Greetings, and welcome to the Conduent First Quarter 2023 Earnings Announcement. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Giles Goodburn, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Thank you, operator. And thanks, everyone, for joining us today to discuss Conduent's first quarter 2023 earnings. We hope you had a chance to review our press release issued earlier this morning. Joining me is Cliff Skelton, our President and CEO; and Steve Wood, our CFO. Today's agenda is as follows: Cliff will provide an overview of our results and a business update; Steve will then walk you through the financials of the quarter, as well as providing our financial outlook; Cliff will then offer his closing comments. This call is being webcast and a copy of the slides used during this call as well as the press release were filed with the SEC this morning on Form 8-K. This information as well as the detailed financial metrics package are available on the Investor Relations section of the Conduent Web site. During this call, we may make statements that are forward-looking. These forward-looking statements reflect management's current beliefs, assumptions and expectations and are subject to a number of factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those statements. Information concerning these factors is included in Conduent's annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC. We do not intend to update these forward-looking statements as a result of new information or future events or developments except as required by law. The information presented today includes non-GAAP financial measures. Because these measures are not calculated in accordance with US GAAP, they should be viewed in addition to and not as a substitute for the company's reported results. For more information regarding definitions of our non-GAAP measures and how we use them, as well as the limitations to the usefulness for comparative purposes, please see our press release. And now I would like to turn the call over to Cliff.

Thank you, Giles, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining Conduent's Q1 earnings call. We appreciate you being here today. As is our custom, provide some high level comments about the quarter and characterize some of the nuance and timing of revenue, EBITDA, sales, et cetera. And Steve, of course, will go into a bit more depth. As you can tell, we've shifted our perspective here as we migrate to a new set of sell-side analysis and thus, we'll forego immediate questions following earnings. But as always, folks should feel free to reach out to our Investor Relations team with any kind of follow-up questions. First, let's start with a quick view of the numbers. Despite some onetime events, and Steve will talk about those, in Q1, core run rate revenue beat our internal expectations due to increased volume, specifically in our Government and Commercial businesses, partially offset by client-driven revenue milestone changes in our Transportation business and a prior period adjustment in our Government business, both of which somewhat muted that positive growth in volume. These volume trends have continued, and we do believe they will, should help bolster the remainder of 2023. Again, Steve will get into the details, but this is all part of the top line growth expectation that we previewed in our investor briefing in late March. As we've discussed in the past, that net ARR number which was higher year-over-year again at $108 million is a leading indicator regarding our growth trajectory. We're certainly and especially pleased with improvements in client retention. However, outrunning that government stimulus volume from 2021 and 2022 takes some time. Slowly but surely, we're outrunning the past and landing in that sweet spot growth range we previously laid out for you. Regarding EBITDA, we exceeded our internal expectations, bolstered…

Thanks, Cliff. As we have done in the past, we're reporting both GAAP and non-GAAP numbers, and the reconciliations are in our filings and in the appendix of the presentation. Let's turn to Slide 5 and discuss our key sales metrics. Our Q1 sales results were as expected and fit into the pattern that we're anticipating playing out in 2023 and in line with how we messaged our expectations for sales growth in our recent investor briefing. In our Q4 earnings presentation and again in our investor briefing in Q1, I referenced the expectation that Q1 2023 sales would be lighter than the prior year compare as we saw and called out a slower build in some of our next quarter or near term pipeline and additionally, we were managing a tough compare from a very strong Q1 2022. This lower pipeline build was specific to our Commercial segment, which we partially attributed to macro factors, as we saw some commercial clients adjusting their budgets and slowing, but importantly not stopping their procurement activities. Similarly, in Government and Transportation where we typically know the timing of RFP driven deals, we expected the first quarter to be light. Before I talk about the quarter, let me give you a flavor as to where we're expecting Q2 to land and how that plays into the first half, because as we've said before, individual quarters can be lumpy. We expect our Q2 ACV sales to grow over Q2 2022, somewhere in the range of 8% to 10%. This would put us just behind our first half performance from 2022 but with a strong pipeline of late stage deals, which we would expect to close in the second half of 2023, keeping us on target to achieve the sales growth expectations we laid out…

Thanks, Steve. That concludes our view of Q1 2023. Thank you to everyone for joining. As I've consistently said, this is a journey. We've come a long way in the past three years. We continue to see a bright horizon ahead. Thank you for being with us.