Marchex, Inc.

Welcome to Mark Chex's second call to conference call. My name is Lauren, and I'll be coordinating your call today. There will be an opportunity for questions at the end of the presentation. If you would like to ask a question, then please press the star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I will now hand you over to your host, Trevor Caldwell, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Strategic Initiatives, to begin. Trevor, please go ahead.

Thank you, Lauren. Good afternoon, everyone. and welcome to March X's Business Update, its second quarter 2023 conference call. Joining us today are Edwin Miller, our CEO, and Michael Renz, our Vice Chairman. Before we get started, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that our remarks today will include forward-looking statements, including references to our financial and operational performance, and actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by these forward-looking statements. Risks and uncertainties that could cause these results to differ materially are set forth in today's earnings press release and in our most recent annual and quarterly report filed with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update statements in subsequent events. During the call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release. Earnings press release is available in the investor relations section of our website. At this time, I want to turn the call over to Edwin.

Thank you, Trevor, and thank you for everyone who's joining. Good afternoon. I would like to thank you all for joining to discuss March X and what we consider a very hot topic around AI or artificial intelligence, which we're in the middle of. Before we dive into details of the quarter, I will share some thoughts around my journey as CEO of March X. We believe we are in a strong market with strong and good tailwinds. I'm in the midst of building relationships with our clients and understanding their problems and how MarchX can provide solutions now and in the future. MarchX is at a unique moment. Our early investments in artificial intelligence have positioned our business to capitalize on the market's growing demand for a vertical market understanding of products. We believe we are in the right place and at the right time to be a leader in the conversational intelligence market. And that we simply need to continue our path to execute across our talent, process, and technology, and empower our clients to be smarter each and every day. It has been a very good amount of time I've spent out in person with our clients. It's been a really good set of meetings. We enjoy working with some of the largest businesses in the world. The potential we have with our current clients and in our vertical markets excite me. I continue to focus the bulk of my efforts on our customers and reorganizing the business to take advantage of the opportunity we see in front of us within a multi-billion dollar market. Over the past six months, I've been developing a deep understanding of the challenges and more importantly, the opportunities our customers possess in their industries. It has been exciting to see how our unique understanding of the vertical markets where we operate gives us an advantage in mathematically understanding data to shape solutions around a complex set of conversations. This is exciting to create in collaboration with our clients, and I do stress with our clients. These are very large companies that engage with their customers across multiple communication channels. They care deeply about each step in their processes. They are data-driven and are aware that many have significant gaps around understanding and engaging customers across their omnichannel communications. The era we find ourselves in now proves that MarchX was ahead of the curve in using our data to develop our AI capabilities. Our foresight and directing resources toward creating award-winning AI products is a testament to the talent and innovation of our team. In fact, In the second quarter, we received the highly sought after industry honor, the 2023 Artificial Intelligence Breakthrough Award for the Best AI Solution for Sales. Say that again. Breakthrough Award for the Best AI Solution for Sales. This award recognizes excellence, innovation, hard work, and success in a range of AI and machine learning related categories, including generative AI, computer vision, AI ops, deep learning, robotics, natural language processing, industry-specific AI applications, and much more. In the second quarter, Martex also received our second Customer Success Award from Appili. Appili SaaS Awards honor customer-based obsessed platforms and success stories that deliver extraordinary experiences and results. This represents further recognition that our cutting edge solutions are highly effective in delivering exceptional results for our clients. We are creating solutions that can help realize tens of millions of incremental sales a year to Fortune 100 brands. Our customers are actively asking more from us. That's a large part of why we are winning new relationships and establishing record contract extensions with certain partners. There's another reason we expect to leave this space. It is directly correlated to the exceptional relationships we have developed with several of the largest brands in the automotive, auto services, and home services industries, among others. These strategic partnerships have provided us with invaluable insights into customer needs and industry trends. Our team has worked over many years to solidify our position as a trusted and often exclusive provider of conversational intelligence solutions. As a new CEO at MarchX, I'm grateful for the care and consideration our teams have poured into these relationships over the years. And what's most exciting is what many of our largest customers want us to do, which is expand now and in the future. To accomplish that, MarchX will continue to organize ourselves to move most quickly and serve our customers and innovate faster as we open new market opportunities. I will stress I now met all of our top customers around the globe. I'm now in second and third meetings with them, and it truly is exciting. I'd like to take a moment now to talk about how, by focusing on three key areas, we intend to unlock our future opportunities. The first will be through building enhanced customer experiences for brands. Conversational intelligence holds the potential to revolutionize the way customers interact with brands. By leveraging our strong relationships with enterprise companies in auto, auto services, home services, and other verticals, we can tailor conversational solutions to meet their unique needs. We can transform the way our customers interact with their customers and prospects across the phone and in text messaging and beyond. The second is through our data-driven insights. Our access to billions and billions of anonymized data points from our partners gives us a significant competitive edge. We can extract insights from customer interactions to a degree of granularity that our customers have never accessed before. This, again, is thanks to the power of our AI platform, and I'm going to add math models. We can identify emerging trends, customer preferences, and pain points to help our clients make the best and most informed data-driven decisions. We've helped our customers achieve increased sales and improve services, driving loyalty and customer satisfaction. Now onto my third and final point about what makes SmartChex a differentiated competitor. It is our innovation and R&D. Staying ahead in the conversational intelligence market demands continuous innovation and investment in research and development. We've committed ourselves to expanding our team of talent engineers and data scientists, enabling us to develop cutting edge technology that pushes the boundaries of conversational AI. The work we're doing is shaping the future of the industries we serve. We are moving fast. We're further aligned. We further aligned the people, process, and technology facets of the company in the past few months. From the executive team to various other functions within the company, I am proud of the team. Additionally, we plan to continue to drive initiatives to achieve profitability earlier than we previously anticipated and preserve the balance sheet to meet our long-term needs. In addition, these efforts are focused to enable us to move faster as a company. AI is changing the landscape in software. Over the next several months, you will see new products and new go-to-market strategies unfold. Many of our customers are looking to us to provide much needed innovation for their businesses. There is much work to do together, but I am excited about our future and I do look forward to updating you on our progress in the coming months. With that, I'll turn it over to Mike.