morning in this organization with the sole purpose of protecting and advancing our customers' brands. We're positioned to where the market is going or out of honor of the heritage, the Canadian heritage that we come from, we have skated to where the puck is going. Our strategy has been prescient in terms of advancing our core intellectual property, acquiring accretive assets and capabilities in the marketplace and growing our leadership position in the market we serve. Wow, who ever said the only constant in the world is change might not have envisioned the dynamic and staggering pace that we are currently experiencing. Post pandemic, changing geopolitical and socioeconomic events, a dynamic regulatory environment, looming recession and continued tight employment numbers are influencing our customers' business decisions. Privacy, protection of miners in social media, bias in our society and governance risk and compliance are the buzzwords and the genesis of most of the conversations that we're having with our customers today, the Digital Services Act that just passed in Europe last quarter, the looming social act that we're expecting in the next month from the European Union. Those are all mandating safer spaces and genuine auditable changes in results in the marketplace. Our customers and the industries they make up are looking for thought leadership and tech convergence across the board. These Fortune 500 household names are seeking to capitalize on technology innovation, including automated workflows, predictive analytics, behavior scoring and tools, which enable teams to become more productive. They want a reputation of engaging in ethical and socially responsible business practices, and they want their partners who emphasize integrity and empathy in the delivery of these goals in their ecosystem, that is TELUS International, but mostly our customers seek to keep their own constituents whether it's customers, employees or supply chain partners connected to their brand, all while managing their costs. We've had a lot of talk today about the Super Bowl and some sports I know that there's some Eagle's fans in the crowd today. So sorry, I didn't have a dog in the game, but it was really heartwarming and engaging for me and my family and friends watching the Super Bowl and the commercials that came on in the first 3 quarters, 11 brands in the Super Bowl doing commercials. Those were our friends, those were our customers, those were people that we were keeping safe. I got major street cred with the young people in my life by saying, we have an app for that. We did this for that customer. Here's somebody that we have a meaningful relationship across multiple service lines for us. Those customers and those brands that you saw on the Super Bowl have a consumer landscape that is very demanding. They look for frictionless interactions. They want everything right the first time. They want you to meet them where and how I live, protect me and mine from the bad guys, fix stuff before I know it's broken, and give me what I need before I even know I want it. That's the consumer landscape that we're dealing with, and we have the superior assets to serve them. This is a tall order, but we understand the ask and the offerings and capabilities that TI has and will continue to develop is unparalleled. Take a look at these headlines. I can do this all day because tonight, there's going to be 50 more. The one I love the most here, ChatGPT has the IQ of 83, yet, it's coming for our jobs. Let's talk about that for a second. An IQ of 83, you know what that means. There's got to be a lot more learning in these AI and ML languages. Generative AI is a boom for data collection, computer vision, labeling, annotation, more complex data, increased diversity, better quality, but the underlying theme is more, more data, more information, more learning. That IQ has to get significantly enhanced for it to have the second line, which is coming for our jobs. By the way, there will always have to be smart human beings and humans in the loop no matter how these technologies advance. We're seeing it firsthand with both existing and potential new customers. We are simply #1 in this space. We know it better than anybody. To quote several of our customers, "2023 is the year of efficiency." We must do better with less, focus on productivity, automate wherever possible. All the while relentlessly focusing on delivering hyper-personalized and empathetic customer experiences. Our customers need us to understand the businesses that they operate in. We must demonstrate knowledge of our products, their products, their market dynamics, their supply chain challenges and a day in the life of their customers, their consumers, their employees and their partners and their supply chain ecosystem partners. This is why we go to market via a vertical sales strategy. It's also advanced and supported by market-leading offering sales specialists, all supporting what Beth was going over with all of our product propositions in the marketplace. Quite simply, disruptors in the tech and games and fintech e-commerce space need to know and appreciate that we understand born digital, cloud-based and apps led businesses, how they behave. Their calling cards are agility, innovation sometimes, process light, and a customer base, which is always online. But wait, the empire strikes back. Banking, comps and media, travel and hospitality, they're flexing their muscles and their balance sheet to gain momentum and increase market share. They're looking for global carrier-grade scale partners, business process improvement experts and proven technology adoptions to the latest. They're also focused on profitable growth. Across both of those disruptors and scalers, we're uniquely positioned to serve them. Our sales organization is designed to meet these customers where they live. A trifecta of verticals, offerings and worldwide geography. We have invested in the following, and this length -- this list is lengthy. Led by proven industry leaders in each respective vertical, each of them having over 20 years of experience in the verticals they serve and consultative sales management backgrounds. Strategic account delineation of our top 10 accounts with dedicated sales teams and investment in technology innovation. Offering sales specialists who major in these capabilities of AI, content moderation, CXM and DX, including WillowTree's mobile apps development experience. We cross-trained our sales teams who can deliver meaningful proposals across all service lines. Account managers leading with representing the entire TI portfolio. We've also invested in local-based executives who engage in decision makers in their community. We put everybody under one roof, and we have a unified commission plan across the entire commercial organization. We've invested and adopted standardized processes and tools. We've initiated a channels and partner organization and we have best practices aligned with TC Corp's premier sales organization. As I stated earlier, this list is the envy of the industry. Just let me canter through a couple of our customer calls. We serve the top 5 of 6 leading North American-based social media companies #1 and #2 in the sharing economy platforms. We have the #1 digital media company in the United States. The #1 cable, the #1 satellite provider, the #1 personal genomics tech company, the #1 title insurance company in the U.S. We are trusted advisers and partners with these customers, and we continue to sell across the board our entire service line. Our competitive advantage, our promise, our performance and our people. Our promise, our brand permission allows us to partner with and deliver for our client base on all things customer based on proven IP and a very strong track record. 7 of our top 10 customers have multiple service lines across TI's capabilities. Technology innovation investments are set aside for our largest customers. So we're never only focused on the CX portion of the house, we are always looking to increase it with advancements in next-generation technology. We have a 96% renewal rate when our customers come up for new contracts. That's unheard of in this industry. We're human-centered and tech led. We never lose sight that an empowered and empathetic team is at the center of our business. On our performance side, Vanessa will address our financial performance in a few minutes, but it is strong. We're making all the short list for key providers as vendor consolidation and downsizing occurs in the customers who are downsizing and we're consistently advancing our rankings with world-leading industry analysts. Top leaders in CXM, PEAK Matrix, IDC customer care matrix leaders in the NelsonHall CX operations and Everest PEAK leaders in the markets that we serve. Goodness, we do process and people and promises made, promises kept well, but it's our people that really make the difference. Everything that we've discussed to this point is backed by a relentless and unwavering focus on our culture. I'm sure you will gain more appreciation on that focus when Marilyn presents, but they are key to our commercial success. Tobias talked about churn. Reduced attrition is good for our customers. Every month, a team member stays on a program, stays on a project. It has a balance sheet transformation just by itself to our customers. In a tight employment model, attracting the best people is challenging, but TI remains an employer of choice. Our best sales superpower is superior and consistent delivery. So frontline team members are our salespeople. As we like to say, every time we go into a new site or an operation at TI, we are genuinely happy here. Finally, my favorite slide. Oops, robust pipeline. We've shared with you our unique differentiators in the market. Our verticals and offerings based sales teams and most important, how our customers perceive us and value us in the marketplace. We have a robust, high-quality pipeline. We measure our pipeline only once it gets to the qualified stage. So imagine what this pipe looks like when I'm talking about prospecting and new opportunities. Qualified opportunities today, $2.7 billion, and that's not including our WillowTree colleagues. So greater than that. It's a steady increase in funnel size year-over-year, 30% increase. We are also selective with the customers that we chase. We want to partner with customers who want to have meaningful experiences with their customers. We're not the lowest price. We never will be the lowest price with the customers that we serve. And we've demonstrated that we know how to land and expand in our market space. Our pipe is really diversified. No vertical occupies more than 25% of the deals in our pipeline. So as one goes up, one can also go down in another space, but we have that diversification to weather through that resilience. Our business is showing resilience in the wake of challenging and rapidly changing business conditions. We've added 50 new logos in 2022. We're winning in the vendor consolidation story and we're increasing wallet share with our existing customers. Thank you for the opportunity to spend some time with you talking about our sales organization and the customers that we serve. And I believe we're going to move to the Q&A session now. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] And in addition to questions from the room, Jason, if we've got questions on the web, we'll take those as well. James?

Thank you very much. And thanks for hosting us today. I really appreciate it. Just 2 questions really to start. You presented a lot of very interesting technologies. And obviously, there's been a lot of headlines around new technologies around AI in the press recently. I'm wondering if you can talk about how not only demand and your engagement with customers for potential projects is changing. And in particular, how the recent headlines may be changing the line of questioning and requests that you're getting from your customers generally. And what kind of time frames are they talking about? Is this increasing in urgency or not? Just trying to get a sense for demand generation from some of the recent headlines?

