Skillsoft Corp.

Greetings and welcome to the Skillsoft Corp Third Quarter 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone to require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Chad Lyne, head of investor relations. Thank you, Chad. You may begin.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today for Skillsoft's earnings call to discuss our results for the third quarter ended October 31st, 2023. Participating on today's call are Jeff Tarr, Skillsoft CEO, and Richard Walker, Skillsoft CFO. Today, after market close, Skillsoft issued a press release announcing its financial results, which is available on our investor relations website. Before I hand the call over to Jeff, I want to remind you that today's call will contain forward-looking statements about the company's business outlook and expectations, including statements concerning financial and business trends, our expected future business and financial performance, financial condition, and market outlook. These forward-looking statements, and all statements that are not historical facts, reflect management's current beliefs and expectations as of today, and therefore are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. For discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, we refer you to our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information which speak as of the respective dates. During the call, we will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures which are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. A reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures included in today's commentary to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, as well as how we define these metrics and other metrics, is included in our earnings press release, which has been furnished to the SEC and is also available on our website at www.skillsoft.com. After our prepared remarks, Jeff and Rich will be available to take questions. With that, it's my pleasure to turn the call over to Jeff. Thanks, Chad.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Our team delivered another quarter of revenue and bookings growth in our high margin SaaS-based content and platform segment. Our LTM dollar retention rate was 101%, up three percentage points, highlighting our progress in growing share of wallet within existing customers. Adjusted EBITDA margins were 21%, up 100 basis points. Our instructor-led training segment remained stable sequentially but was down year over year, in part due to a non-core product line that we are exiting. Rich will cover our results in more detail. Today, I'll focus my remarks on how we are positioning Skillsoft to seize the substantial growth opportunity in front of us. In my recent discussions with business leaders across a range of industries, skills gaps and workforce transformation challenges are a consistent theme, and generative AI is almost always a topic of conversation. According to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs report, nearly one quarter of all jobs will be disrupted in the next five years due to new technologies, including generative AI. According to Goldman Sachs, two thirds of occupations are exposed to at least partial automation by AI. In the face of this wide ranging disruption to the labor market, more than eight out of 10 companies view investments and learning as the most promising strategy to deliver on their businesses goals. For these organizations, effective upskilling and reskilling initiatives are C-suite priorities. This is where Skillsoft is winning. Over the last two years, we've transformed Skillsoft from a vendor of video e-learning content into a provider of transformative multimodal learning experiences that deliver measurable results. We built Skillsoft Precipio into a best of breed AI enabled learning experience platform that integrates with nearly every major LMS and e-learning content provider. We added skills assessments, benchmarks, and curated learning journeys to our platform. We enhanced our leadership and business skills solution with ICF accredited coaching at scale. We grew our compliance practice with important platform enhancements and thought leadership while revitalizing historically dry training with dramatic, emotion-infused scenarios grounded in sound instructional design and interactivity that has proven to change behavior. We acquired Codecademy to add interactive learning and hands-on labs to serve many of the fastest growing occupations and skills in AI, data science, cloud, cybersecurity, and web development. And most recently, we launched Casey, a powerful generative AI-based simulator that is helping learners develop their skills to engage in crucial business conversations across a rapidly growing range of scenarios. These strategic moves have positioned us as the leading provider of transformative learning experiences to the world's largest and most sophisticated organizations. Organizations with acute and complex reskilling, upskilling, and workforce transformation needs. These customers are focused on realizing demonstrable business outcomes. Unit economics for Skillsoft from this group are attractive. Deal sizes are typically six or seven figures. Contracts are usually multi-year and dollar retention rates are often north of 110%. Taken together, these metrics are indicative of our success cross-selling and upselling solutions with our largest customers and the potential for growth across our customer base overall. For example, a leading international supplier of integrated technologies and systems for the defense industry operating in 130 countries chose Skillsoft to centralize and enhance its global training program. Skillsoft won the account on the breadth of our multimodal solution, integration capabilities with their LMS, compliance with their IT security requirements, and broad language coverage. In another example, we were chosen