Accenture PLC

Good morning. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Accenture's second quarter fiscal 2026 conference call. At this time, all participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad, and to withdraw your question, please press star then two. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Alexia Quadrani, Managing Director and Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today on our second quarter 2026 earnings announcement. As the Operator just mentioned, I'm Alexia Quadrani, Executive Director and Head of Investor Relations. On today's call, you will hear from Julie Sweet, our chair and chief executive officer, and Angie Park, our chief financial officer. We hope you've had an opportunity to review the news release we issued a short time ago. Let me quickly outline the agenda for today's call. Julie will begin an overview of our results. Angie will take you through the financial details, including the income statement and balance sheet, along with some key operational metrics for the second quarter. Julie will then provide a brief update on our market positioning before Angie provides our business outlook for the third quarter and full fiscal year 2026. We will then take your questions before Julie provides a wrap-up at the end of the call. Some of the matters we'll discuss on this call, including our business outlook, are forward-looking and as such are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to Those factors set forth in today's news release and discussed in our annual report on Form 10-K and the quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and other SEC filings. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed on this call. During our call today, we will reference certain non-GAAP financial measures which we believe provide useful information for investors. We include reconciliations from non-GAAP financial measures where appropriate to GAAP in our news release or in the investor relations section of our website at Accenture.com. As always, Accenture assumes no obligation to update the information presented on this call. Now let me turn the call over to Julie.

Thank you, Alexia, and everyone joining us this morning. And thank you to our more than 786,000 people for your extraordinary work. We delivered another strong quarter with $18 billion of revenue growing 4% in local currency and once again taking significant market share. We had record bookings of $22.1 billion bringing H1 bookings to a total of $43 billion. We had a record 41 clients with quarterly bookings greater than $100 million bringing us to 74 of these bookings in the first half 12 more than this time last year, demonstrating the continued demand for reinvention at scale. We delivered 30 basis points of operating margin expansion with strong EPS growth year over year, generating significant free cash flow while investing significantly in our business. We closed three strategic acquisitions, deploying $1.6 billion of capital, and we now expect to deploy $5 billion in acquisitions this year with capacity to do more for the right opportunities. And double-clicking on our revenue, our revenue growth was broad-based across geographic markets and types of work. Revenue from our top 10 ecosystem partners continues to outpace our overall growth, and we are expanding these partnerships. And we are on track in FY26 to more than double our bookings over FY25 from partnerships with our key emerging AI and data ecosystem partners. And we delivered these strong results through the disciplined execution of our growth strategy as our market remains roughly the same. Our long-term growth strategy is to help our clients reinvent and to capture other new opportunities created by AI. To accelerate this strategy, we are using two key competitive advantages, our strong balance sheet and our long history of successful acquisitions. Our goal with acquisitions is to more rapidly expand into higher growth areas with attractive margins, which will fuel organic growth and increasingly help us grow non FTE related revenue in each one we invested in four areas first Ai powered transformation. Last week, we closed the acquisition of Faculty, a leading UK-based AI native services company with a decision intelligence product business that provides a platform for us to expand into new areas of unmet AI demand with non-FTE revenue. We also acquired two companies to accelerate our growth with Palantir, an emerging ecosystem partner, Deco in the UK, which focuses particularly in defense and public sector markets, and Ranger Data in the US, which works across industries. Second, AI enablers. AI enablers include data centers, cybersecurity, energy infrastructure, and data. We acquired a 65% stake in DLB Associates, a data center engineering and consulting firm with high double-digit growth. We also acquired CyberCX, a leader in cybersecurity in Australia. And we announced the acquisition of Ookla, a global leader in network intelligence, competitive benchmarking, and customer experience analytics. UCLA, with only 430 employees, generated $231 million of revenue in their calendar year 2025 through non-FTE subscription and licensing revenue models at an 8% year-over-year growth rate and with healthy margins accretive to Accenture. Third, high-growth secular trends. These trends include capital projects, defense and public sector, and education around AI, data, and tech. we acquired Orlade Group, a French capital projects firm, which expands our presence in the energy, utilities, rail, and aerospace sectors, including nuclear power plants and power grids. This acquisition is also part of our focus on key AI enablers because AI requires significant expansion of energy infrastructure. We also expanded LearnVantage, our business that is capturing the education opportunity through the acquisition of Itami in Japan, a portion of our LearnVantage business Leveraging our proprietary platforms operates with a non FTE commercial model growing double digits. Finally, mid market expansion, we made to mid market acquisitions nor flash and total Eva solutions. And announced one cabal to expand our presence in the mid market where we are experiencing higher revenue growth and a higher volume of smaller deal sizes that convert to revenue faster. As we delivered this quarter, we also are executing at speed on our talent strategy for the age of AI. We now have over 85,000 AI and data professionals, already exceeding our goal of 80,000 professionals by the end of fiscal 2026. Thanks to our intentional talent strategy, we will hire more entry-level reinventors in FY26 than FY25, which is important for our financial model. Just as our clients must reinvent, so must Accenture. Our re-inventors completed 13 million training hours this quarter alone, and 192,000 completed our agentic AI fundamentals program, co-created with Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI. After significant investment in training starting this year, we've made the use of the AI tools and contributions to helping Accenture become the most AI-enabled company in the world, now a formal part of our performance evaluation. Finally, we are pleased at the number of external recognitions of our broad-based drinks that we have received in the last several months. Please check out these recognitions in our earnings presentation for the quarter. Over to you, Angie.