Sure. Why don't I invite Maria to take that to start off? And if helpful, I'll top up.

Yes. Thanks for your question. That's a great one. We are seeing demand soften in some of our verticals. So as you can imagine, tech and games, there's a tap the brakes although I will tell you, there's an immediate kind of step back with our customers and then a reprioritization. So while we're seeing demand soften, we're actually now seeing some -- the chess pieces move into place for some additional and accretive work for us. However, when you look at some of the other verticals travel and hospitality. I think maybe all of us have seen the Airbnb results over the last few days, record bookings. So in our travel and hospitality space, we're seeing incredible and increased demand. In health care, we're starting to see much more efficiency cost structures come in place and some opportunities for us to expand in our space, especially with our TELUS Corp health care practices. So yes, tap the brakes on tech and games with a recalibration happening there, but some additional demand and quickening opportunities in some of our other verticals. Banking and travel and hospitality definitely on upswing.

And specifically around technology, James, I think what we're finding is almost every single engagement is no longer a conversation about human-assisted support, whether it's human-assisted for technical development, project implementation, migration to the cloud, et cetera. it's almost invariably how are you going to use technology? How are you going to use automation? What are you going to do to help me take cost out of serving my client base in a more efficient, effective way. Everyone wants to know how to better assess and utilize those technologies to drive better outcomes. I think there's finally a recognition that technology is merely an enabler for a better business outcome but everybody here sees and senses if they're not leveraging technology more effectively so that their customers can self-serve, so that they can automate those channels, reduce the overall cost to serve whilst at the same time, continuing to grow their share of wallet, increase lifetime average revenue, they're missing the boat. And so again, we feel like we've been quite prescient in building out the scope and scale of our technology-enabled service line so that we have something relevant to say and sell to all of these businesses.

And just as a follow-up and specific to WillowTree, I know that we touched on this on the earnings call last week. But I'm wondering, WillowTree brings a lot of interesting capabilities and engagements, et cetera, that you think -- I would think there would be leverage across the business and opportunity. At the same time, its margin structure historically has been a little bit below that of TELUS International generally. Can you just revisit what the points of leverage are and potential for improvement there and over what kind of time frame?

Sure. Happy for Tobias to start. And then once again, I'll top up as necessary or Vanessa as well.

Yes. Maybe -- sorry, before Tobias jumps in, actually, James. That's a really great question. I'm actually going to cover that in the financial review section. So why don't we just do that, instead?

All right. Here we go.

I never mind. Any other questions from the room? At the back there.

This is Jeff Cantwell from Wells Fargo. And again, thanks for doing this as well. Can you -- I sort of preface this question by stating that this is within the context of your guidance, which you've given us and double-digit top line growth and so forth. But can you sort of help us unpack cyclicality from your perspective in the different verticals that you operate in. Clearly, we also understand what you're saying is macro has created [Indiscernible] reset but you feel your recession proof, that's all out there and understandable. From your own perspective, just we can kind of stack order them a little bit. I'm curious what you feel would be more cyclical, less cyclical, et cetera. So you can kind of think through our models a little bit.

Do you want to give that one Vanessa, and then I'll again top up?

Sure. So I don't know that we said we're recession proof, but certainly recession resilient. That's for sure. And you can see that throughout our history of operating through various cycles, and we'll talk a bit about that later on as we go through some of the financial performance. But in terms of our guidance, we have taken a pretty thoughtful approach to the 2023 guidance and really thought about the -- starting first with the macro environment, what do we actually see happening out there? And what impact do we think that's going to have on us. And we factored that into our guidance. We've also looked at a vertical perspective. As Maria talked earlier, we are seeing a bit of a softening within tech and games and e-commerce and fintech. In fact, you may have heard us talk on the call last week that we actually see e-commerce and fintech being flattish. So we think it's going to decline for the first couple of quarters and then start to get a little bit better. But overall, flat to slightly down in 2023. We see -- and that's e-commerce and fintech because of what's happened to clients in that space specifically. And then within tech and games overall, we also -- we don't see a decline or flattening. We see some growth there, but certainly not to the levels of growth that we've seen historically. What you counter that -- you balance that against other verticals like Maria mentioned travel and hospitality, health care, as examples, comms and media which we've done very well in, particularly because of our TELUS pedigree that we're able to take the work we've done for TELUS almost as a proof of concept to take that to market with many other clients in that space as well. And so on balance, those are all the different factors that have built up into our overall guidance. So 20% to 23% -- 20% to 22% rather top line overall growth and 10% to 12% organic, which is pretty strong. We're watching some of the earnings. We saw one of them earlier this morning. And certainly, we're seeing more and more macro play into the expectations that others are reporting as well.

Tien-tsin?

The WillowTree conversations around why you guys came together makes a lot of sense. I'm glad you went through that. I'm just curious on the cross-sell component, the 600 with TI and the 64 for WillowTree, how quickly can we see that come through because the closing of the deal is kind of interesting with budgets being set right now. So I'm just curious which direction which way are you pulling potentially more business? And it sounds like TELUS parent is probably the first one where they'll get some exposure. So I'm just curious how much visibility there is from the revenue synergy side and how quickly we might see that?

Tobias, do you want to go for...

Yes. So I can't talk about the revenue specifically, I can talk about the time to market is when you think about our business, right, and you're trying to penetrate a new logo you're usually in a semi-cold relationship environment. And then if you actually get the deal, you're then in MSA environment. So the time from when a client decides I need to build x to the time that someone like WillowTree gets a deal and starts might be 4 to 6 months. And we can short-circuit that to weeks, literally, and we're proving that right now because the relationships are warm. We can get to the right people. There's previously established trust. Most importantly, there's an MSA in place and we can just start working on a project in an SOW. And so it is -- those things we are incredibly bullish about. And we've done, I think, 5 or 6 pitches in the first 6 weeks. And we've gotten incredibly positive feedback that clients want teams to start working. So it's -- I think it's significant. It's easy to see this on paper and say, it makes a lot of sense is it going to work or not, it's working right now.

Now we've had a lot of experience around integration planning, given heritage of 10 transactions over our 18-year history. And I can candidly say this one, in particular, is going to break records for us in terms of how quickly we realize synergy revenue. We are already going to see synergy revenue from WillowTree and TI serving TELUS in Q1 of this year. We will see synergy revenue in Q1, Q2 at the very latest. -- in serving existing TI clients with WillowTree services, and I'm cautiously optimistic before Q2 is out, we will see TI revenues serving WillowTree clients with TI services, whether it's content moderation, data annotation or both in particular. We spent a great deal of time evaluating which partner we thought would help. We at TI achieve our ambitions in terms of building out that design build, deliver construct that all of you followed us at the IPO roadshow and subsequent earnings calls know that we've spoken about. And similar to Tobias' checklist for looking for a partner that ticked all the boxes and choosing TI, we spent a great deal of time looking at other businesses with whom WillowTree competes over the last 2 years. And none of them were nearly as exciting as partners for us as WillowTree, for all of the same reasons that Tobias has described in his prepared remarks earlier, but our confidence in getting to realizing revenue synergies could not be higher. And indeed, having TELUS as this anchor client got us even more excited because it's not just incremental revenue, but I have to tell you, I drive some meaningful satisfaction from displacing my competitors in the -- as Tobias call as the grandparent or as I call them parent company, it has been frustrating over the years to watch TELUS spend go to my competitors. But understandably so, when we at TI didn't have the capability with the requisite gravitas, scale, speed or expertise. And now when I get to wave bye-bye to some of these folks that have been really cashing very big checks from TELUS because they're now coming to we and WillowTree. It's doubly more exciting, and this is going to endure for the long term, I think.

Can I add a point, Jeff?

Of course, Yes.

So just to your point, and we've talked a lot about how we're going to ingest WillowTree's capabilities into TI's existing customer base. And Jeff just talked to you a lot about what we're going to do with TELUS. But I think on the reverse, the synergies are really candidly just as strong. I spoke earlier about one of our biggest, easiest synergies, quite frankly, is -- WillowTree has phenomenal customers. They've got phenomenal use cases, and they've got long-term relationships with their customers. Their customers often ask them after they've built some of these remarkable assets that Tobias talked about earlier, can you stay on and support and maintain my application long term? That wasn't in WillowTree's DNA previously. And so they would say no. And that business would go to TIs competitors to support and maintain. Now WillowTree's answer is yes. We can stay on and TI can then begin to support and maintain those applications and not only the first one, but the second one, the third one and the fourth one as WillowTree stays engaged with that customer to continue to build more consumer-based applications.

Yes.

Ravi from Baird. I guess as your business moves more towards digital value-added design and consulting types of revenue, especially with WillowTree, how does that impact your contract length right now and contract value? And I guess, are the contracts shorter in duration than you've seen over time, but higher in value. Maybe you could talk about those couple different factors.

