The Hackett Group, Inc.

Please continue to stand by. The conference will begin momentarily. Again, please continue to stand by and thank you for your patience. Again, please continue to stand by. The conference will begin shortly. Welcome to the Hackett Group fourth quarter earnings conference call. Your lines have been placed on a listen-only mode until the question and answer session. Please be advised the conference is being recorded. Hosting tonight's call are Mr. Ted Fernandez, Chairman and CEO, and Mr. Rob Ramirez, Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Ramirez, you may begin, sir.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss the Hackett Group's fourth quarter results. Speaking on the call today and here to answer your questions are Ted Fernandez, Chairman and CEO of the Hackett Group, and myself, Rob Ramirez, Chief Financial Officer. A press announcement was released over the wires at 4.08 p.m. Eastern Time. For a copy of the release, please visit our website at www.thehackettgroup.com. We will also place any additional financial or statistical data that's discussed on this call that is not contained in the release on the Investor Relations page of our website. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that in the following comments and in the question and answer session, we will be making statements about expected future results, which may be forward-looking statements for the purposes of the federal securities laws. These statements relate to our current expectations Estimates and projections are not a guarantee of future performance. They involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that are difficult to predict and which may not be accurate. Actual results may vary. These forward-looking statements should be considered only in conjunction with the detailed information, particularly the risk factors that are contained in our SEC filings. At this point, I would like to turn it over to Ted.

Thank you, Rob, and welcome everyone to our fourth quarter earnings call. As we normally do, I will open up the call by providing overview comments on the quarter. I will then turn it back over to Rob to comment on detailed operating results, cash flow, and guidance. We will then review our market and strategy-related comments, after which we will open it up to Q&A. This afternoon, we reported revenues before reimbursements of $74.8 million and adjusted earnings per share of 40 cents which were above and at the high of our quarterly guidance, respectively. While we cannot control the short-term market sentiment or demand volatility, we can control the value, the intrinsic value we create. Over the past two years, we have been systematically expanding our suite of GenAI-enabled platforms to lead in the rapidly emerging agentic enterprise era. By embedding our IP into our new platforms and models, We believe we will be able to generate new revenue with higher margins in entirely new ways that allow us to deliver breakthrough value to clients. Our quarterly results continue to reflect the market and our own disruptive effects given our aggressive AI transition. Our strategy has been to develop highly differentiated Gen AI enabled capability that leverages our unique expertise as well as our proprietary IP. The goal was to be able to accelerate and, more importantly, enhance the value of solutions we deliver to clients. Our AI leadership and relevance is being defined by our distinct capabilities to help clients identify, evaluate, design, and deploy high-impact AI solutions utilizing our AI Explorer or XPLR platform. We are not surprised by the changes required by the AI transition We were early adopters and anticipated the required changes. We started in January of 2024 when we first introduced AI Explorers Version 1, and in September of 2024 when we acquired the globally recognized Gen-AI engineering capabilities of Leadway Hertz to expand our agentic design and build capabilities and also enhance our platform innovation as well as licensing efforts. Our AI Explorer version 5 release is now licensable. AI Explorer is distinct due to its enterprise-wide solution stimulation, ideation, and detailed process and agentic design capabilities, which are supported by solution-specific ROI. AI Explorer is uniquely ours because it is powered by our proprietary Hackett solution language model, and informed by our globally recognized HackIt process benchmarks and best practices process intelligence IP. Although we started with AI Explorer, we have now introduced new platforms, which include XT to support our business transformation engagements, and AIX to support our enterprise application implementation engagements, and as HackIt, which we rolled out last summer to support the delivery of our executive applied intelligence programs. As we recently announced, we now have a complete suite of GenAI-enabled platforms to support nearly all of our services. We believe we have been innovative leaders in our industry. As I mentioned, these platforms significantly accelerate and enhance the value of our services and should allow us to grow our revenues and realize meaningful margin increases as we move from labor-based delivery to labor-led services supported by our powerful Gen AI delivery platforms and globally recognized IP. Our job is to make sure our clients understand the importance of their business process context and the critical role it plays in the successful adoption of AI. There is little to no value realization without a detailed understanding of a client's specific business process and reimagining those specific client requirements by assessing the AI enablement opportunity of each work step. That is the critical foundational element of AI Explorer. We believe that our platform-enabled delivery strategy will provide significant new revenue growth opportunities with higher margins while helping clients capture this unprecedented transformative opportunity. We also believe that channel partners can help us accelerate our efforts by increasing client access, which should also result in revenue growth. We have spent nearly six months with a global technology and consulting company demonstrating and testing AI Explorer's powerful capabilities on global, highly complex client solutions that have resulted in our platform being described as game-changing. We expect to execute and launch a global global market collaboration agreement that will allow us to jointly serve new and existing clients. We expect to finalize our agreement and launch our first client shortly. We also continue to believe that we can bring significant value to all organizations that utilize Solonus' software and other process mining software. Our ability to ingest their valuable volume and process execution detail into AI Explorer allows us to accelerate and better inform our ideation and solutioning recommendations which allows customers to accelerate their transformation initiatives. We also plan to launch a market pilot initiative with ServiceNow this month. We have been pursuing this opportunity for several months and are eager to see the outcome from our joint pursuits. On the balance sheet side, we continue to generate strong cash flow from operation, which has allowed us to maintain our dividend and continue our strong buyback program. With that said, let me ask Rob to provide details on our operating results, cash flow, and also comment on outlook. I will make additional comments on strategy and market conditions following Rob's comments. Rob?