by one of Europe's leading IT transformation providers with more than 3 billion in revenue to deliver a unified learning experience to a highly technical workforce of more than 5,000 employees. Our offering, spanning leadership and business skills, technical training and compliance, all delivered on our industry-leading learning experience platform, allowed this customer to consolidate down from five vendors and deliver a better learning experience at lower total cost. For a global leader in memory and storage technology, we broadened the scope of our pre-existing relationship beyond leadership and business skills with a new three-year deal that added our compliance solution and a competitive takeaway. In the financial services industry, we secured a three-year agreement spanning leadership and business skills, compliance, and coaching to support a leading digital consumer and corporate bank. For a global energy and chemicals company, we doubled the size of our relationship with a multi-year extension and upgrade to our full solution suite, allowing the customer to rationalize multiple vendors and achieve a higher ROI by centralizing their learning experience on the Skillsoft Percipio platform. Within the US federal government, our ability to offer the only digital coaching solution that is FedRAMP authorized through our Percipio platform led to the award of a high six-figure contract to provide leadership coaching and custom assessments to the Department of the Interior. And finally, we had a sizable land and expand success story, growing a content and platform customer win from earlier this year by adding a seven-figure commitment to deliver instructor-led training that support this technology company's culture of innovation through skills growth and talent development. The unifying thread behind these success stories is our focus on winning with customers for whom reskilling and upskilling is a strategic imperative and where the breadth and scale of our capabilities delivers differentiated value and measurable outcomes. We believe our recent investments in talent and product will position us to capture more of this growing market opportunity. We recently attracted new senior leaders to accelerate our growth, including a new seasoned CRO, new heads of customer success and customer acquisition, and new leaders for our coaching and tech and dev businesses. We are seeing good early returns from this infusion of new talent, and I look forward to the positive impact they will have on our business in the future. We've also continued to invest in our platform and content, particularly in areas related to generative AI, which we believe is creating a long-term structural tailwind for our business. Generative AI is rapidly changing what we teach, how we teach, and how we work, and we're moving quickly to seize this compelling opportunity. During the quarter, we announced the general availability of Skillsoft's Casey, our AI-powered skills trainer that delivers personalized and contextualized leadership coaching at scale. The customer reaction and market feedback to Casey has been exciting, validating our position as a forward-thinking and innovative industry pioneer. Casey's initial launch included 10 scenarios focused on developing effective interpersonal and leadership communication skills, including employee performance management, customer negotiations, and customer service challenges, all of which can be modified for a wide range of personality styles. We're partnering with customers to rapidly develop additional scenarios, with 50 scheduled for launch this quarter, as well as powerful new capabilities creating innovative and immersive learning experiences. Another example of our use of generative AI to transform how we teach is Role Advisor. RoleAdvisor is an AI-powered skill-building concierge for the learner. It identifies top skills required for a specific role, assesses those skills to identify gaps, and serves targeted learning recommendations to close gaps and build proficiency. Much as AI is transforming how we teach, it is also changing what we teach. Our new generative AI-aspired learning journeys offer multimodal learning paths that promote subject literacy, with courses ranging from generative AI foundations and guardrails to AI and ML for decision makers, ensuring that learners are equipped with the fundamentals needed to use generative AI effectively. We also launched additional skill benchmarks, which assess learner proficiency and knowledge in generative AI. These benchmarks score in level learners from novice to advanced with personalized learning recommendations that progress the learner from foundational literacy to subject matter mastery. On an enterprise-wide basis, organizations are able to ensure that AI skills gaps are quantifiably bridged and that their employees are prepared for the future of work. Beyond our market-facing generative AI investments, we are also leveraging this important technology to change how we work. For example, our content production teams are using generative AI to help author content and assessment questions, reducing development time and shortening content release cycles. Our marketing teams are using it to rapidly build and localize marketing campaigns, web pages, and collateral. And our shared services teams are using it to automate workflows that were previously time and labor intensive. I'm proud of our team's progress to strengthen our position as a market leader, innovator, and workforce transformation partner for the enterprise while seizing the exciting opportunity created by generative AI. I'm encouraged by the progress I'm seeing across the company. The entire organization is currently laser focused on closing our important fourth quarter on a strong note to set us up for a promising fiscal 2025. With that, I'll now turn the call over to our CFO, Rich Walker, to review our financial results. Rich?