Yes. I mean, as I've shared in the past, TI contracts tend to average 3 to 5 years in duration at the MSA level. And then discrete SOWs underneath them, sometimes co-terminus with the MSA oftentimes shorter. I'll invite Tobias to provide a little bit more color around sort of the average duration of MSAs and SOWs for the WillowTree platform.

Yes. The MSA is very similar. The SOW varies a great deal. We tend to not get super focused on the actual length of the SOW because it's heavily driven by different companies procurement practices, et cetera. For us, it's about the relationship and how critical we are to that client success. And we have clients we've worked with for 4 or 5 years that we literally have had 50, 60, 70 SOW is with because of how they do procurement. We've had clients that are over the same span that we've had 5 SOWs with. So I tend not to focus on that construct. I focus much more on a, a long-term MSA but b, what value are we driving for them? And how does that continue to move.

Ramsey.

Ramsey.

I was wondering if your revenue visibility changes at different points in the cycle, when clients start looking at cost reduction, maybe start reprioritizing a bit. Does that impact your ability to kind of see what's coming and project out what might come in, which I guess is a sneak way to ask about confidence in the annual guide, but it's a more general question.

Fair question. I feel supremely confident in our visibility into what we've guided for 2023. I think it's a fair observation that the rotation into higher sensitivity and focus on efficiency in year for many of our clients is changing perhaps some of the conversation. But I haven't seen a deterioration, degradation or change of consequence that makes me feel less certain about our ability to anticipate and predict where we think our revenues will be this year. Vanessa maybe I can invite you to top up as we were building our guide?

Yes. I think it ties back to the question asked earlier in terms of what are the different considerations that went into our guidance. Certainly, visibility is a key part of that. And as you would expect, obviously, the shorter the duration, the better the visibility. But we haven't -- to Jeff's point, we haven't seen a meaningful change in that direction. We are talking to clients on a fairly regular basis. And so where we have seen softness, whether it's happened now or we think it's going to happen, we've built that in. So that is visibility of some sort. Where you're seeing what's happening to the actual clients within their own operations and what you're hearing from them. That is visibility that we're building in, and that's exactly why when we built our guide. It really is a bit of a -- it's a bottoms-up build. We start with the funnel, but we don't end with the funnel, right? So we go -- we look at the funnel, we look at the quality of the funnel. Where is the demand coming from? Where is the conversion going to come from? We don't assume that we're going to increase conversion rates as an example. So we look at the funnel, but then we also take a really big focus on the top 30 clients just because of the percentage of revenue that comes in from those clients, and we go client by client, what do we see happening within these clients? What's the level of visibility, not only from a finance perspective, but frankly, the teams that deliver. So workforce management, the regional operations teams, what are you guys seeing and hearing from those clients? And that's what we build into our guide, and that's how we've been able to get in front of e-commerce and fintech declines, as an example, tech and game softness, as an example. So I would just echo what Jeff shared. We've taken, I would say, a balanced view towards the guide. We don't think it's overly optimistic. We also don't think it's overly pessimistic either. And at this point in time, again, things could change 6 months from now, but at this point in time, knowing what we know today, we feel pretty confident in our guide.

Right here at the front.

Brad Clark from Bank of Montreal. My question is on talent. You've gone organically your headcount pretty meaningfully over the past year or so. And I guess, I'd like to understand, one, what TELUS International does specifically to win talent, in a pretty competitive field, again competitive. And then I guess, second, you've added whatever, 10,000 or so employees over the past couple of years, what is the average sort of lamp time for newer employees to become productive in the respective fields.

So Marilyn is going to be up after the break to talk about our culture, ESG and people strategy. So I don't want to steal her thunder at that point. I'm happy Marilyn for you to take a couple of seconds now if you think it's appropriate. And just for point of clarification, we've added 25,000 people in the last 2 years. Not just 10% organically.

Sure. Jeff's correct. I'm going to spend quite a bit of time after the break talking about what makes our team member value proposition different than what we see our competitors do. And we do have meaningful differentiation. We believe because it's not simply about hiring quickly. It's about hiring the right people with the right skills at the right time and more importantly, retention. So to get in front of what is that growing need for team members by also building really meaningful career opportunities and growth within the organization. So you have team members who join but then grow with their skill development across the different service lines that we supply to our customers today. The other thing that you've asked is what's the ramp time. That's a really difficult question to answer because across our service lines, whether we're hiring application design, software engineers, whether we're hiring team members to do frontline support in a sales or technical space, their ramp-time proficiency can be a few weeks or a few months. It really depends on the roles that we are acquiring for those team members to do.

All right. We'll take one last question right here in the middle of the room, and then we'll give everybody a bio break and a chance to top up their coffee, rocket fuel, juice or whatever, and then we'll come back. Go ahead.

Aravinda from Canaccord. My question is on content moderation. Can you just talk a little bit about what makes your view of that segment, your expertise unique with respect to your peers and how you see the shape of growth in that business going forward, in particular, the construct of that growth as you think about that segment over the next couple of years?

So I tried to provide a little bit of that foundational differentiation in terms of how TI approaches content moderation in my comments earlier. I'm happy to spend more time with you. Indeed, I gave 2 interviews yesterday to the Wall Street Journal and CNN Business, and I have 2 more tomorrow with Forbes magazine and Wired magazine to talk about specifically content moderation. Not surprisingly, it is in the news everywhere now. In fact, I think Congress today just invited our 5 technology behemoths to appear before Congress and explain why it is allegedly that their content moderation policies and practices are unduly biased. As I've said before, as I'll share again briefly now and then during the break, we can talk further about it or perhaps over lunch just in the interest of time. It all starts with our unique caring culture. And I know that may sound a bit etherial or fluffy, but the nature of what digital first responders are called upon to do is more and more complex and challenging every day. And whilst 5% of content on average is the horrific objectionable graphic content, 95% is more administrative in nature and helping to identify with a reasonable degree of accuracy, fake accounts, spam and what have you. It's the 5%, unfortunately, just given our species predilection for salacious content that gets most of the attention and headlines. And whilst it may only be a smaller proportion, I think there's good reason for concern about that. And we, as a species, I believe, are still struggling with finding that unique balance between allowing us to exercise our rights of freedom of expression with drawing appropriate limits where the exercise of those freedom of expression rights infringe other people to be free from being unduly influenced or harmed by false, misleading or inappropriate content. And I think what we continue to struggle with across all of the social media platforms, in particular, but even more broadly, is the law allegedly is supposed to be reflective of our common morality. And yet, what we see around the world is a high degree of heterogeneity in the legal framework that dictates how, when and what gets posted or deleted. And then we see businesses that seem to have a disproportionate influence on what the audience gets to see and/or post just based on their size and scale, and they're setting their own policies. And not surprisingly, I think we continue to see this friction, this confrontation between user community expectations, their expectation of their governments to step in when and as appropriate and then finding where to draw the line on limiting those restrictions. And so we're seeing already, I think, a regulatory move from a restriction to punishment in many jurisdictions. I think emblematic of a belief that, you know what, sticks may be more effective than carats to try and get these technology behemoths in particular, to be more proactive and engaged. I don't think we're going to get this right anytime soon. And as a consequence, we believe at TI that, that represents significant opportunity. But with opportunity to turn a phrase on that superman statement comes great responsibility. If you're going to have a digital first responder community at scale, participating in this ecosystem, you need to be mindful of the impact the ecosystem has on them every bit as much as they on it. And so back to my originating point about caring culture, how we recruit 4 digital first responders, who we recruit, the profiles we use and how we protect them from the beginning of their first day of hire, ray through to, as I mentioned in my comments earlier, 12 months post them leaving the organization is profoundly differentiated than the competition, which is why we enjoy better performance, ask our clients, they'll tell you so. Why we enjoy better tenure, why we have better engagement, why almost 35% of our content moderators are actually referrals from existing moderators. All of those elements tell me that we do this differently and better than others. And it comes down to how we approach this responsibility at first instance. We're not merely transacting with our customers or just transacting with our team members, this is a long-term commitment, and it gives us a competitive advantage. All right. So let's take a break. There's refreshments up back. Bathroom is just around the corner, and we'll see you all back here in 10 minutes. [Break]

Thank you, everyone, as we welcome you back from the break. I wanted to ease you into the next section with a video sharing some of the images of our days of giving from around the globe. After almost 15 years with this organization, participating in those days of giving is still one of the personal highlights for me, and I'm sure it will continue to be that way for years to come. For those of you, who have been following the TELUS International story through our growth and our IPO, we've spoken about culture as one of our key differentiators a lot and from the very beginning of our story. Our focus on empowering our leaders and developing our teams on being an employer of choice around the globe is visible for us in how we attract, how we hire, how we retain, develop and inspire our teams. In turn, it's visible on how we deliver quality and innovation for our customers. Almost every single one of my very supportive colleagues took the time in their presentations to mention that innovation and quality and expertise stem from the power of our people and the power of the message of growth and retention. I'm sure many of you have heard, culture is important from a whole lot of people like me many times before. So if I'm going to talk about it being different, and I say there's tangible impact, what does that actually mean? So one of the most, in my view, meaningful measures of the impact of culture is the level at which current team members refer family and friends to join TELUS International as an organization, or the level at which they amplify and disseminate our employer brand and messaging through their own personal social networks around the globe. In 2022, our annual engagement survey asked the questions. Do you recommend TELUS International as an employer, 87% of our team members said, yes, we actively do. On the back of the incredible messages we portray as being an employer of choice, that are really resonating and given authenticity in the marketplace by the personal amplification of those messages through our current team members around the globe, we attracted 1.1 million applicants to this organization in 2022. On the right-hand side of this slide, we have what we refer to as our culture value chain. So this concept brings to life tangibly how we see the real impact that culture has on actual business outcomes. We introduced our culture value chain in 2014, and it's still relevant today. This speaks to the continued importance of culture and engagement and the significant impact that those concepts play now as a part of our growing and emerging ESG strategy. For TI, ESG isn't a topic. But for us today, it's not something we do because it's expected by the investment community. Rather, our focus on culture, DEI, environment and giving back has been at our core since day 1. Building on the robust history I just mentioned, our post-IPO story continues to evolve. And we elevate our disclosures, and we elevate our reporting and structure around our practices and priorities relating to ESG. In more simple terms, we as a leadership team are clear about our priorities: diversity across the globe, giving back to the communities where we live and work, supporting a sustainable planet and lastly, adherence to strong corporate governance growing from the award-winning governance practices of our parent TELUS. In support of these priorities, we've made real progress already and have made ongoing commitments that include, at least 30% of our Board members are women. In 2022, 57% of our executive leadership team are women. We have and will continue to attain an 80% team member engagement score globally and 100% participation in our annual ethics and integrity programs. Going forward, we will increase our impact sourcing by 15% in 2023, align all our suppliers to our supplier code of conduct by the end of 2023 and take pro-active steps to provide equal access to suppliers with diverse backgrounds. We're early in our formal ESG journey through disclosures, but we're proud to have already been recognized on the Sustainalytics ESG industry top related list as well as to receive a number of ESG awards like the Forbes list of Best Employers for Diversity in 2022 and Mogul's top 100 Companies for Diverse Representation in 2022. The magic of team member engagement that drives the ability to attract and retain the best and drives the ability to inspire those, to continue to learn and grow with TELUS International as an organization, which, as we said before, in turn is what drives our ability to deliver higher quality and innovation for our customers, that magic happens when our values and priorities are real, demonstrable and as they align to those things that are important for our team. Feedback from our team members continues to highlight for us that are focused on our planet and the environment matters. Working with an organization that is socially and environmentally responsible is important to our teams and to our clients. Highlighted here are many of the key programs in place today to help us reach our environmental goals. We are committed to reducing our carbon footprint and to increasing our support and use of certified renewable energy projects like wind and solar. We will continue to work collaboratively with our clients to support their carbon neutrality commitments, including TELUS, who has committed to net carbon-neutral operations by 2030. And we will disclose Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions annually. You will find additional information in our sustainability report to be released in April. Global talent has been at the forefront of ongoing media and business discussions throughout the pandemic. I think we've all seen and heard that many times. The topic continues to be top of mind today. Well, TI is not immune to the competitive trends impacting labor markets around the globe. Our differentiated approach of a multifaceted team member experience that focuses on DEI, focuses on learning, focuses on career growth, innovation and focuses significantly on ongoing team member wellness enables us to attract and retain talent with an employee value proposition that far exceeds a traditional discussion around basic compensation and benefits. You can see how some of the data points on this slide here show the impact of our inclusive practices. Our global team is truly diverse, which is not just a nice to have for our business. Rather, it is and has and it will continue to enable broad talent coverage across a wide variety of geographies, which is important. This gives us flexibility in how we address labor market trends around the globe. And as Beth spoke to earlier, this diversity is also core to how we embed truly nuanced cultural understanding into our content moderation practices as well as how we mitigate bias in our data collection and annotation offerings. Tobias spoke eloquently to the differentiation of having high-caliber talent in software design and development to ensure that customers have an ongoing relationship that leads from one project to the next to the next. We continue to see across this business that, that ability to connect with and retain teams has meaningful outcomes for ourselves and for our customers. Part of our ESG strategy that you will note, we make commitments around is impact sourcing. On the right-hand side, you can see a few references to some programs that we have around the globe. I think impact sourcing is something that many organizations speak to, but the unique way in which we demonstrate that, I think, again, is differentiated. I'm going to highlight just a couple of those today. Our HOPE program in Central America was introduced over a decade ago, where individuals from rural indigenous communities, participate in a year-long program to learn language skills, computer literacy, technical or customer support skills and competencies and this program then leads to full-time employment with TELUS International, creating income and stability for families beyond what they had originally thought possible. And at the same time, is TELUS International, a group of absolutely amazing and strongly committed team members. Our partnership with SETU, an organization in India is new. It's an NGO where our partner provides computer training, and general business acumen for women from remote underserved communities who are then enabled to participate in and perform computer vision and video annotation work and engage in ongoing meaningful employment that changes the path of their futures. These ongoing diversity initiatives are not words on a page for us. They create a powerful outcome for us with respect to our teams and with respect to customers, who share similar values in wanting to impact employment around the globe. I'm going to share some numbers on this slide, which I'm not going to read to you because nobody enjoys that experience, around what our community giving and our incredible volunteers have accomplished. But let me highlight with a few extras. Since 2007, our community initiatives have positively impacted the lives of 1.2 million citizens around the globe. Since 2011, our local community boards have supported small grassroots charities with an excess of $5 million of funding. In 2022 alone, our team members gave 75,000 hours of personal time giving back to their local communities. For us, it's not just about writing a check and donating funds. For us, it's about creating a real sense of pride and connectedness to the communities where our team members live and work. And as much as these numbers create a sense of pride for our TELUS International team, create a shared sense of purpose with our customers, who support and align with our giving philosophy, the real power of these programs is the amount of connection it creates for our global team. So what makes us different? People want to be proud of where they work. People want to talk about great things. They have an opportunity to participate in with the communities where they work and spend time. A sense of belonging is something that our team members remember when they are talking to family and friends that they may refer. When they're deciding to join or stay with TELUS International through good times and challenging times, this is what they remember. When our customers are making their decisions to grow their business with TELUS International, it is this motive connection to our values and beliefs that our customers as well share that they align with and they remember. This memory is created through the active participation and storytelling of TI as an organization. To bring this to life, I'm going to share one quick story with you. In October of 2013, our teams volunteered on a Saturday to renovate a school and to build an addition in Guatemala City. After that day, we didn't write our check and walk away. We continued -- and our local team members continued to participate in connection with that school. They showed up to do English tutoring, they showed up to do volunteering around computer and technical skills, they showed up to coach students in an environment where they played soccer, which my teams continue to remind me is actually football. But a few months later, after all the trees had grown in and the playgrounds in the school have been occupied and used by students and teachers, we went back in May of 2014 to celebrate with the local community that uses the school. I had the privilege of being at both of these events as did our CEO, Jeff Puritt. And although we had a very well written speech, all prepared for that second event, after meeting the students and the teachers that morning, after walking around and interacting with the community engaged in that school, after meeting the students, who were participating in their new environment using the playground, using the new library, after seeing the joy and appreciation on the faces of the students and teachers, he chose to simply throw away that speech and speak from the heart and tell the story of what it means to be a TELUS International team member and to build that community, connection and to feel that sense of pride in what it means to be connected as an organization, as a group of team members and as a community. I hope you walked away today with the belief that how TELUS International integrates culture, engagement and now ESG priorities is a real differentiator for our teams, our customers and our community and most importantly, these impacts and influences of culture and community drive real value for us as an organization, for our communities, for our teams and for our customers. With that, here's the story. [Presentation]

So I have the unfair advantage of video content, which is always meaningful. But I was really just a warm-up back for the real headliner here, which is TELUS International's differentiated financial story. So for that, please welcome our CFO, Vanessa Kanu.

Thank you, Marilyn. I always love watching that video. It really brings to life the culture and the values at TELUS International. I actually had the opportunity to participate in my first TDOG, TELUS Days of Giving, August of last year, Marilyn, maybe? August. Because of the pandemic, we hadn't done it in person in 2021 or 2020, they were done virtually. And let me tell you, those are phenomenal. I remember actually my teenage daughter called me that evening. She said, "what did you do at work today?" I said, "Well, we're building schools". And she said, "I thought you're an accountant. What are you doing building schools?" and I said, "Don't worry, I wasn't doing the electricals, there's professionals for that. I just painted numbers on the ceiling". Really phenomenal and actually a really, really great lead into the financials, I think, because we really do believe that it is that culture and those values that contribute to the consistent delivery of the financial performance that we have had at TELUS International. So speaking of consistent delivery, one of the things that we don't often get a chance to do during the quarterly earnings calls, because they are so focused on the quarter is to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. And so what I thought I would do as a starter this morning is to really look at the 5-year picture of TELUS International. And you can actually kind of see here a very strong track record of consistent execution and consistent execution of a profitable growth strategy. So when you look at the revenues, for example, in 2018, our revenues were $835 million and at the end of last year, 2020 (sic) [ 2022 ], just about $2.5 billion, a 34% CAGR, excluding WillowTree, and that growth has come from a combination of both organic and inorganic revenue growth. But when you even think about the inorganic, M&A has been a key enabler of our strategy. You heard Jeff talk about that earlier. But as most of you know, 70% to 90% of acquisitions actually don't work out. They don't actually add any value at the end of the day, they destroy value. So that we have been able to actually integrate those acquisitions and get that kind of growth CAGR, I would say is, again, proof points of consistent execution. When you look at the EBITDA, again, very strong CAGR there, 40% CAGR over the 5-year study period. And what's particularly interesting, because this has been part of the dialogue for the last 2 years is the fact that we've actually maintained our EBITDA margins particularly when you think about the fact that going back to 2021 and all of the talk around wage inflation, and we experienced probably amongst the tightest labor markets that we have seen in a very long time and particularly within this 5-year period, all of the wage inflation, of course, wage inflation is a thing, but we saw the rate of wage inflation accelerate to the point where a lot of the questions that Jeff and I were taking on the earnings calls, what are you going to do with wage inflation? How is it going to impact your margins, right? And not only on the wage inflation side, but also, frankly, supply chain pressures that resulted in a lot of cost increases across the board. And so that we were actually able to maintain our EBITDA margins to all of that, again, consistent execution. And yes, I know that some of our peers did expand EBITDA margins 10 bps, 20 bps, 30 bps here and there. I would suggest that they were starting from a lower base and still playing some catch up. And this clearly has also flowed through to earnings per share. You can see there the 32% CAGR on EPS over the 5-year study period. And then last but not least, of course, free cash flow, very, very robust, 43% CAGR over the study period as well. Now the market sentiment we know is changing. We're actually happy about that because we're now -- we've now gone from a sentiment that is -- that was revenue growth at all costs. So revenue growth was king. So now a sentiment that is more aligned to profitability and cash flow. And what you can see here is TELUS International has actually always executed towards profitable growth. And so while the market is now moving in that direction, this is certainly not a new muscle for us. It actually has been part of our DNA. And there's actually a reason we chose a 5-year study period here across these metrics, because we are managing the business for the long term. There will always be quarterly aberrations, who's on consensus, who's not on consensus? It's fun to read all the reports every quarter. But frankly, we are here to deliver and create value over the long term. And particularly now that markets are so turbulent, there's so much economic uncertainty. You saw the slides that the headlines Maria shared earlier, with uncertainty comes opportunity, of course, and that's the approach and the stance that we are taking. But when you're in these times of uncertainty, you've got to look beyond what happens in one quarter or the other quarter. You step back and look at the bigger picture and you look at a team that has consistently delivered over a 5-year period, and that's what you see here. What's also notable for us is very strong performance relative to our peer group. So this was actually a third-party chart that we were happy to borrow. What this shows is our revenue CAGR over the 5-year period and our EBITDA margins against our peers. And we haven't named specific -- we did them in peer groups based on their overall segmentation. And you can see TELUS International, there up and to the right of that. So again, very distinguished performance relative to our peer group. However, when you also look at that peer group, what's very interesting is if you look on the bottom axis there, when you look at the revenue CAGR plus the EBITDA margin. Now many of you would remember the rule-of-40 which is now starting to come back in favor, and that's your revenue growth, plus your EBITDA margin or your revenue growth, plus your free cash flow should at least equal 40. And by the way, these are not our charts, third-party, we sourced it, but we're happy to reference it. But when you look at the rule-of-40 construct and look at the -- our historical CAGR plus our EBITDA margins, and you see us being a lot more towards the right. But what's very evident here is the valuation gap relative to a lot of those other peers that have either the same or frankly not quite the same revenue growth plus EBITDA margin. So again, we actually do see a tremendous opportunity for us to close that gap over the fullness of time. So I've talked a bit about growth and the strong revenue CAGRs over time. You also heard Beth talk a lot about our different service offerings earlier and I think, very eloquently described all the different capabilities that we have in each of those service offerings. What we haven't actually previously shared was what our revenue mix was within each of those service offerings. And what's really evident here is not only the revenue mix, but how that mix has evolved over time. And so in 2019, 75% of our revenue was derived from CXM services. And look, we only had about 2% of revenue in Trust & Safety. You fast forward to 2022, through a series of acquisitions, which I'll come back and talk to -- I think Maria, you called them prescient acquisitions, and I would agree. By the end of 2020 (sic) [ 2022 ], before even including WillowTree, our CXM mix is now 52% and you can see there Trust & Safety, 18%; AI Data Solutions, 14%; and Digital IT, 16%. And on a pro forma basis, with WillowTree, we're now about 48% of revenues in CXM, 17% of revenues in Trust & Safety, 13% in AI Data Solutions and 22% in Digital IT. And why this is really important is think back to those market growth charts that Jeff shared at the beginning. Yes, $750 billion market and rapidly growing but you may recall from those charts, CXM, according to IDC, is growing about 7% CAGR. That's the market industry prediction. We at TI have always grown significantly faster than that, which is obvious when you look at the revenue mix. But what's even more important here is 52% of our revenues from this day forward, are actually coming from those faster-growing market segments that you saw earlier. So in the slides that Jeff shared, you may recall, AI growing at 23%, Trust & Safety growing at 22%, Digital IT, it's a massive market, it's huge, growing very fast. So as we pivot the business or as we have pivoted the business towards these faster-growing lines of business, that gives us a lot of opportunity and hope in terms of our future revenue growth trajectory not only for now, but also over the medium and long term. So a lot of that evolution did come from these prescient acquisitions as both Maria and Jeff have alluded to. And I wanted to take a moment to actually talk about that, because as our business has evolved, because -- and we've now acquired the WillowTree capability set, how have we actually done in our past M&A. We've done a lot of acquisitions. They've been a key part of our growth story and evolution over the last 18 years. I think it was 18 years yesterday, if memory serves me. So what I wanted to do here was I just look at the last 3 most material acquisitions prior to WillowTree. Again, execution, how has the team here executed? What's the track record. Xavient Digital, as an example, was acquired in 2018 with a focus on digital transformation capabilities, particularly helping comms and media clients to take their legacy premise-based applications like billing systems and so on to the cloud. Since we acquired Xavient, we've grown that revenue CAGR, 26% and EBITDA by 45%. CCC, you saw from the previous slide in 2019, while we did actually participate in the Trust & Safety ecosystem, it was 2% of our revenue. And what that acquisition did for us, it allowed us to play in that market at scale. And you now see the share of Trust & Safety in our business, again, faster growing market segment that we can now meaningfully participate in, you also saw in Jeff's slide earlier, Everest, a third-party research group on the leaderboard. There's only 2 companies in Trust & Safety with more than 10% share, Accenture and TELUS International. And that was springing off the back of the CCC acquisition. And what I really like about this is, again, back to our profitable growth orientation, the EBITDA growth. So it's not just here we grew the revenue and let's stop there. It's also what do we do with the EBITDA from the acquisition date onwards. And then last but not least, Lionbridge AI, 18% revenue CAGR, 14% EBITDA CAGR. For those of you that have followed us for some time, you may recall that Lionbridge was a carve-out. And with carve-outs, you don't get a lot of infrastructure. And so that EBITDA CAGR reflects a number of meaningful investments we actually have to make into the platform. And again, looking at seeing the revenue growth there, and as I think Maria may have alluded to, really now head to head with the other player -- the other key player of scale in that market. And we do think that very shortly, we probably will be #1 if we aren't already. So it's not just the success of the M&A and how we grew the revenues and how we grew the EBITDA, but also the deleveraging story. And I know that many of you know very well our deleveraging story. I'm not going to read the numbers on the page. However, some of you are new to the story. And so because of that, I thought it was worth repeating for those that are new to the story, but also more importantly, just given the environment that we're in of rising interest rates and the track record of the management team of not only successfully growing the acquired entities, but also very rapidly delevering post-acquisition. And that's the story that you see here. And of course, as we now know, WillowTree is next. So in our -- WillowTree has historically actually grown very well relative to its peer set. And of course, we now think that with TI scale and the synergy opportunities that we talked about earlier, Tobias spent quite some time talking about them, we dealt with some of them in the Q&A. We do think that we're very well positioned. Even in the -- when you look at our guide for 2023, at the midpoint of our guide, we're looking at 30% revenue growth for the WillowTree assets. And many of the peers in that space are growing 20%, some of them have actually guided lower. So we're feeling really positive and optimistic about what's happening within the newest members of our family. All that being said, we've got about a 20% EBITDA margin. I'll address your question, James. I'll just start by saying, that actually is a pretty good EBITDA margin. Relative to that -- so WillowTree, they're not starting from a low EBITDA margin, they're starting from a really, really good EBITDA margin as compared to not only public peers, but frankly also private peers, because through the acquisition process, we looked at a lot of companies. And one of the things that attracted us to WillowTree, frankly, was to use Jeff's words, it was not a fixer upper. We saw opportunity for enhancement, but certainly, it was not a fixer upper. All that being said, we're 20% today, where do we see it going. And frankly, we do think that we'll get closer to TI margins by 2024. And we don't think that's the upper limits per se. We do think that even beyond that, we've got some opportunity for continuing margin expansion and coming from a number of different levers, right? So as an example, just taking advantage of the scale that we bring and so that's going to be accretive as well. But even, I think Tobias may have alluded to this earlier, now having access to nearshore and offshore capabilities that WillowTree on its own in their size did not have that access or could have gotten it but at a much -- with a much longer time to market and time to production. So I do think there's multiple levers there on the WillowTree front, and we'll continue to expand the margins over time. So I probably wouldn't spend too much time on guidance because I think we did -- we took a few questions earlier on guidance. So I'll skip that only to reiterate the numbers that we shared last week. And if you have more questions around guidance, we'll talk about that more in the Q&A. But suffice to say that we have taken a fairly thoughtful approach. Not everything is growing at the same rate. We do have some segments that we see softness in, but we also have a lot of other segments that we see growth in that's making us fairly comfortable with our guide for 2023. Now beyond 2023, what do we actually see? A number of growth levers. From a revenue perspective, you saw the very, very large TAM that Jeff shared earlier, $750 billion growing at double digits for the most part. We are still at the very, very early stages of penetrating that TAM, very early stages. And so by just executing, which we've done over the last 5 years, by just executing, we can continue that growth trajectory prospectively. We talked a lot about the NTM capabilities that WillowTree has now brought to us that we didn't have before. We talked a lot about WillowTree in the past not being able to say yes to certain projects, and now we can say yes to those projects. Maria shared about the funnel and converting that funnel even though we have not assumed any -- Maria has a conversion target, but we don't build that into our guidance and of course, all the cross-sell and upsell opportunities. So aspirationally, we do think that maintaining organic growth CAGR in the mid to high teens in the medium term, we think is doable, and that's our aspiration. And of course, getting north of that, but we think comfortably, aspirationally mid- to high-teens organic revenue growth. From an adjusted EBITDA margin perspective, as we look beyond 2023. And again, for us, medium term here, I'm not giving 2024 guidance, by the way, that's not the purpose of this session. This is really more what do we see happening over the medium term, i.e. over the next 3 years. And again, there, we do see EBITDA margin expansion. Our EBITDA margin this year, as we talked about last week on our call, we're adding in WillowTree at 20%. We've got a few puts and takes that are happening in 2023. We also want to be a little bit cautious in terms of our -- while we executed really well on pricing adjustments, historically, we want to be a bit cautious as to how much of that we bake into our expectations for 2022, just given the macro climate, right? But you set that aside and you look at a longer-term horizon, we certainly do see a clear path to EBITDA margin expansion. And again, aspirationally, we think 100 to 200 bps expansion over a 3-year horizon should be doable for us. And that will continue to come from operating leverage scale, continuing to shift the mix of our service offerings towards those higher margin, higher value services. And then, of course, last but not least, free cash flow coming from the EBITDA margin expansion and continuing working capital optimization. And I think this team here also knows that our capital intensity is fairly modest, 4% to 5%-ish of revenue. So with that modest capital intensity, we should be able to generate some pretty strong FCF conversion as well. One of the things, actually, and I should have mentioned this earlier when we talked about the execution track record, we have consistently -- our return on invested capital has consistently outweighed our cost of capital. And that actually is a really good proof point in terms of putting our capital to good use. As we now look at our capital allocation strategy, prospectively, our capital allocation strategy is geared towards growth. So what does that mean for us? We're going to reinvest into our own growth. It probably means you're not going to hear about dividends from us in the near term. You're not going to hear about share buybacks from us in the near term. We see ourselves as a growth-oriented organization, and that's where we're going to be putting our investments. We'll invest to drive organic growth. We'll continue to increase the proportionate share of our investments that go into sales and marketing, so that we can go back and attack that large TAM that you saw earlier. It's not going to fall in our laps. We have to invest for that growth. We will continue to invest in capital expenditures and as we build and enhance our infrastructure globally but frankly, we'll also continue to invest in innovation. You heard Mike and Beth and others talk about innovation. We want to continue building innovative solutions, and that will be a key part of our organic growth driver, prospectively. And that you'll see that reflected in our allocation strategy. When we can't build, we'll buy. As we've done over the last 18 years and as you've seen, just looking at the last 3 material acquisitions, we expect M&A to continue to be a key part of our story going forward, and we'll continue to do that to continue to acquire capabilities within different market segments, within different geographies, et cetera. So that will continue to be a key part of our allocation strategy going forward. But as always, you should expect a very thoughtful and disciplined approach from TELUS International. And then last, but not least, and this is really important, particularly in this climate, is we'll continue to manage our leverage ratio, pay down debt and still within that target range that we shared of 2x to 3x. Of course, we can fall below that, by the way, for those who are a little leverage adverse these days. We're not -- it's not like once you hit the 2x watermark we go, let's ratchet it back up, we will go down. But we do see 2 to 3x as a fairly comfortable range to be as we've demonstrated historically. So bringing all that together, I've spent a lot of time talking about track record, partly because the lawyers didn't want me to spend so much time on forward-looking stuff. So we can blame the lawyers for that. They scripted me very heavily. But all that to say, it is a very important time to actually look at the track record of a management team and of an organization. Again, back to when times are uncertain, you look for performance. You look for past success. You look for actual proof points, and that's what you've seen today. Strong double-digit top line growth, both historically as well as prospectively, leading adjusted EBITDA margins, continuing strong FCF conversion and of course, selective M&A to continue to drive value. For us, again, we're here to manage the business for the long term. We're all about long-term value creation. Yes, we sweat the quarter, because the quarters make the year. But really and truly, our jobs, Jeff's job, all of our jobs, all of the management team that you see here, we really are here to drive value creation over a longer-term horizon. So with that, I'll pause there. I'll invite Jeff.

Thanks very much, Vanessa. Well, I hope you are all as excited as I am after hearing Vanessa describe what we believe this little lemonade stand will deliver in terms of financial performance over the next 3 years. All right. I get it, you're probably not as excited as I am. But perhaps you're all at least a little bit impressed or perhaps just a tad intrigued. We decided to host this Investor Day, because we believe that we've not done enough, not nearly enough to help the market properly understand how TI is different from our competitors, to help close that gap that Vanessa just shared between our performance and our valuation. Captured on this slide here are 7, excuse me, compelling reasons why TI wins and why we believe TI deserves your interest, your support, your confidence in your investment, the very same value drivers that my colleagues have been illuminating for you throughout the day today. And whilst all of them are important, I think 2 in particular, are worthy of repeating here, our caring culture and our resilient profitable growth. The former is not only the foundation of our entire business, but it is undeniably underpinning and directly correlated to enabling the latter. All of this leads not only to creating meaningful incremental shareholder value, but even more so to delivering substantial value to all of our stakeholders. It's beyond contestation that both TELUS and Baring Private Equity Asia, now BPEA EQT, have derived meaningful shareholder value from their investment in TI. And while we're all frustrated, disappointed with the current TIXT share price, our operating and financial performance over the past 2 years, in particular, has been solid. And all our shareholders, hopefully, recognize the significant incremental value already created with so much more yet to be realized. So too do we believe that our customers recognize the meaningful value that TI delivers to them and their customers, leveraging our unique and differentiated value proposition with a relentless focus on client experience excellence. And while we've spoken at length today about our engaged team members, perhaps not fully understood is just how important TI is to so many of them. Our caring culture, our commitment to their well-being to their career development to diversity, equity, inclusion to our planet's well-being is undeniably correlated to TI having among the most engaged and tenured talented team members in the world and ensuring that we continue to be an employer of choice. And finally, very closely connected to this last point regarding team members is our commitment to healthier communities. This not only serves as a galvanizing dynamic for our team members, but it also serves us well when we interact with our local hosts around the world. By way of a specific example, we've built 12 schools in Guatemala over the past 14 years. And the federal and municipal government representatives with whom we interact regard us favorably and work more cooperatively with us because of how we recognize and respect their local laws and communities and make a difference. We've created over 5,000 well-paying jobs and contributed millions of dollars in taxes to the economy in Bulgaria. The government regards us in a more positive light and they invite us to collaborate with them on parliamentary hearings to discuss opportunities to improve social media access and content moderation rather than punishing or penalizing us. And they actively support us in our efforts to ensure a safer working environment for our team members rather than standing idly by while others in the community cast false dispersions. We truly believe there is something special about TI and something for everyone. And I certainly hope you all do as well. So with that, I'm going to now invite my TI colleagues to once again join me on the stage as we take your questions. And then I'll have some closing final remarks before lunch. Come on up, team.

I have a pool going as to how many of these questions go to Vanessa. So I hope you don't disappoint me. I think we've got some mic runners, so I'm going to make them earn their pay, even though they're volunteers. Why don't we start right here in the front.

So when you think about the capital allocation strategy, I love that design, build, run page, especially with what you layered in, very helpful when you think about all the areas of the business. Could you comment on which areas within that page will be sources of capital moving forward, potentially more capital-light businesses or where TI has a bigger presence established already and which ones will be uses of capital?

Great question. Vanessa?

If I think along that wheel, design, build, deliver, certainly, the deliver front has historically been a source, right? And the recent use has been our investment in the design because we just have not been very heavy on the design front. So we've been putting a lot more investment into that. And of course, the WillowTree acquisition is the most recent example of that. As we think prospectively, which of those segments will be more uses than sources. I would expect the CXM, especially as we look along that deliver front, we'll continue to be a tremendous source of capital and -- but we'll continue to invest in capabilities. So even within the delivery front, you should hear from us investments in geo expansion as an example, that will be a use. You should continue to hear from us even along the design front. I mean even with WillowTree we'll continue to probably do some more tuck-ins to expand our capability set, so that will be a use as well. But on the whole, again, I think all of this will just continue to drive and enhance our overall organic growth profile prospectively, because whatever is inorganic today, we'll continue to drive the organic prospectively, and we'll want to continue to invest in innovation and innovative solutions to help to drive that going forward.

This is [ Kathy Chan ] from Bank of America. Thank you for the whole presentation and everything. So I first wanted to ask the mid- to high-teens organic growth CAGR over the medium term, what are your assumptions around the growth and the largest client, TELUS within that? And then are there any newer verticals or geographies or anything that you think are going to be key in driving that growth going forward that maybe you weren't a part of in the past? And then I have one follow-up question on margin.

This is where I wish I brought my little notebook to write down the question so I don't forget them. Should I? Should you?

Jump right in. I'll top up.

Do you want to start with TELUS?

Yes. We anticipate TELUS continuing to grow healthily over the study period. As I shared in my prepared remarks earlier, it was 20% growth year-over-year, '22 over '21. And over the next 3 to 5 years, TELUS' CEO and President, also TELUS International's Chairman has shared many times now that his expectation is that TELUS' spend with TELUS International over the next 3 to 5 years will exceed its spend over the last 10 years. In terms of other clients, big and small, that go into the bottoms-up build, I'll invite Vanessa to comment.

Yes, I think you are also asking around other verticals as well as we kind of look at that medium-term horizon. As we kind of look beyond, we talked a bit about 2023 and what we're seeing happening there from a vertical perspective. As we look beyond 2023, we actually see tremendous growth opportunity in health care as an example. And so there are certain verticals today that are -- represents a much smaller proportion of our revenue, but through what we're seeing and how the funnel is building up in those verticals, we actually expect them to become increasingly important and health care is one of those. We also see hospitality and travel coming back. Quite frankly, it's already coming back relative to what happened in the last couple of years. So we do see that as having another greater weighting through the course of time. Comms and media, not just -- not only because of TELUS though. I don't want to say too much prospectively, but a lot of similar clients like TELUS where we're able to export the work that we've done for TELUS, other telcos, other comms and media organizations right here in the U.S. and globally as well. I'm looking at [ Monty ] because that's his remit. He's actually singularly responsible with Maria to actually build that vertical. So we've got a pretty big bogey that is trying to get for us and leveraging the TELUS experience and the TELUS expertise to drive that growth across other similar companies as well. And I forgot your -- I should have brought my notepad. What was your last question, [ Kathy ]?

No, no. That was basically it, you covered that. So -- and then the second question was just around margins. So I mean you guys provided a really helpful slide about the breakdown between the different segments of the business like digital IT and et cetera. So about 50% is from CXM. Can you talk a little bit more about the margin profile for the different business segments? And then I think you mentioned the 100 to 200 basis points over the next 3 years. Obviously, that's not the annual growth of it, but just kind of overall trajectory. Where do you see the incremental margin really coming from, I guess, relative to the different business segments that you guys thoroughly outlined today?

To you again, so far I'm winning the poll.

So 100 to 200 basis points is our aspiration, and we do think that it's a doable aspiration. It's going to come from some of the things that I said earlier. I mean just again with scale, with leveraging the WillowTree assets in terms of bringing more of their cost structure in a more balanced way towards onshore, offshore versus where they are -- or offshore, nearshore versus where they are today. But frankly, there's other parts of our business as well that we have that opportunity to continue to refine the mix of where the delivery happens from so we can continue to leverage even to a greater degree than we do today, lower-cost jurisdictions. And so those will be drivers of margin expansion going forward. In terms of the different service offerings, I would say CXM being 48% of our business, we actually drive very good margins in CXM. But there, again, I think we can actually continue to increase that. Trust & Safety actually today is one of our highest margin service offerings. The fact, it actually is the highest margin offering. I'd be a little bit cautious as to how much more we can take that forward. But as I look through the longer-term horizon, I would see a lot more margin accretion happening in CXM because we can continue to leverage that and refine that in digital IT through the mix of our service offerings and in AI data solutions. I'm not suggesting we can't grow margins in Trust & Safety, but we're already very, very high. So when I do the modeling and I look at where do we have room to grow, I look at the other sub-segments a little bit more, and I put more waiting towards those.

Awesome. Thank you. Looking forward to seeing you guys grow 10x in 5 years.

Me too. James?

I want to follow up, and I don't know if this one is going to Vanessa or not. So we'll see how it goes. You guys have obviously done well with your acquisitions and been very consistent with those and found really good ways to integrate those. How are you seeing the landscape now for potential acquisitions? And I'm sure valuation is always a key question along those lines. But separately, how do you evaluate like valuation versus strategic, right? Like I could imagine that there would be cases where there could be things that would be really interesting from a valuation perspective, but maybe outside or different than what the business lines you're currently in. So just wondering how you can talk about the decision process right now, what you're seeing from a valuation perspective?

So I am parsimonious to a fault. And I think we received a fair bit of commentary about the price tag for WillowTree. And in the fullness of time, I am supremely confident that we will demonstrate that we have derived tremendous value for money. And at the end of the day, it's always sort of the benefit of hindsight that determines if you overpaid or not. And based on our track record, not just the last 3 that Vanessa shared the tale of the tape on, but without exception, we are 10 for 10 in terms of creating meaningful, not just nominal incremental shareholder value to every single one of those transactions. And as you would expect, that emboldens my thinking a little bit in terms of whether or not we could or should leverage that channel to continue to complement our organic growth strategy. And I'm not getting any younger and so relying only on organic growth to get to our 10x may take me a little bit longer than I have. It's hard to belly up to the bar sometimes for these valuations, particularly when there's such a delta between hours and the target. We've not done that often, but we have done it a few times, and it's paid off each and every time, because we don't just look at valuation. In fact, I would suggest, although we don't weight them specifically, and there's a variation on each transaction that's quite subjective. But it is the realization of synergies, our confidence in our ability to do that. And I forget who it was, I think Vanessa or Marilyn talked about fixer uppers. And we've done a few fixer-upper acquisitions in our history. And by that, I mean more specifically, businesses whose margin profile was decidedly inferior to ours. But through our diligence and evaluation, it was clear to us that through that combination, we could improve the margin profile of that business dramatically. And as a consequence, that influence valuation considerations, because we thought we could easily justify the purchase price through the realization of those EBITDA synergies pretty quickly, never mind, incremental revenue growth, so on and so forth, so prospectively, you should expect a lot more of what you've seen from us through our 18-year history. We're going to look at M&A activity on an opportunistic basis. We're not going to overpay. And I get that overpaying is in the eyes of the beholder, but I'm, as I said before, very confident and I hope you've come away from just listening to us today and to be in this presentation, the rest of it, we really have to go out of our way to screw this one up in terms of realizing synergies between WillowTree and TI. There is just such a natural opportunity there. And again, I think the market tends to be habituated to cost synergies because they're within your control, but they're not particularly exciting or interesting. They don't move the needle of consequence. And that's one of the reasons why I think we've been such an effective shopper and integrators, because we're not looking to immediately start wacking the second CFO or the controller or the second insert name of duplicate title here, we want our business to grow faster. We want everybody from WillowTree and then some. We want to see their business go from 1,200 people to 5,000 people as fast as we can. And again, although the data wasn't on the slides, if you look at each of those prior transactions, we didn't just crush the revenue and EBITDA growth targets in terms of synergy realization. The team member count went up materially as well. So think about those lenses as you evaluate how we might approach M&A prospectively. Hope that's helpful.

Just on that same topic, I had a question. So could you elaborate on how would you broaden WillowTree's capabilities across your employee base? They come with 1,000 -- close to 1,000 design engineers. You have 90,000 employees. How can you bring that design capabilities and gap -- and bridge that margin gap from 20% to, say, 24% between WillowTree and TIXT?

So Divya, I'm not sure I entirely understand your question. But before I ask you just to clarify and part, I'll see if I repeat it back to you clearly, we're 75,000 right now. We're not 90,000 yet. Maybe next quarter, we'll see.

Sorry about that.

No, no, that's okay. I just want to make sure that I'm not confusing folks out there. So Tobias can probably comment better than I in terms of how he -- we envision taking their 1,200 folks and not all 1,200 are designers, but 800 are and how we're going to replicate, proliferate that capability across the combined TI WillowTree business, if that's what you're referring to.

Yes. So when we went through the courting process, one of the things we did was -- on the WillowTree side, together with TIs, we went down to Guatemala City and spent most of a week talking to folks and understanding what they do and what the baseline is. And I think one of the reasons we were so excited about the deal is because it was clear to us that there was the opportunity to do exactly what you're saying. Is it going to happen overnight? No, it takes time, and we have to do it very carefully. But there is extraordinary potential in all these markets. I think the differentiator for both TI and WillowTree is that it's about the human beings and you don't trade human talent, the way you trade oranges' futures, right? It is differentiated and so we are going to find the best of the best and start slowly. And I think we have a team actually going down there in the next 2 weeks to start that process. And the way this is going to happen is not in theory, but in practice, meaning it's going to happen on projects. Going to happen on projects for TELUS, it's going to happen on projects for new clients, and it's going to be a core part of our growth trajectory going forward.

Maybe, sorry, folks. I want to give priority to the people in the room, who took the time to join us and went through that difficult airline experience, no doubt to get here. But maybe just in fairness, we'll take a question from someone on the webcast now.

We have several. So I'll try to combine a couple. Concentration at TELUS continues to grow and will likely continue to increase post WillowTree, is there a ceiling or cap you'd like to keep your concentration to? Or are you happy to take on all projects you can do for them? And also do you have enough staff at WillowTree to deliver to the tight time lines for TELUS? What further investments are needed into WillowTree?

So I think that second part ties to what Divya just asked us. So Tobias will come back to you on that again. But the first one I'm going to invite Vanessa to speak to, but I think the question might actually have the data backwards.

Yes. I think maybe what the question was getting at was because we've talked a lot about, so TELUS is our largest client right now, and we've talked a lot throughout the presentation around obviously, multiple levers for growth, but we've been talking about TELUS in the context of even WillowTree synergies and they extend well beyond TELUS, but we've been using that as one of our proof points of immediate synergies. So I think the question was, okay, well, if you keep going like this with TELUS your -- the concentration might be going up and then do you have a cap. Well, we don't have a cap on concentration. I don't think we're going to say, well, gee, tell us you've hit 19% of revenue, we're just -- we're going to stop doing work for you. We enable TELUS. We are a key partner for TELUS. TELUS distinguishes itself largely through exceptional client service, commitments to its client base and obviously wanting to optimize its own internal cost structure and its own digital -- through its own internal digital transformation efforts. And so TELUS has a lot of opportunity within it. As Jeff said earlier, we actually -- so one might expect that because we're a subsidiary, we just get handed work from TELUS. It actually doesn't work that way. As Jeff said earlier, we have to compete for work with TELUS. With WillowTree, we can hopefully displace Thoughtworks, Accenture and many more. That work didn't fall in our laps previously. They didn't say, gee, you're a subsidiary, you could do this work. We didn't have the capabilities. And so for us to say if we've got the opportunity to displace Accenture and Thoughtworks for us, say well, no, no, we've hit like 19% of revenue, we're good. That just seems a little -- so all that to say, -- we will continue to do work to continue to help TELUS to execute on its own strategy for exceptional customer service, to accelerate its own internal digital transformation work that they're doing, that we're a partner of choice for TELUS, frankly, I think it's very complementary to us because we always -- we haven't always had the credentials to do that. So I don't think we're going to be tapping the breaks on that. I think the key for us is continuing to win new logos and expand the overall revenue base rather than limit individual clients.

And that latter, Tobias?

Yes. So I think a couple of things. I've been cautioned on giving forward-looking statements, so I won't do that. But I will say, historically, we've grown our employee base by about 40% to 50% a year. So scaling the team has been a core part of what we have always done. And it's multifaceted. There's an organic perspective. And at the end of the day, 1,000 plays going to 5,000, we're still a small drop in the bucket of the overall talent available even in the United States, right? We have to attract that talent and manage that talent. So the main challenge isn't necessarily hiring. The main challenge is leading and managing those teams where we spend a ton of time organizing that. We've also done tuck-in acquisitions. WillowTree did 3 acquisitions in the last 4 years before the TI deal. So we're collectively going to be continuing to look at tuck-ins as capacity is required. And so I think we're very bullish on being able to fulfill the needs of TELUS and these other clients coming in. We also have typically a 60- to 90-day window, right? It's not like a project shows up and they said, we need 35 people on Monday. It usually takes several conversations. So we have some visibility into how we put together those teams.

I'm going to say one, can I top up one thing? One of the things that Tobias highlighted into the original conversation of why the partnership with TELUS International was meaningful, was looking for a partner with size and scale. And on the talent acquisition front, on the development of leaders, on the internal training and development of team members, we've got a degree of success on significant global scale and growth. And so I think the other opportunity here is for our teams, we're only 6 weeks into this movie, but for our teams to definitely be working together on the integration and strategy around how we scale effectively and how we share best practices of doing that going forward.

All right. We'll take one more question from the room, and then we're going to wrap up and feed you all. But during lunch, we are happy to answer all of the other questions. Stephanie?

Thank you and thanks for the event. I want to just circle back on your comment that you'd like to grow the EV of the business by 10x over the next 5 years. Just wondering how you think about getting there in terms of organic growth and M&A and maybe what the biggest growth driver you see to get there is and also the biggest potential impediment?

So as you might imagine, we spent a great deal of time talking about, which is code for Vanessa trying to muzzle me from sharing that aspiration. But I think it is, indeed, as I shared in my comments earlier, achievable for the reasons I articulated. And as you might expect, there's a number of factors that go into that calculation. Obviously continuing to deliver against our promise of double-digit organic growth, critically important to closing the gap and getting us to where we want to be. Continuing to sustain best-in-class margins equally, if not arguably progressively more important as the market starts to recognize the perhaps more intrinsic value of sustainable profitability rather than just growth top line without associated margin or cash flow. I think we want to do, we will do, as I just shared in response to James' question, additional M&A on an opportunistic basis. And if we continue to be smart, thoughtful shoppers, that will obviously continue to contribute to helping us achieve our 10x ambition. And then last, but not least, and this is the one over which we have the least control, but the 3 things I just described will meaningfully influence it, and that's the valuation multiple that we attract. I think as the market evolves and decides what it perceives to be more valuable, if we have more of that, we ought to be the beneficiary of a higher multiple. If we continue to grow the business and outpace the market and our peers, I think we will be rewarded with a superior multiple. If we continue to increase the mix of our services from which we derive our profitable revenues from those areas where the market perceives there to be disproportionately higher value, more sustainable benefits, there too, I think that drives the potential multiple higher. So it's -- in totality, those elements all contribute to getting us to my ambition of 10x in the business over the next 5 years. And we didn't work up a algorithmic formula, 30% of it is coming from organic and 14% from -- we did a number of sensitivity tables that we can grow organically by 20 rather than 12, well, that reduces that pressure, if you will, in terms of the contribution from the other elements and vice versa, just so that we could have some sanity check on the ZIP code we kind of need to be in from all of those elements in order to get there. Makes sense? Vanessa did I miss anything?

It's an aspiration, not a guide. The lawyers tell me to say that.

All right. We're going to take more questions over lunch. But in closing, I just wanted to gut check. I hope this was time well spent for you all today that you leave here with a now deeper understanding of our business, of how we create value for our various stakeholders and of the massive potential ahead of us. I want to offer just a quick reminder that later today, our management team has been given the opportunity to ring the NYSE closing bell, which we missed out on at our IPO due to the pandemic. Unfortunately, while you all cannot join us in person, if you're interested, you can watch it live streamed on NYSE's website as well as on their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. And then just before we break for lunch, I want to close by sharing with you a brief video that our team put together to memorialize our IPO debut. And I'd be remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to extend a very big thank you to the team members, who didn't just work on our videos, but as well diligently helped us to organize today's event and finally, of course, a sincere thank you to each and every one of you for making the time to be here with us today. I look forward to speaking with you further over lunch. Why don't we run the video, please.